A Winning Night on the Town at Brasserie Cognac

June 1, 2009 3:22 pm

A Winning Night on the Town at Brasserie Cognac

The only thing that I have ever won is a goldfish at a carnival and not to be self pitying, but it died, causing me psychic trauma that outweighed the satisfaction of winning. But, this isn't a post about my lifelong struggle with contest loserdom—it's about my triumph over it. Fine. I didn't win anything, exactly. My roommate did. But I bullied her into cutting me in, so I count it as a joint victory.

A few months ago, to our shock and delight, my roommate won a two hundred dollar gift certificate to Brasserie Cognac from Behind the Burner. A few things about this, the first and most obvious being: enter the contests! People do actually win them (throughout my history of trying, I've had doubts too...)

After an ebullient freak-out session, we established that we would blow the entire thing to celebrate Miri's graduation from NYU. I should also mention our remarkable patience—Miri won the gift certificate in February and we waited until well into May to use it. In the months leading up to our dinner date, we had ample time to get familiar with Brasserie Cognac. While I won't outwardly admit that I spent a significant chunk of time deciding between bottles of Sancerre on the website, it might have happened. By the actual day, both of us had committed Brasserie Cognac's French bistro menu to memory. Terrines of foie gras and filet mignon flambé danced in my head.

As part Vittorio Assaf's Serafina empire, Brasserie Cognac is not fancy. But, we agreed that you can't drop multiple hundreds of dollars on dinner in regular clothes. So, we strapped on heels that neither of us had worn since New Year's and tottered through the entrance in sophisticated little dresses. Wearing cocktail attire to a casual restaurant can be tricky to pull off. Luckily, any concerns about being overdressed dissolved in the first bottle of wine we ordered.

Wine is really where this gastronomical adventure begins. As I mentioned before, I had my eye on a bottle of Sancerre. But the waiter, clearly not seeing a sales opportunity, kept steering us towards bottles of cheap New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. (Was it the cocktail dresses?). Not to be deterred (or offended), we ordered a marginally less expensive bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blancfrom the Loire Valley to start.

Although I was obviously excited about the prospect of spending the gift certificate, I had some reservations about the food. Brasserie Cognac exists on a stretch of Broadway that leads out of Times Square towards a desolate clump of office buildings. It also has a sushi bar, which seems to be a desperate and ill-conceived attempt at hipness. In my less optimistic moments, I imagined tables filled with middle management guys in loosened ties and checked shirts munching on California rolls and sawing away at overdone steaks.

In an attempt to avoid the sushi bar altogether, we started out with shrimp cocktail. It became clear on arrival, however, that the shrimp were prepared at the sushi bar. I'm usually a purist when it comes to the classics, but the artfully butterflied shrimp coated with thick swishes of cocktail sauce hit the spot. Next, we ordered a deceptively simple goat cheese and tomato tart. Savory pies can be a mess of leaden crust and bland fillings, but Brasserie Cognac's flaky, buttery puffed pastry enclosed zingy roasted tomatoes, dabs of salty goat cheese and a sprinkling of thyme—we ate an appetizer that was probably intended for four in under ten minutes.

After polishing off the first bottle of wine, we started to get a little more extravagant. Out of principle, I ordered filet mignon and Miri got lobster. But, nothing could have prepared us for the spectacle that followed. When they wheeled out a white-tablecloth draped cart, I assumed that they were deboning someone's duck a l'orange tableside—nothing unusual. Then, they set our entrées on fire. My immediate reaction was to grimace like an embarrassed thirteen year old and curl into a fetal position. In the spirit of the evening, though, I kept my head above the table. In fact, I actually got into it. What's the point of spending a phenomenal amount of money on dinner, if the waiter doesn't bring a flaming steak to your table?

The details get a little blurry at this point, but if my memory serves me well (which it might not), we devoured a plate of perfectly executed profiteroles scattered with slivered almonds and oozing chocolate sauce. Then, with dessert all over our faces, we continued to finish a second bottle of wine, cash in the gift certificate and stumble out into the night stuffed to the gills with bistro food and emitting French wine from our pores. Before calling it a night, we stopped to chat with a hedge fund manager outside of Serafina. Somehow in the span of ten minutes, one of us had called him fat and the other had agreed to make out with him in the bathroom. It was time to go home.

Through this experience, I learned an important lesson: winning is awesome—the bigger the win, the better. However, it also leaves the winner with a sea of unfulfilled desires to contend with after the whole thing is over. From now on, I'm always going to be a little disappointed when the falafel place around the corner drops our food on the table without flambéing it first and I'll feel a pang of nostalgia whenever I order the second cheapest bottle on the wine list. But, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop entering every Web sweepstakes I get in my inbox anytime soon...

Brasserie Cognac
1740 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
212.757.3600
www.cognacrestaurant.com