Bistro du Jour

Libertine is a new (and pricey) take on an old idea.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

LONG AGO, the city's French restaurants busied themselves with haute cookery and haute ambience. These days, they've ceded much of the white-tablecloth territory to other cuisines and disguised ambition under scruff at all manner of bistros and bars à vin: Claud, Place des Fêtes, Le Dive, the list goes on. The newest and perhaps most eagerly hyped arrival in this overcrowded genre is Libertine, tucked in a petrol-blue corner about as far west as the West Village goes, where the Hudson stands in for the Canal Saint-Martin. Its menus are movable chalkboards, just as they would be in any low-ceilinged hideaway in the 11th; its patron libertine is Serge Gainsbourg, peering down from above a prime table.

Since it opened in May, the restaurant has gone from a whispered tip among those who know to a near-impossible booking for those who can. The best reservation I could manage during a sleepy week in dog-day August was for 5:30 p.m., an hour that doesn't incline to libertinism. On the upside, if you're eating the kind of bistro cooking that requires an alp-size mound of butter like the one that is clearly visible over chef Max Mackinnon's shoulder in the open kitchen, you may cherish the extra time to digest.