A Private 19th-Century Experience

Looking for a new — yet straight out of the 19th century — venue for an intimate private dinner in Midtown? Chef Alain Ducasse, whose appetite for antiques is as avid as his appetite for what’s on the plate, has just the spot.Hidden away above Benoit, his homage to the classic Parisian bistro on West 55th Street, is the Officine, a nearly square room entirely corseted in handsomely carved walnut paneling. The room is a reconstruction of a French herbalist’s shop, c. 1830. It was transplanted from France, where it once served the residents of Blaye, a sleepy riverfront town 35 miles north of Bordeaux. A kind of sanctum sanctorum, with its own extraordinary wine list sourced directly from the Ducasse cellars in France, it’s fitted out with a country-style plank table and horsehair-stuffed armchairs. The Officine, where a three-course prix fixe lunch or dinner begins at $200 per person (excluding beverages, tax, and tip), seats a maximum of 10 diners.“I was visiting a friend who is an antiques dealer in Bordeaux,” Mr. Ducasse said one day last week, as he swung open the door to the Officine, “and he said to me, ‘I’m going to show you something wonderful that used to be in Blaye.’ He took me to his warehouse, where the entire shop lay, dismantled.”After purchasing the shop for an undisclosed sum, Mr. Ducasse gave it to a craftsman in a village near the Riviera to have it restored. He then packed it off to New York where, during the winter, it was painstakingly reassembled above Benoit. The Officine is intact, right down to the original porcelain nameplates identifying the botanicals (e.g. valerian, eucalyptus, melissa, and krameria) that once occupied the cabinets that line all four sides of the room. Mr. Ducasse has added his own collection of old salmon poachers, as well as an assemblage of white porcelain apples and garlic plants commissioned from a ceramicist in the village of Gourdes.The only overtly modern interloper in the Officine is a dirigible-shape crystal chandelier by the edgy Dutch designers William Brand and Annet van Egmond. There are also a pair of mural-size photos of classic Paris scenes by the photographer Jean-Michel Berts. In all, Mr. Ducasse said, as he surveyed the Officine while a painter touched up the room’s baseboards, “it has an architectural equilibrium that is perfect.”It’s hard to argue with that.Benoit (66 W. 55th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 646-943-7373).

A Private 19th-Century Experience

A Private 19th-Century Experience

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