Little Frog opened two years ago as the construction of the Second Avenue subway dragged on and the excavation’s noise and dust kept a lot of people away from the restaurant.  Now that that boondoggle is finally over, Little Frog is thriving in a Yorkville neighborhood once crowded with French bistros with names like Bis, Pascal, Le Boeuf à la Mode, Café du Soir, Fleur de Lis, Le Jacques Coeur and Le Réfuge, all now gone.
    So the neighborhood was certainly in need of a good, honest bistro, and François Latapie (left) provided it, with Gallic whimsy, real comfort and solid bourgeois cooking, via chef Xaviar Monge. Now that the weather is turning warmer, there are tables outside—with only the sound of passing cars and taxis to disturb the peace.
    Latapie is a veteran of New York’s French restaurants, including a stint as maître d’ at Le Cirque and as a partner in La Goulue. He knows his guests well and they depend on him and his fleet-footed staff to recommend what’s special each night, which currently includes the season’s first, fattest soft-shell crabs.
    Little Frog is a long room and bar with 75 seats, done with white brick walls, green tufted banquettes, bentwood chairs and a cosmopolitan mural (right).  You can happily carry on a conversation with your friends, and Latapie has gotten rid of the canned music.
    The one-page wine list is very much geared to the style of the food, with ten selections starred as “Recommended” by Latapie, and plenty of bottles under $60.
    Do order the Provençal rosemary-flecked whole-wheat fugasse bread ($20), and you’ll probably order another. It’s delicious.  There is also a small section of tapas (all $10), which include slick, hot, spicy shishito peppers to pop in your mouth, and thinly sliced pink Iberico ham comes on a crunchy garlic-swabbed baguette. Best of all are the plump fritters enclosing oozing Comté cheese.
    Frogs’ legs—once a staple of French restaurants—make a welcome re-appearance at Little Frog, nicely garlicky, sprinkled with parsley and served with spring’s ramps and asparagus ($17). The duck parfait is as rich and creamy as ever, given sweet-sour inflections from brandied cherries, served on a baguette with cornichons.  Little Frog’s onion soup gratinée is still one of the best in town, with a deep, dark mahogany broth and plenty of bubbling, browned Gruyère on top. Bouillabaisse has all the right shellfish in a ruddy, Pastis-scented broth with garlic mayonnaise rouille (above).
    The specialty of the house, which I did not try this time, is worth knowing about: a whole Normandy duck seasoned with Asian spices with a bourbon-orange sauce that is flambéed, and a side of spinach and kumquats ($79 for two).
    The onglet cut of steak has been replaced with a 10-ounce New York strip (above), with an abundance of French fries in a paper canister, at a very reasonable $35. The beef has a pleasing chewiness to it, as it should. For two bucks more, you can have it with a sauce au poivre.   Currently there is a whole grilled dorade with Provencal tomato and olives ($29), and they always have mussels with frites ($26).
    For dessert my favorite is the big bowl of oeufs à la neige, or île flottante (floating island), as light as spun sugar with a rich crème anglaise (left). Last time I ordered the apple tart, it was undercooked and the pastry mushy; this time it was overcooked and the pastry needed a sharp knife to get through. Practice has not yet yielded perfect results on this item.
    Aside from that, Little Frog has hit its buoyant stride, and Latapie is eagerly waiting for a tall condo to open across the street to bring in a new crowd of what will inevitably become regulars.  I hope he saves some place for us old regulars who don’t live in the neighborhood and those who have yet to find it.  Little Frog is worth searching out.

Open for dinner nightly, for brunch Sat. & Sun. There is a three-course, fixed price dinner with wine for $29 from 5 to 6 p.m. nightly. 

CHÂTEAU MINUTY

By John Mariani

      The rosé wine season is upon us and it is therefore incumbent upon all wine writers to write their annual rosé wine story.  This year I had the good fortune to learn about what’s going on in France’s Provence, where most rosés come from, by having dinner in New York with François Matton (below, with his brother Etienne on the right), whose Château Minuty is among the biggest and best producers in the region.
    If anyone could be called a crusader for rosé wines, it’s Matton, who makes it clear that people who drink rosé only in spring and summer are denying themselves the pleasure of a fresh, brisk, acidic aperitif at any time of year. Most of his wines, which come from estates in and around Gassin, near Saint Tropéz, are harvested in the fall and released the following spring, which is why we were drinking the just-released 2018 vintage.
    I asked him straight out what seems both a foolish yet wholly reasonable question: Why make rosés at all, since the grapes commonly grown in Provence—Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah—are all red? Matton, 50, who is a third-generation vigneron of the Matton-Farnet family, made a typical French pout and said, unequivocally, “I do not use red grapes to make my wines. I use rosé grapes!” He explained that those three red grapes are intended by nature and the terroir to make good rosé wines, rather than mediocre reds.  (The estate does also make red and white wines.)
    “Our wines go perfectly with our food,” he says. “We are on the Mediterranean, close to Italy, and the seafood, fruits, herbs and spices we use need an acidic, delicate wine to go with dishes like bouillabaisse, pissaladière, tapenade and aïoli. We use olive oil, garlic, tomato, fennel, basil and thyme in our cooking. You don’t want to drink a red wine with such food.”
    His point was well taken, not least because the aromas and flavors of Provence are vividly evident in rosé wines. One can smell a bouquet of roses, hyacinth and lavender, and they taste of sage and olives and rosemary.  They come in a wide range of pastel colors, from very pale gold to burnished pink. Some are very dry, and others very floral. The best will indeed have that brisk acidity and the alcohol will rarely be above 13 percent.
    “If you don’t drink rosé within the year,” said Matton, “the acid decreases and, although the alcohol doesn’t get any higher, the wine will seem heavier and lose its freshness.”
    The 80-year-old company produces a lot of wine—600,000 cases—and is also a distribution company for others’ wines. Recently Matton and his brother Jean-Étienne have worked to restructure the vineyards, replacing Carignan and Ugni Blanc grapes with Grenache and Rolle, and modernizing the winery and tasting rooms for visitors. Their wines are now sold in 75 countries, with the U.S. taking 10% of the exports.  They are also very involved in clonal research, using a proprietary clone for their finest estates.
    I asked him if his rosés, which do not need aging, would be better off with non-cork closures. Matton leaned towards me and said, “To be honest, yes. We already use screwcaps for bottles we ship to Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand.  But the rest of the market is not ready for them.”
    We drank three wines, all from 2018, over a dinner that included a good deal of seafood like soft-shell crabs, golden snapper and Dover sole. The first was the “entry level rosé,” called M de Minuty ($21), a blend of Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah, which served as a bracing aperitif. Matton said he thinks this wine should be served cold and is not against plopping ice cubes in this wine in warm weather. The wine is in the now-familiar shapely bottle for Provence. There is also a limited edition of this same wine in a new bottle (at $23). The alcohol is 12.5%.
    The next wine, enjoyed with the first course, was called Rose et Or ($40), a blend of Grenache, Cinsault and Tibouren, which had more finesse and body, of which Matton said, “The aroma of this wine is of the white peach that grows in the region.”
    The third wine was another step up in refinement and complexity of flavors, adding pear to the peach notes.  It is called 281 ($79)—which has no mysterious meaning other than being the number on the international standard chart for a royal blue (right) that designer Hubert de Malherbe used for the unique bottle (he also does Dior’s perfume bottles).
    It is made from a single clone developed by Matton’s grandmother and from vines that average 25 years old. The Grenache and Syrah grapes are hand harvested and free-run juice is used. The alcohol is 12.5%. Production is 35,000 bottles.
    Overall sales of rosés have been booming, with plenty of novelties being made in California, and many traditional examples pouring out of Spain and Italy. But it’s tough to convince Matton that nature favored any other territory outside of Provence with the perfect conditions to make great rosé.