Regional French cuisine in New York

[Pan]

Where do you go when you want genuine Provencal Soupe de Poisson and Salade Nicoise? What if you're looking for Norman, Alsatian, Breton, or Burgundian cuisine? How many genuine regional specialists are there in the five boroughs, and which regions are represented? Inquiring minds want to know.

[rozrapp]

Gascogne is a favorite of ours. The menu includes specialties of the eponymous region. And I have to add that, with the warm weather months upon us, they have one of the loveliest back gardens around.

[Suzanne F]

Roz, you beat me to it. (We like D'Artagnan, too, but they're gone, sigh, and anyway Gascogne is more straightforward.)

[Eric_Malson]

I've had some really excellent meals at L'Acajou--53 W. 19th St. (Manhattan).

I believe they identify themselves as an Alsatian restaurant....at any rate, they do have a yearly Alsatian festival.

[Pan]

Thanks for the recommendation, Eric.

What dishes have you liked there?

[Eric_Malson]

What dishes have you liked there?

Oh, dear....it's probably been 5 years since I've been there and I just don't remember much of what I've tried. I do remember hoping for choucroute garni on more than one occasion, and they never happened to have it when I happened to be there.

The one thing I do remember vividly is their onion tart....if it happens to be the "savory tart of the day", grab it! I used to love eating onion tart in Schwaben (Germany, where it's called zwiebelkuchen), and L'Acajou's is every bit as good or better than what I had in Germany (which is intended as the highest possible praise).

I'm sure I had the rack of lamb at some point, and it was excellent....if there is rack of lamb on the menu, there is at least a 50-50 chance I will order it.

I finally found an online menu here. The daily specials tend to be more "regional" in flavor than the regular menu, which is fairly standard bistro fare.

(There are still many things I don't understand about search engines, it appears... a Google search for "L'Acajou" turned up dozens of listings on general restaurant sites, but not one hit for the site belonging to the restaurant itself. Finally found it linked from one the other general sites.....bizarre.)

[mikeycook]

Roz, you beat me to it. (We like D'Artagnan, too, but they're gone, sigh, and anyway Gascogne is more straightforward.)

We had a large party in the garden at Gascogne for my wife's 30th birthday, so I would have to wholeheartedly endorse them for Southwest cuisine.

Provence (on MacDougal in SoHo) has (obviously) Provencal cuisine. I am sure there are probably a couple of other Provencal spots in NYC, but right now I am drawing a blank on them.

[herbacidal]

(There are still many things I don't understand about search engines, it appears... a Google search for "L'Acajou" turned up dozens of listings on general restaurant sites, but not one hit for the site belonging to the restaurant itself. Finally found it linked from one the other general sites.....bizarre.)

People who are more intimately familar with search engines than I will have to comment further, but from what I understand,

Google's algorithms take a number of things into account before pulling up its results. Although one of them is no doubt the registered keywords and metatags which the website designer should have taken care, also very important is how many people visit the page, how many links there are to the page, and other indicators of a page's popularity. I suspect just that no one uses their webpage (for info about the restaurant, hours, phone number, etc.) and they haven't bothered to link to many other web pages.

[mikeycook]

(There are still many things I don't understand about search engines, it appears... a Google search for "L'Acajou" turned up dozens of listings on general restaurant sites, but not one hit for the site belonging to the restaurant itself.  Finally found it linked from one the other general sites.....bizarre.)

People who are more intimately familar with search engines than I will have to comment further, but from what I understand,

Google's algorithms take a number of things into account before pulling up its results. Although one of them is no doubt the registered keywords and metatags which the website designer should have taken care, also very important is how many people visit the page, how many links there are to the page, and other indicators of a page's popularity. I suspect just that no one uses their webpage (for info about the restaurant, hours, phone number, etc.) and they haven't bothered to link to many other web pages.

A few points on search engine placement for Google (gleaned from my own experience).

1. To get on Google, you usually have to make a submission to dmoz.org, which Google uses as a database (unless your web site is affiliated with another site with a Google relationship, like Adsense). Based on this, Google will come and spider your site.

2. The number of sites that link to your site is a major factor, as is the ranking of THOSE sites at Google. One of the best ways to improve your ranking is to get links to your site from sites that already rank highly on Google for the keyword(s) you are targeting. The more prominent the link on their site, the higher the ranking.

3. Google looks at the URL, page title, text headers and first few paragraphs of a page to do their ranking. In my experience they ignore meta tags (some search engines use them, others don't).

For instance, if you wanted to come up highest on the word "lobster" and you owned a restaurant called "Bob's Seafood House" in Portland, ME, the following would be the idea way to organize your homepage.

URL: www.lobster.com or www.lobsterhouse.com.

Page Title: Lobster in Portland, ME at Bob's Seafood House

Page Header (i.e. first major headline, best if it's an HTML H1 tag): Lobster is king at Bob's

First Paragraph: Lobster, steamers, and fish are caught daily at Bob's Seafood House...blah, blah, blah

In this example, Lobster is the first word in each category, which would be ideal. A lot of restaurants just put the name of their restaurant in the title, which limits their search engine effectiveness. By putting lobster and portland in the page title before the name of the restaurant in this case, one would be more likely to get matches from people who are searching for lobster in portland and not just people searching for Bob's (who are most likely already familiar with it and will find it by other means if they can't find the web site).

(This is obviously a very simplistic example, since most sites want to come up under multiple key words.)

Edited April 28, 2004 by mikeycook (log)

[Pan]

I finally found an online menu here.

Thanks for the online menu from l'Acajou. I like the menu, and it's not wildly expensive at all.