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Forget SoHo’s always booked-up Corner Store. The city’s hottest restaurant — and the hardest to get into — is miles uptown on staid East 74th Street.
Chez Fifi has been the toughest ticket since it opened on the Upper East Side on Dec. 10 — and with good reason. It’s the coziest place north of Bloomingdale’s since fabled Swifty’s closed nine years ago, with a menu and staff perfectly attuned to the plush but unpretentious surroundings.
The owners, native-New Yorker brothers David and Joshula Foulquier, also own pricey nearby omakase-heaven Sushi Noz.
But Chez Fifi, named for their late mother, has no Japanese elements. Chef Zack Zeidman’s menu plausibly calls itself “a love letter to Paris and San Sebastian,” the culinary capital of Spain’s Basque country.
Friends better-connected than me have raved about Chez Fifi for months. I finally scored a dining-room table at the civilized hour of 7:30 p.m. earlier this week.
Chez Fifi’s design, by Stockholm-based Joyn architectural studio, has been called clubby, but “cozy” is a better word. The 44-seat dining room and 28-seat upstairs cocktail salon make you want to stay all night. Burnished mahogany paneling and glistening mirrors recall downtown’s Pastis and Balthazar without artifice.
Conversation comes easily with neighbors, like the woman next to me who cheerfully gushed, “It’s so big!” over her neatly-stacked endive salad. Everyone else was just as friendly, but I wish they dressed up more for such a pretty dining room — my tie was the only one in the house.
The menu and the mood draw the city’s top chefs night after night. Eric Ripert was in last week. On Wednesday, I chatted up Alfred Portale in a booth. He chuckled when I asked if, in addition to his namesake West 18th Street restaurant, he’s still also culinary director at Scott Sartiano’s Mercer Hotel spot, Sartiano.
“Only totally,” he said.
There’s nothing cheap about Chez Fifi — a glass of good but short-of-ethereal rosé was $30 — but the a la carte format lets you spend less than at Le Veau D’Or, the nearby bistro phenomenon where the prix-fixe only, three-course dinner menu is $125.
For the most part, Chez Fifi’s high prices are worth it.
A starter called Txangurro ($42) — a Basque dish of deviled crab in a shell — brought back fond memories of the San Sebastian farm country with its gently tingling, tomato, garlic and white wine sauce.
Equally evocative were littleneck clams in bomba rice ($36), another appetizer that is large enough for a main course.
“It looks like risotto but it isn’t,” the captain explained of the creamy, short-grained rice in clam broth.
A half-dozen escargot ($25) with garlic and parsley butter sauce were the French classic, as tasty as.any in town and easily plucked from the shells .
After so many hits, the house special half-chicken ($82 for two) with hide-and-seek foie gras came as a slight letdown. The leg and breast were flavorful but chewier than your average high-end bird, thanks to being slightly undercooked. The dish was largely redeemed by abundant jus and crackling roasted potatoes from the real Fifi’s own recipe.
It was easier using my hands on the meat than the knife. I felt self-conscious until the captain cheerfully said, “David and Josh eat with their hands all the time, and we encourage customers to do it.”
The dessert menu includes a classic baba au rhum, but even better was farmer’s cheese ice cream with fresh huckleberries (both $14). The latter’s sweet-savory interplay had us all but meowing with delight .
What the house calls “martinis” are the pride of mixologist Yumi Nemoto’s cocktail list. My Grey Goose gin came with as much fruit and juice as a planter’s punch but tasted better. I look forward to trying the others and some of the 3,500 bottles on sommelier Tira Johnson’s wine list.
But memories of the Basque country and of Fifi’s charming staff will hold me for now — until I can score another reservation.
Chez Fifi, 140 E. 74th St, ChezFifiNYC.com, dinner only Tuesday-Saturday, 5-9:30 p.m.
