Delice & Sarrasin

Vegan French Cookery at Délice & Sarrasin | The New Yorker

"In the West Village, I found Délice & Sarrasin, a charming French bistro where vegans can bide their time in style with meatless haute cuisine crafted by head chef Yvette Caron. She deliberately sprinkles the menu with animalic terms—“Brie,” “duck,” “salmon”—while serving only vegetal reinterpretations, a tactic intended to welcome omnivores as well as vegans. By the metric of approximating the mouthfeel of real animal foods, the crab cakes—served with a savory cashew-based tartar sauce—are beyond reproach: they’re made from dehydrated lemon peel, yellow bell pepper, and seaweed marinated in soy sauce with a wheat-flour crust, and my longtime pescatarian father kept insisting, half-jokingly, that “this is crab cake.” The tournedos Rossini’s pan-seared Impossible Burger, standing in for filet, fooled us both, and while PETA has called that fatty, iron-dense patty “probably the unhealthiest veggie burger on the market,” in other words, it’s delicious. Caron’s cruelty-free foie gras—made from tahini, cashews, garlic, onion, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and cardamom—arrives fruitier, nuttier, and silkier with homemade fig jam and sourdough, a satisfying alternative to a product produced by force-feeding. For escargot she uses thinly sliced oyster mushrooms glazed with white wine and a sauce of pulverized cashews, coconut, garlic, and parsley; they don’t masquerade perfectly as snails but stand out on their own. Perhaps the best dish in the house is a ratatouille that isn’t trying to be anything else: coarsely sautéed garlic, onions, eggplant, zucchini, tricolor peppers, and heirloom tomatoes combined with herbs so that every bite retains the full, distinct flavor of each ingredient. (Entrées $14–$35.)" - David Kortava