But you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2014to pronounce that Keith is good at this whole restaurant thing and George is not\u2014but I\u2019m inclined to be less deterministic, and to say, instead, that what we\u2019re witnessing is the difference between innocence and experience. When you\u2019re 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\u2019t matter, and neither does the food, really, as long as the French fries aren\u2019t 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\u2014those luxuries can come later, as compensatory bulwarks against the gentle indignities of time.<\/p>\n
About half of Faux\u2019s 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\u2014the brasserati?\u2014get their curiosity-fuelled visits out of the way. In the taxi back uptown, they\u2019ll agree that they\u2019re certainly thrilled for young George, and wish him every success, and maybe they\u2019ll 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.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
But you\u2019re 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\u2019s first-ever shift, every night. The upshot of this is that George, who works the room in a sharp gray suit, a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32594,32593,45,46,8788],"class_list":["post-41557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-french-restaurants","tag-balthazar","tag-brasseries","tag-french-restaurant","tag-french-restaurants","tag-tribeca"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dnc\/117461578182807351","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}