West Village Restaurant Is 2023's 'Biggest Surprise:' Report

WEST VILLAGE, NY — The French bistro is back. Well, at least one West Village spot is reviving the idea. And to critic's shock, it's one of the best spots of the year.

Eater just released their 2023 Eater Award Winners for New York City, and they called the new French bistro, Libertine, on Greenwich Street as the "Biggest Surprise" of 2023.

"The West Village long ago dispensed with its cookie-cutter French bistros," writes Eater's critic, Robert Sietsema. "But suddenly appears Libertine."

The spot, which Eater describes as looking "like it had been their forever," offers "a new definition of what a bistro can be."

How they do that, the website describes, is by reaching deep into French tradition and recreating a space and dishes that "have an almost rural quality, as if to appeal to homesick Paris transplants from other regions."

Highlights include a "giant pork sausage lolling on a volcano of mashed potatoes," an in-shell scallop par-baked in bechamel, gnocchi in a tart yellow cherry tomato sauce and a lamb shank described as "resolved into a compressed fibrous brick — but what a tasty brick it was!"

Eater wasn't the only place to heap praise onto the new bistro.

New York Times food critic Pete Wells wrote in September that Libertine "cooks and looks like the real thing."

Libertine can be found at 684 Greenwich St., near Christopher Street.

To check out the rest of the spots on Eater's list, click here