Looking at that gorgeous, glittering façade above, you would hardly believe it’s inside the lobby of the Met Life building, which New Yorkers still call the Pan Am building. It looks just like one of the more soigné brasseries on Boulevard Saint Germain, and, once inside, you’ll be dazzled by the art deco appointments and polish of the place—the lacy curtains, glowing chandeliers, brown leather booths, and a mural (below) in the style of Tamara de Lempicka. There’s also a genuine bonhomie provided by a cordial wait staff.
In a favorite brasserie or bistro, if you order a dish you’ve had a hundred times and it is good, you are happy; if it is bad, you are sad; but when it is very, very good, you are as delighted as the first time you fell in love with it. That is the way it is with Christina Towers’s food, which shows enormous reverence for and knowledge of French
brasserie fare while imbuing it with her own personality. In so many dishes the intensity of flavors and reductions is the antithesis of cooking that can so easily become staid. So, when you taste Towers’s onion soup gratinée ($14), not only is the broth mahogany rich and caramelized by the onions but the Gruyère and Emmenthaler topping is just thick enough and browned enough to insure it does not overwhelm the soup and yet has the proper stringy texture throughout (below).
Towers (above) studied at Le Cordon Bleu and became chef de tournant at Rosemary’s in Las Vegas, then sous-chef at New York Palace and really fine-tuned her kitchen management skills as executive sous chef under the Chef Julien Jouhannaud at Le Bilboquet in NYC. You can watch her through a wide glass kitchen window working the stoves and directing her cooks with the efficiency demanded of a restaurant that does breakfast, a big lunch and has a rush of people pouring in at six o’clock.
You might begin with a generous plateau of seafood ($32 and $49) or the pan-seared octopus with a tender bean salad and lemon aïoli ($24). Beef carpaccio with arugula and shaved Parmigiano was delicately wrought and perfectly seasoned ($27). Parisian-style gnocchi can so often be a Gallic mis-step of floury, gummy tastelessness, but Towers’ version is excellent, the gnocchi nicely formed, cuddled in a ceramic dish and enriched with truffle butter ($16).
There are plats du jour—Monday, coq au vin ($26), Tuesday, baked flounder ($29), Wednesday, osso buco ($36), Thursday, chicken paillard ($26), Friday, bouillabaisse ($33) and Saturday, châteaubriand for two ($39 per person). I was there on Monday and lucky to sample the coq au vin in its dark, winey reduction as rich as soup, with carefully cooked chicken, carrots, pearl onions, mushrooms, mashed potatoes and the requisite lardoons that really make this dish so satisfying these wintery days. A simple steak au poivre ($45) was good, though it could have used a bit more pepper bite, but the frites were perfect. A wild branzino was superb, delicately roasted with delicious eggplant caviar, bits of tomato and crispy artichokes ($34). Unexpected was a lamb tagine with couscous, toasted almonds, sweet dates and carrots ($27), a North African dish as good as any I’ve had around town.
Equal commitment is given to desserts, with a crème brûlée (above) whose crystallized crust shatters to reveal a wonderful yellow interior of just the right creaminess. Cheesecake was good, too, and I was happy to see an old-fashioned American dessert—red velvet cake—make it onto the menu. Café Centro has a good selection of wines by the glass ($13-$16), a “sommelier’s selection” of bottlings chosen “for their prized attributes and seasonal qualities,” signature cocktails and a slew of bottled and draft beers. NYC doesn’t have quite the number of bistros and brasseries it used to, and even at some of the better ones, the kitchens seem to be coasting. At Café Centro you can tell that Christina Towers is very much a dynamic force, not just making sure things taste right but putting her own stamp on every dish that goes out of her kitchen.
Open for breakfast and lunch, Mon.-Fri., dinner Mon.-Sat.
CAFÉ CENTRO
Met Life Building 200 Park Avenue 212-818-1222