Among the many thousands of restaurants in New York City, only a very small number are New York City Restaurants, a rarefied fraternity of establishments that seem to evoke simultaneously the city as it is and as it’s romanticized—a sort of archetypal super-reality of now and then and never. There are several different subtypes of New York City Restaurant, from the humble old-timers (Katz’s, Nom Wah) to the temples of filthy lucre (Bemelmans, Rao’s). But the most New York City Restaurant of all might be Keith McNally’s Balthazar: the anchor of SoHo, functional and fantastical, a restaurant large enough to be populist yet sufficiently mirrored and mazelike to feel clubby and élite. No casual French restaurant can open in the city without following in its shadow. McNally has had many other successful endeavors, but he will always be known as the man behind Balthazar.
Is it ambition, then, that led McNally’s twenty-three-year-old son, George, newly striking out on his own as a restaurateur, to launch his career with a sceney downtown brasserie? It’s certainly something: delusion? Hubris? Freudian? Faux, a spot with clear New York City Restaurant aspirations, opened last month in a double-height Tribeca storefront. It’s a total mess, and it’s very much not for me, but it has working in its favor a shocking earnestness, a near-total absence of cynicism. McNally fils has described obsessing over the restaurant’s details (custom millwork, hand-painted tiles, wall sconces inspired by one of his father’s spots), but the result is imperfect, off-kilter, inconsistent—even a little bit ugly, and not in a puckishly jolie-laide way, with fleshy-pink plaster walls that clash with mottled wood-plank floors. The effect is of a restaurant trying, with golden-retriever eagerness, to be a really good, maybe all-time restaurant, and I can hardly bring myself to care that it doesn’t remotely pull it off. In this environment of ultra-constructed, mercilessly optimized restaurants, where every centimetre is designed to be Instagrammable, Faux’s imperfection feels almost exuberantly winning.
An awkwardly boxy space has been somewhat warmed up with fleshy-pink plaster walls.
Of course, not just anyone could get away with so much disarray, especially with Tribeca-level overhead. Cue the whole nepo-baby brouhaha, the never-ending conversation about the professional advantages that come with a famous last name. McNally père isn’t involved in Faux—he’s not even an investor—but it’s safe to say that without the sheer fact of George’s paternity this restaurant, certainly in this form, wouldn’t exist. The brasserie has Provençal leanings evident in a few of the menu’s flourishes—crisp triangular panisses with a garlicky aioli, a pinky-peach sauce algérienne for dipping your fries. (The kitchen is run by Kristina Ramos, a chef who has cooked in the South of France and also at the Washington, D.C., location of Minetta Tavern, another Keith McNally joint.) Despite these grace notes, though, Faux is, on the main, a bistro of the species Crowdpleasing Bistro. Your oysters will be briny, your steak will come with frites, your half chicken will be golden and well-salted. There’s a real zing to the sauce au poivre, which is mahogany-dark and sticky with demi-glace, and a cozy depth to the paccheri, floppy cylinders of pasta in a cream sauce with kale and sausage. The Caesar salad is pretty terrific, with gorgeous croutons and a balanced, briny dressing, though paying an optional surcharge for a few dull anchovies draped on top is a silly exercise, and the spaghetti with spicy tomato sauce varied, from visit to visit, between crunchily al dente and squishily overcooked.
Then there’s the oddness of the space. It’s boxy and narrow and disorientingly tall, its primary architectural asset a set of double-height windows that fill the street-facing wall. George et al. have done their best with it, hanging dropped lights to fill the yawning infinity between the top of one’s head and the ceiling and delineating a host foyer in the front with the placement of a shedlike structure just inside the door. (It hides the staircase down to Prevz, a swank subterranean bar.) Still, it’s a fundamentally ungainly room. What I assumed was merely a front section, an awkward anterior Siberia to be passed through en route to the restaurant proper, turned out to actually be the entire dining room, with a bar anchoring the back wall.
But you’re almost certainly not here for the food or the room, and neither are you here for the service, which has a sort of friendly air of bafflement, as if this were everyone’s first-ever shift, every night. The upshot of this is that George, who works the room in a sharp gray suit, a few tattoos peeking out, has plenty of opportunities to charismatically make things right, shaking hands and clasping shoulders and sending over lull-filling drinks. It would be tempting to say that Faux illustrates some fundamental difference between father and son—to pronounce that Keith is good at this whole restaurant thing and George is not—but I’m inclined to be less deterministic, and to say, instead, that what we’re witnessing is the difference between innocence and experience. When you’re at the start of life, full of potential and little else, as George McNally and his friends and their friends of friends are, the room itself doesn’t matter, and neither does the food, really, as long as the French fries aren’t soggy, as long as the Martinis hit the table. You are the room, you are the scene, you are both the moth and the light. Excellent food, attentive service, artfully crafted interiors, and a cultivated mood—those luxuries can come later, as compensatory bulwarks against the gentle indignities of time.
About half of Faux’s dining room, on my visits, seemed to be occupied by the young and beautiful, perhaps strategizing, over moules bouillabaisse, when to move the party to the bar downstairs. I suspect that, over the next months, there will be fewer of the rest of us, as the novelty of the place fades and the Keith loyalists—the brasserati?—get their curiosity-fuelled visits out of the way. In the taxi back uptown, they’ll agree that they’re certainly thrilled for young George, and wish him every success, and maybe they’ll find something more their speed at whatever restaurant he opens next. Stepping out onto Church Street after dinner one evening, happily buzzed on one and a half cocktails and a fairly potent baba au rhum, I nearly collided with a pack of young women on their way in, leggy as fawns, the New York night sweeping out behind them like a glittering train. ♦