There are fresh flowers on every table and a large spray to the rear of the long dining room.  The linens are soft, the lighting is too. The wait staff is impeccably dressed.  The noise level in the room is wholly civilized.  The butter is salted just enough and served at the right temperature. The complimentary hot gougères puff pastries ooze with a truffled Mornay cream.
    You are at Chevalier, the ten-month-old fine dining room in the Baccarat Hotel, just across from MOMA.  And from the first warm greeting by managers Alexandra Levy and Alessandra Lavey, you sense that the evening will take as long as you wish in order to enjoy all of Chevalier’s many pleasures, foremost Chef Shea Gallante’s cuisine, which epitomizes what fine dining, without pretension, means in NYC now.
     Chevalier is not a place where you’ll be presented with six sea salts or seven knives, nor is it a place where the clientele all look like they reluctantly drifted down from their hotel rooms.  Indeed, when I dined there after a rough snowfall the night before, everyone from tall, slinky Asian models to young businessmen and women occupied most of the room, comforted by the banquettes, the soft carpet and the pearly cast of the walls.  The ceiling is a little too high, perhaps, but the openness of the room and just the right number of seats, 70, preceded by an elegant bar, add in grandeur what it lacks in intimacy.
    As NYC’s gossipy food media sniffed last year, Chevalier was originally to be managed by Charles Masson, for decades a partner at La Grénouille, but that arrangement lasted only a few weeks over disagreements with management. The assumption was that, without the Masson name, Chevalier would just lapse into being a mediocre hotel dining room.  Clearly, it has not.
    One NYC restaurant critic called Chevalier “both expensive and ambitious.”  Shea Gallante (right) is certainly guilty of the latter--his is some of the most exciting food in the city right now--but the charge of being expensive shouldn’t need explaining for the level of elegance, table settings, design, wine list and staff you find here. In fact, the prices at Chevalier are considerably below La Grénouille’s $138 for three courses, Daniel’s $142 for four, and Le Bernardin’s $147 for four, with Chevalier’s dinner appetizers $22-$29 and entrees $38-$44--this at a time when a dreary brick-walled Greenwich Village haunt like Carbone is selling baked clams for $21 and veal parm for $55.  At Chevalier you can  have a beautifully served three-course meal for about $72, which includes those gougères and an amuse (which on the night I visited was hamachi), and mignardises at evening’s end.
      The appetizers are among the most interesting I’ve seen in a while. Pork belly is  braised with baby spinach (all the way from New Zealand, for some reason), pickled mushrooms and a citrusy tom yum broth to cut the meat’s fattiness.  Raw Nantucket bay scallops  made a rare appearance this season with bergamot grapefruit, hot yuzu kosho aïoli and Japanese ash salt, each element with just enough flavor to buoy the delicacy of the scallops.    Hudson Valley foie gras ($29) was cooked perfectly, not mushy inside but resilient to the touch of a fork, with a Sauternes gelée, almonds, huckleberry, buckwheat and carob molasses, which added up to too much sweetness. 
    Wild mushrooms were pleasingly roasted for a salad with white sturgeon caviar (from a small producer in Austria), bok choy and Napa cabbage emulsion. Dungeness crab, black sea bass and bouchot mussels came with a classic, ruddy bouillabaisse sauce ($46). Very light, fluffy sheep’s milk ricotta gnocchi took on the flavors of spicy tomato and fennel, with a sauce of octopus and Calabrian pepper made in the style of a Bolognese ($24), with the octopus working as the protein in the sauce.
    In restaurants of Chevalier’s caliber appetizers often outshine the main courses, but every one of the entrees I tasted was at the same high standard with what preceded them. Lobster was gently poached in fine butter and came with braised artichokes, ricotta gnudi pasta and a reduction of lobster jus ($42).  Gallante suggested a thick veal loin be cooked medium-rare, which I agreed with, though that night it was far closer to very rare, which is not ideal for veal, but there were woodsy enhancements like aligot, in which parsnips replace potato pureed and folded into Raclette cheese, with charred shallots and chanterelles ($36).
    I had no such reservations about the rareness of superb Colorado rack and loin  of lamb with Cantellucio lentils, sweet baby carrots and braised lamb belly ($44), which is as sumptuous a dish for a long winter’s night as you’ll find in town.  Both roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon and potatoes gratin dauphinois ($12 each) were impossible to resist ordering.
    Chevalier has acquired one of NYC’s most respected patîssiers in David Carmichael, formerly at Gilt and Oceana, and his creativity is at its height here. His beignets  ($16) are filled with crab apple marmalade, rolled in cinnamon sugar, a ‘liquid’ pie crust—pastry blended with a simple syrup and tempered with white chocolate to make it into a spreadable form; it is then lavished with crème Chantilly and apple sorbet, a sweet masterpiece.  And even if it went over the top in richness ($16), the sticky toffee of date pudding cake, dulce crèmeaux, banana gelato and almond tuille was fantastic.
        Wine Director Jeff Taylor, formerly at Betony and awarded “Sommelier of the Year 2014” by Wine & Spirits, stocks a wine cellar with an appropriate number of labels—700—for a restaurant of Chevalier’s refinement. The whole team here is among the cream of the crop.
    As I’ve had reason to mention more than once, the NYC food media seem to delight in insisting that people no longer want to dine at Chevalier’s level of sophistication, but the continued entry of new restaurants like Gabriel Kreuther, Vaucluse, La Chine, Bâtard, Betony, Juni and others belies such ignorant pronouncements.
      At least in NYC. But that’s why NYC is NYC. 

WHAT I'M DRINKING NOW
By John Mariani

Joseph Drouhin Vaudon Vaudesir Chablis Grand Cru ($55-$60)—The name "Moulin de Vaudon" comes from the watermill nearby the property, whose limestone-rich Chablis vineyards were abandoned  after the phylloxera infestation of the 19^th century. But Drouhin has restored them to Grand Cru status, using biodynamic farming methods.  I’ve come to feel you really have to get to Grand Cru level to appreciate the charms of Chablis—so much boring Chablis is made in Burgundy—and yields are kept low.  This example has richness while at the same time the flinty, lean backbone that makes Chablis so appealing with shellfish.

Le Volte dell’Ornellaia  2013 ($30-$32)—An IGT wine of Tuscany, this is the lesser label of the great Ornellaia estate but shares much of the DNA in a blend of 50% Merlot, 30% Sangiovese, and 20% Cabernet Sauvignon.  The vintage started with shaky weather but a good warm summer followed that ultimately pushed the fruit to ripen well over an entire month in autumn.

The wine was aged for 10 months, partly in barrels used for Ornellaia and partly in cement tanks, so that the fruit was maintained and tannin muted.  It does not reach the heights of its illustrious big sister but neither does its price, and I would happily drink this any night of the week with roasted meats or risotto with wild mushrooms.

Donnachiara Irpinia Coda di Volpe 2013 ($9-$15)—This estate is in Montefalcone in Campania, so there’s plenty of sun and volcanic soil from Mount Vesuvius  to produce a good structure from the Coda di Volpe (tail of the wolf) white varietal, whose virtues are its balance of fruit and acidity, making it a very good choice for shellfish in particular, of a kind you’ll find in the restaurants of Naples and the Amalfi Coast.

Matanzas Creek Winery Merlot 2012 ($28)—Ever experimenting but never experimental for the sake of effect, Matanzas Creek always looks at the Sonoma vineyards producing the best grapes and the best clones of those grapes to bring elegance to their wines.  Following a near perfect 2012 summer and after several evaluations over a 14-month period, a blend (including just 2.3% Cabernet Sauvignon for tannin) was made and returned to oak for two more months so that the components could rest together.  It is a soft and satiny wine just skirting being too high in alcohol, at 14.5%

Tenuta Saint'Antonio Monti Garbi Valpolicella Superiore Ripasso 2012 ($13-$17)--Valpolicella gets a bad rap for being a lightweight red produced in volume, but the ripasso style, which involves keeping the wine in longer contact with the pulp during maceration, really shows what a fine Valpolicella can be.  Made from  a blend of Corvina, rarely used Corvinone, Rondinella, Croatina, and Osleta varietals, it has unusual complexity because these are indigenous to the Veneto and spend 15 to 18 months in barrel, rounding them off and giving body to the final bottling.  What a great bargain this is for a wine of this caliber!

Presqui’le Vineyards Santa Maria Valley Pinot Noir 2013 ($60)—Presqui’le’s President Matt Murphy and winemaker Dieter Cronje show that California can make a solid, delicious Pinot Noir without burning alcohol levels—the 2013 bottling comes in at 13.1%--from this 200-acre winery founded in 2007.  The vineyards enjoy the cool Central Coast appellation, and all the family’s wines are made in small batches, carefully tended so that none takes on that cloying flavor that is the major flaw of so many made-by-the-book Pinot Noirs that seem  products of marketing than of good wine making.

Michter’s 10 Year Rye ($150)—Along with drinking good wines, I like a nightcap of Scotch, Irish or Bourbon, but I must say I’ve been impressed by the recent flurry of releases based on rye, which almost disappeared from the market in the ‘90s.  Leading the comeback is Michter’s (which had gone bankrupt in 1989), whose Master Distiller Willie Pratt is bringing back next month.  I got an advance tasting, and the maturity of the whiskey is essential to appreciate the delicate and not-so-delicate difference between rye and corn-based bourbon.  It has an edge and a fine dryness (93 proof) that make you forget all that cheap Canadian rye of the last century.  . . . Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. Straight Rye ($70) is less than  half the price of Michter’s and is a Bottled in Bond  blend of rye and malted barley, so, while light in color, at 100 proof,  it has an engaging briary cut to it and a slight sweetness that may remind you of a single malt Scotch with American breeding. . . . Acvording to spirits expert Fred Minnick, the main reason rye is having a renaissance is that "in 2000 Seagram folded their whiskey operations and sold its Lawrenceburg, Indiana, distillery to  Pernod Ricard, which announced it would close it in 2006. (CL Financial purchased it but sold it five years later.) But the distillery The distillery had a couple thousand barrels of rye whiskey leftover with nowhere to go so small brands started popping up, buying the Indiana juice." Willett 4 Year Old Single Barrel Rare Release ($45), at a whopping 110° proof rye, is an Indiana rye. Though the company opened its distillery in 1937 and took until 2012 to produce their first blended whiskey . This rye, which actually has some corn in the mash,   is a very smooth whiskey indeed, with a pleasant burn, and faint sweetnesshas a lush, sweet element to it.