Search best restaurants near me around Canal and Lafayette and Le Coucou will appear as a dinner reservation problem — a room that won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2017 and has been difficult to get into ever since. What the listings tend to bury is that the same dining room serves lunch six days a week, at a fixed price, from half past eleven. It is the same kitchen, the same room and a substantially different level of difficulty.
A set-price lunch in a room like this is one of the few genuine bargains left in Manhattan fine dining, and it works best when you are not in a hurry. Ask Karpo whether there is a table today and what is worth building around it in Soho and Chinatown afterwards.
A French restaurant that meant it
Le Coucou is a collaboration between chef Daniel Rose and the restaurateur Stephen Starr. Rose had built his reputation cooking in Paris rather than in New York, which matters: the restaurant did not open as an American interpretation of French food but as a fairly direct piece of French cooking transplanted into a Manhattan dining room.
The menu reflects that. Quenelle de brochet — pike quenelles, a dish that has largely disappeared from French restaurants outside Lyon — sits on the list alongside sweetbreads and a whole-rabbit preparation. These are not crowd-pleasing choices. They are the dishes a French kitchen cooks when it is not worrying about whether the room will order them.
The 2017 James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant confirmed the bet had worked. Nearly a decade later the room is still full, which in New York terms is the more impressive statistic.
The lunch is the whole point of this piece
Lunch runs Sunday through Friday from half past eleven to two, and on Saturday from half past eleven to half past two. It is priced as a set menu — two courses, three courses, or a longer version — which means you know before you sit down roughly what the meal will cost.
That structure is what makes it worth planning around. Dinner at a restaurant like this is open-ended: you order, and the bill is whatever the order came to. A fixed two- or three-course lunch removes that entirely, and it does so in the same room, off broadly the same repertoire, at a fraction of the total outlay.
The longer lunch option exists for people who want the full production, and it is a reasonable choice for an occasion. But the two-course version is the one that makes this a realistic thing to do on an ordinary Friday rather than a birthday.
How to order at lunch
The temptation with a set menu is to pick the most familiar options, which is precisely the wrong instinct here. If the quenelle is available, order it — it is the single most characteristic dish in the building and the one you are least likely to encounter anywhere else in the city.
The beef tartare is the other reliable choice and the safer one if you are bringing someone who is unenthusiastic about offal or freshwater fish. Between the two of them you cover most of what this kitchen is about, and at lunch you are ordering two courses rather than trying to build a whole evening.
The room itself is worth arriving in daylight for. It is a tall, generously proportioned space that reads quite differently at midday than under evening lighting, and lunch is the only way to see it that way. In the evening the room is deliberately dim and candlelit, which flatters the food and hides the architecture; at noon the proportions and the plasterwork are the first thing you notice, and they are the reason the restaurant looks the way it does in every photograph you have seen of it.
One thing a set-price lunch changes is the wine decision. At dinner in a room like this the list is where the bill quietly doubles; at a fixed-price lunch, a glass each is a proportionate addition rather than an escalation, and the by-the-glass selection is where a French kitchen usually puts its most useful bottles. Ordering two glasses rather than a bottle is the move that keeps a lunch a lunch.
Building a Saturday around it
138 Lafayette Street sits on the seam between Soho, Nolita and the northern edge of Chinatown, which makes it one of the better lunch anchors in Lower Manhattan. Saturday service runs half an hour later than the rest of the week, to half past two, which is the most useful thirty minutes in the schedule — it turns a lunch booking into an unhurried one.
The sensible shape of the day is lunch first and walking afterwards, rather than the reverse. Everything around here is at its best in the afternoon, and a two-course lunch at midday leaves the rest of the day intact in a way a three-hour dinner does not.
Practical notes
Le Coucou is at 138 Lafayette Street, on 212.271.4252. Lunch runs Sunday through Friday from half past eleven to two and on Saturday from half past eleven to half past two, at a set price for two courses, three courses or a longer menu. Dinner runs Sunday through Thursday from five to ten and Friday and Saturday from five to eleven. Take the lunch: it is the same kitchen and the same room at a fixed and much lower cost. Order the pike quenelle if it is on, and the beef tartare alongside it. Saturday's extra half hour makes it the least rushed booking of the week.
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Ask Karpo first
A lot of the hardest dinner bookings in New York run a set-price lunch that almost nobody competes for. Ask Karpo which rooms near you do that, what today's menu looks like, and what is worth walking to once you are done and the afternoon is still ahead of you.
