There are two ways to open a French brasserie in downtown Manhattan. You can conjure Paris out of a SoHo warehouse, the way Keith McNally did at Balthazar in 1997. Or you can be Keith McNally’s son.
Faux, which opened in early September at 277 Church Street, between White and Franklin, is the second kind of brasserie. Its proprietor, George McNally, is 23. Its furniture, according to Tribeca Citizen, is “largely cast-offs” from his father’s former hotspots. Its designer, Ian McPheely, did Pastis and Balthazar, Grub Street reported in June. Its name, at least, is honest.
The question every critic in town has asked since September is whether the reproduction has a life of its own. The answers are in: unanimous on the facts, divided on the verdict. Faux is a mess. Whether that is a bug or the entire point depends on how old you are.
The Backers, or Not
The first thing to know about Faux is who isn’t paying for it. Keith McNally “isn’t involved in Faux—he’s not even an investor,” Helen Rosner wrote in The New Yorker on October 18. Grub Street reported that George raised roughly $1.5 million from investors on his own; neither he nor the restaurant has named them. Vanity Fair reported in August that the father was not sold on the space and the son signed the lease anyway. It is the most McNally thing a McNally could have done.
The family resemblance is hard to miss all the same. The elder McNally’s brother, Brian, ran Indochine. The Odeon, the restaurant that invented Tribeca as a place to be seen eating, is a few blocks south and is still run by Lynn Wagenknecht, Keith’s former wife and partner. George, who came over from London and worked at Balthazar before striking out, is not entering the business so much as joining a dynasty, and the dynasty has opinions about where the fries should be.
The Room
The space was once Shigure, a sake bar. Downstairs was the jazz club B Flat, now reborn as Prevz, a basement bar open Tuesday through Saturday from 7 p.m., per The Infatuation. Upstairs is the problem. Rosner calls it “boxy and narrow and disorientingly tall.” Its best feature is a wall of double-height windows. Its worst is a shed-like structure inside the front door that hides the stairs to Prevz. Even Tribeca Citizen said that bulkhead “really set my teeth on edge.” The walls are what Rosner describes as “fleshy-pink plaster” over mottled wood plank floors, and the effect, in her words, is “a little bit ugly, and not in a puckishly jolie-laide way.”
Patina is the one luxury money cannot buy. It has to be waited for, or, in this case, inherited by the truckload.
The Menu, and What It Costs
Faux has no public menu online. Its website is a private Squarespace page, which is either very exclusive or not yet finished. The prices below therefore come from published reports, and we have linked each one so readers can check our arithmetic.
The kitchen is run by Kristina Ramos. Her résumé depends on whom you ask. Rosner and Grub Street place her in the South of France and at the Washington outpost of Minetta Tavern, another Keith McNally restaurant. Tribeca Citizen and the blog If the Devil Had Menopause list Eleven Madison Park and Oxalis. We print both versions until the restaurant tells us which is right.
The menu is Provençal in its accents and crowd-pleasing in its bones. There are panisses with aioli, oysters, a half chicken, paccheri with sausage and kale, and a Caesar salad whose anchovies cost extra. Rosner, who calls the salad “pretty terrific,” called the surcharge “a silly exercise.” We agree on principle. A Caesar without anchovies is a salad that has misplaced its identity papers.
Tribeca Citizen lists the burger, dressed with a sauce algérienne, at $29, the halibut with lentils at $43, and red wine by the glass at $21 to $26. If the Devil Had Menopause reports steak frites at $42, an endive salad at $22, pesto rigatoni at $26 and crispy potatoes at $14. A Brooklyn blogger, Fat Guy From Brooklyn, put the steak frites at “around fifty-three dollars,” served family style. That is an $11 discrepancy on the restaurant’s signature dish. Either the cut has changed or the arithmetic has, and we would like to know which. OpenTable files Faux under “$50 and over.” Vanity Fair reported that George wanted the place to be “not pretentious or too expensive.” A $43 halibut in Tribeca may well count as restraint.
The Consensus
Rosner’s review is the one people will remember, because it manages to be both a pan and a blessing. Faux, she writes, is “a total mess, and it’s very much not for me,” but it has “a shocking earnestness, a near-total absence of cynicism,” and its imperfection “feels almost exuberantly winning.” She praises the “real zing” of the sauce au poivre, reports a spaghetti that swung between crunchy and overcooked from visit to visit, and describes service with “a sort of friendly air of bafflement, as if this were everyone’s first-ever shift, every night.”
The Infatuation’s Willa Moore reached the same place more quickly. Her headline says the scene is “deliciously messy and the food just fine,” and she calls the room “sceney, loud, and almost shamelessly sloppy.” She has not yet assigned a rating. The neighborhood press is warmer. Tribeca Citizen reported “no disappointments.” One Substack headlined its review “George McNally’s Faux is a delight. His father should be proud.” OpenTable diners, who reward a martini more generously than critics do, give it four and a half stars.
Our Judgment
Here is the column’s view, offered as criticism, not as a report from a banquette. Faux is a restaurant whose critics are reviewing two things at once: the room on Church Street and the surname over the door. Most of them have been fair to the room and slightly too kind to the surname. When every professional review agrees that the service is baffled, the space is ungainly and the cooking is “fine,” the right word for the restaurant is not “winning.” It is “unfinished.” And unfinished at $29 a burger and $21 a glass is a choice the paying customer is entitled to make with open eyes.
None of this is fatal. Few restaurants are themselves in their first season, and a 23-year-old who signs a lease his father did not like has at least shown the right instinct. The kitchen has a burger and a steak sauce that critics like, the martinis get good notices across the board, and the basement gives the place a reason to stay open past midnight. What Faux does not yet have is the thing that made its furniture famous: a room that runs itself, so the owner can stop shaking hands long enough to see what is happening at the tables.
Go for a drink at the bar, and go downstairs to Prevz. Book dinner in the spring, when the novelty crowd has moved on and we will find out whether anyone was there for the food.
The Particulars
Verdict: Promising, unfinished and overpriced for now. Worth a drink, and worth a dinner once the kitchen and the floor have caught up with the furniture.
Price: Expensive. Burger $29, halibut $43, steak frites $42 to about $53 by published accounts, wine by the glass $21 to $26. OpenTable lists it at “$50 and over.”
Address: 277 Church Street (between White and Franklin Streets), Tribeca. Open daily, 5 p.m. to midnight. Prevz, downstairs, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 7 p.m. Reservations through OpenTable. Tribeca Citizen reported walking in without a booking at 5 p.m.
Reservations weighs menus, prices, the published record and the critical consensus; when our critic has dined, we say so. For this review, our critic has not dined at Faux. All quoted judgments of the food and service belong to the critics and outlets named and linked above.
Featured image: Balthazar, Keith McNally’s SoHo brasserie, on Spring Street in 2009. Photo by Ralph Daily via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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