Restaurant Review: Chateau Royal | The New Yorker

The onslaught of intensity works, thanks to the choices the restaurant makes in dividing food (not too big) and service (not too fast), giving the palate some time to regroup between happy sighs. In this respect, Chateau Royale brings to mind Libertine, Pruitt’s other restaurant, an interesting little cream-worshipping restaurant in the West Village where diners often felt like they should get a free handful of Lactaid pills in addition to their bread and butter. As with Libertine, Chateau Royale offers almost no deviations from richness, even when you think you’re ordering something light. For example, this chicory salad is tossed in a delicious anchovy sauce and enriched with a snowfall of grated Mimolette cheese. The orange duck sauce, bright with bergamot and calamansi, is sticky and bright. A piece of scallop is wrapped in velvety thanks to the sauce grenobloisemade with brown butter with capers, lightly drizzled with miso, and thick like peanut butter.

There’s a blatant American intrusion in all this Frenchness, and perhaps an unnecessary flourish on a menu whose extravagances are even more discreet: the Beggar’s Purse, a one-bite appetizer in which crème fraîche and osetra caviar are pooled inside a chewy crepe and tied with a ribbon of chives. Although it is often said, apocryphally, to have originated in France, it became a New York icon in every sense of the word: in the 1980s and 1990s, the beggar’s purse was the signature bite of the Quilted Giraffe, the most exciting restaurant of the era. (As it happens, Brian Young, executive chef at Chateau Royale, was a chef at the Quilted Giraffe restaurant at the time.) Perhaps thanks to its irreverent, class-warfare-inducing name, the Beggar’s Wallet became a sensation, helped, no doubt, by its face-melting price: When this product debuted in 1981, the price per piece of Quilted Giraffe thirty dollars; By the end of the decade, the price had reached fifty dollars. The beggars’ purse at Chateau Royale is priced at thirty-nine dollars per ping-pong ball-sized bundle — depending on how you look at it, that’s either a scandal or a hell of a deal.