At Le Coq Rico, Fowl Takes Center Stage
Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
I’m almost always the one who gets the chicken.
For review meals, I try to let my guests choose their own food. Then I pick something nobody else wants. Often, this is the chicken. I think this can be explained by a remark a friend made recently. “I never eat chicken in restaurants,” he said. “I can make chicken at home.”
So can I, but every time I go to a new restaurant, I hope the kitchen may know things about poultry that I don’t. Every once in a while, I’m right.
At Le Coq Rico, a three-month-old restaurant on East 20th Street, I was right. In fact, I think I have finally found the perfect restaurant to take people who think they can make a better chicken at home.
We’d ordered an old New England breed of chicken called Plymouth Rock for $95, along with a guinea fowl that cost a dollar more. Carved and fit back together, each bird was placed in the center of the table in its own iron roasting pan. Our eyes locked in on the bronzed skin and tapering curves of drumsticks with fixed and purposeful stares that, if we had not been humans looking at poultry, I would call lust.
The meat had all the things I wanted and none of the things I didn’t. It was moist but not drippy or briny; compact and muscular but not tough; long on deep, rounded flavor that didn’t seem to rely on salt or sugar.
Some of my guests preferred the chicken, calling the guinea fowl “sinewy.” It was a bit stringy at the joints, but once disentangled, the flesh had a flavor I found highly persuasive. Even the white meat tasted like dark meat.
The menu suggested that one bird would feed up to four people. We nearly demolished twice as many, along with a macaroni gratin and a bundle of stout, dark fries that we dunked into a small pitcher of jus. After we were too full to go on, we noticed an untouched chicken leg. One of my guests ate that, too, down to the bone.
True, he did it on a bet. But I suspect he would have done it for nothing.
The chef and owner is Antoine Westermann. His distillations of the cuisine of his native Alsace at Le Buerehiesel in Strasbourg were widely praised before he handed it over to his son and moved to Paris. One of the places Mr. Westermann opened there is the original Coq Rico, a theme restaurant of sorts. Poultry (eggs, organs, broth) turns up in almost everything the kitchen makes, most spectacularly in the whole chickens that are first braised in chicken stock and then threaded on to a rotisserie.
He gave Le Coq Rico a subtitle that is both irresistible and accurate: “The Bistro of Beautiful Birds.”
By March, when he opened a Manhattan branch a few doors down from Gramercy Tavern, he had spent several months scouting for beautiful American birds. Mr. Westermann is particular about how long they spend pecking and strutting before they land on his rotisserie. The menu lists the age at slaughter — our server seemed to prefer “harvest” — for each breed on the menu, from 90 days for the Plymouth Rock to 130 days for the guinea fowl.
“The industry standard is 40 days,” the server said, apparently used to fielding questions about these numbers. (Two more chicken breeds listed on the menu, New Hampshire and Cornish, weren’t available when I went; they are still enjoying country living.)
A whole Brune Landaise (110 days), a French breed with milder flavor than the Plymouth Rock, is simmered in a clay casserole with potatoes, tomatoes, onions, artichokes, stock and a bottle of riesling. This, Mr. Westermann’s version of an Alsatian baeckeoffe, was terrific, with bewitching undercurrents of spice in a sauce that had body but no visible fat. The price, though, $120, made me queasy.
A roasted quarter of the same breed, for $24, is Le Coq Rico’s offering for the solo chicken eater. The half-breast and thigh I tried were moist and flavorful but slightly inert, as if warmed over. If I came back alone, maybe to sit at the counter facing the kitchen in a narrow alley off the main dining room, I’d want the squab. Unwrapping the cabbage leaf around it, cutting into the handsomely roasted bird surrounded by foie gras stuffing, and dipping slices of excellent house-baked baguette into the glossy dark sauce is a sure route to Francophilia.
Shopping for chickens, Mr. Westermann found eggs. Some go into Matthieu Simon’s desserts, one of which is awe-inspiring: the floating island, a single grapefruit-size ball of meringue with a crackling sugar glaze on top, resting in a pond of crème anglaise. The rhubarb soufflé is another good, if more routine, showpiece for egg whites. I’d choose either over the double-wide raspberry mille-feuille whose puff pastry wasn’t crisp enough to shatter.
A Coq Rico meal could start with eggs, too — or, as the menu calls this group of appetizers, “Eggz.” It’s rare to find oeuf en meurette, in all its rich, spoon-coating, lardon-studded glory, made this well in Manhattan.
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http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/06/15/dining/sichuan-food/s/15SICHUAN-slide-JLA3.html
Served with a heap of mâche and spicy pink hummus, sautéed chicken livers were glorious, combining the rich creaminess of a soft cheese with the metallic tang of organ meat. I expected great things from the chicken gizzards served with artichokes à la Barigoule, too, but their flavor seemed to have leaked out somewhere.
From his days at Le Buerehiesel, Mr. Westermann has brought along the recipe for foie gras terrine baked inside a soft pastry crust. I’m not convinced this single slice of terrine is worth $32, but I don’t know anywhere in New York to get a better, cheaper version, either.
The architect Pascal Desprez has slotted Le Coq Rico into a somewhat awkward U-shaped space. By the entrance is a bar where the cocktail menu promises, somewhat menacingly, “the dark side of Le Coq Rico.”
There always seemed to be mild confusion at the host podium, and each time I was led to my seat, I was afraid I’d be deposited at one of the tables crammed into the narrow passageway. This hall opens in the back into a stylishly monochromatic dining room.
Unless you have been to the Paris original, also designed by Mr. Desprez, the only things about the atmosphere that will strike you as French may be the peculiar pop music and, on some nights, Mr. Westermann himself, with wire-framed glasses on a head full of thoughts about chicken.
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