when you want, where you want.
It’s Hot. It’s Mysterious. It’s on the Upper East Side?
Photo: Paolo Cruz
I suppose I should know at this point that if you want prime real estate — say, a townhouse on East 74th — you should be prepared for a bidding war. So it goes lately with Chez Fifi, a 1920 townhouse turned pocket-size French bistro on 74th and Lex. Since its opening in January, Fifi has been, by seemingly universal agreement, both unbookable and unmissable. New York does not want for French bistros; cognac-scented au poivre sauce flows like the Seine through these parts. But in the way that sometimes happens through a precise and perverse alchemy of hype, worth, luck, and scarcity, Fifi is the one to visit.
All of that, of course, makes it impossible to get in. I tried for weeks to get a table with no luck. I was prepared to consign it to the hype heap of history, but something annoying happened: People kept asking me about it. So I did what I least like to do, and I reservation-laundered with one of my best-connected friends: Get us a table, and dinner’s on me.
On a recent Wednesday night, I caught what I’ve (and maybe you’ve) been missing. Fifi isn’t large, counting 40 seats in the ground-floor dining room with another 28 in the allegedly unreservable upstairs “salon” bar. What few seats they have are going fast. One of Anna Wintour’s former assistants was at one table when I walked in, and Jon Hamm showed up with his wife at 9:48 p.m. Another night, a spy told me, Sacha Baron Cohen and Chris Rock were in the house. Petite is the point. Fifi is a production of the We All Gotta Eat group, which also runs Sushi Noz a few blocks away, a place with 14 seats.
The restaurant is paneled in mahogany, which gives it a flavor of Paris’s great Le Voltaire, the 19th-century restaurant on the Quai Voltaire, where you can also get a thoroughly decent, but maybe not sterling, steak frites. At Voltaire, one of my all-time favorites, history and legend conspire to elevate the experience. (One night there, Lee Radziwill, dining with the Reinaldo Herreras, nearly made off with my raincoat by accident.) Fifi, despite the little Paris-blue placard announcing “Place de Fifi” by the door, can’t yet count on generational goodwill. It has to make do with Zack Zeidman’s menu, which trusts that the classics will sell themselves.
In general, the closer you hew to the expected, the better you can expect to do. Escargots, served in shell with the traditional tongs, were letter-perfect. A starter omelette, served open-faced (“a plat”) under a shower of Périgord truffles, wasn’t the fluffy cloud of Pépin tutorials, but I found I didn’t care. Txangurro, a Basque appetizer of deviled crab, on the other hand, tasted more like bread crumbs and accouterments than crabmeat. Steak frites, dressier than usual with filet mignon au poivre, got high marks at my table and, at $69, comes as close as you’ll find to a bargain. Like plenty of other spots, Fifi offers the ominously “MP” côte de boeuf (around $300 the night I went) as an expense-account splurge, alongside a named-for-the-restaurant roast chicken, with foie gras jus (allegedly), potatoes, and salad, which rings in at $70 for the half and $135 for the whole.
Lounge long enough, and the room’s coziness creeps up on you, as do the solicitous staff and the attentive drinks menu. (Martinis seemed to be circulating widely, but Tira Johnson’s wine list had some interesting surprises: I was happy to sample a 30-year-old Portuguese Cab by the glass without the Coravin upcharge it would have carried elsewhere.) Whether Fifi will keep its present heat as the novelty dims remains to be seen. But taken with Cafe Commerce just down the block, it augurs a resurgent Lexington Avenue restaurant row. The good news is if subterfuge and horse-trading to secure a table isn’t your idea of an ideal aperitif, old reliable Orsay nearby has many of the same bistro classics — without Hamm, sure, but also without headache.
Photo: Connor Cowden
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