The onslaught of intensity works thanks to the restaurant's choices in portions (not too large) and service (not overdone), which gives the palate a little time to regroup between happy sighs. In this respect, Chateau Royale resembles LibertinePruitt's other restaurant, a sexy, cream-worshipping West Village bistro where I often felt like diners should get a free handful of Lactaid tablets along with their bread and butter. Like Libertine, Chateau Royale offers virtually no deviation from opulence, even if you think you're ordering something light. For example, the endive salad is served with a sophisticated anchovy dressing and further enriched with a snowfall of grated Mimolet cheese. The duck sauce is a la orange, bright with notes of bergamot and calamansi, sticky and shiny. Scallop crudo gets plush thanks to the sauce Grenoblemade with brown butter and capers, lightly flavored with miso and thick like peanut butter.
There is one jarring American intrusion into all this Frenchness, perhaps an unnecessary luxury on a menu whose extravagance is otherwise more subdued: a beggar's purse, a bite-sized canapé in which crème fraîche and sturgeon caviar are packed inside chewy pancakes and tied with a ribbon of garlic. Although often apocryphally said to have originated in France, it is symbolic of New York through and through: in the Eighties and Nineties, the Beggar's Purse was the calling card of the Quilted Giraffe, the hottest restaurant of the era. (As it happens, Chateau Royale chef Brian Young was working as a cook at the Quilted Giraffe restaurant at the time.) Perhaps thanks to its light-hearted, class-strife-inciting name, the Beggar's Purse became a sensation, no doubt helped by its staggering price tag: when the item debuted in 1981, the Quilted giraffe” cost thirty dollars apiece; by the end of the decade it was fifty dollars. Beggars' purses at Chateau Royale cost thirty-nine dollars for a package the size of a ping-pong ball—depending on how you look at it, it's either a scandal or a hell of a deal.
