Rouge et Blanc: Travelling to this West Village eatery takes food-lovers through time

In this city’s quiet restaurants, there is a species of gentleman seldom spotted elsewhere.

He wears shabby houndstooth and smokes opium in the privacy of his apartment, meeting friends to avoid writing his newspaper copy. I met such a man at Rouge et Blanc. Thomas Fowler was a sardonic Brit who bounced from Saigon to America after the First Indochina War. Sitting at the bar, Fowler sucked Vietnamese sausage off a licorice swizzle, ate rice noodles and pistachios, and told me about life in the colonies.

Rouge et Blanc is quiet, empty during dinner hours, a silent remnant of a lost world. Chef Matt Rojas, formerly of Eleven Madison Park and Degustation, takes cues from French and Vietnamese traditions. Despite the current fad for noisy “fusion” cooking, Rojas joins Occident and Orient with a tender touch. Forest mushrooms come “en papillote,” packed in parchment and swaddled in soy garlic butter.

The effect is sophisticated and, though not terribly exciting, a pleasant mirage of cultural harmony.

According to the restaurant’s web site, “Rouge et Blanc” alludes to Stendhal’s novel “Le Rouge et le Noir.” How Stendhal figures into this restaurant’s theme is a riddle wrapped in mystery. Chew on that and a plate of short rib stuffed squid. Served over buttery cocoa beans, the squid requires rumination. It snaps, it crackles, it wriggles as though just tugged from the surf.

Cluttered with lanterns and wooden screens, Rouge et Blanc wallows in colonial nostalgia.

This surreptitious dependency on pure fantasy feels at once endearing, desperate, and surreal. The furnishings appear carefully distressed, battered to an intentional extreme. It’s difficult to focus on a delicious melange of fall vegetables smothered in green curry while wondering at a canopied booth illuminated in lurid red. Imagine mopping up that curry with a hunk of monkey bread even as sordid shenanigans get underway across the room.

Still, it is worth visiting Rouge et Blanc, if only to sample the lamb ribs. There are few greater pleasures in an ordinary life than a mouthful of lamb fat, unctuous and sweet and as heady as Semillon. Roti comes on the side for finger sandwiching. Roasted eggplant and blistered peppers are included for fiber. Colonial guilt for indigestion.

By the time Thomas Fowler disappeared, a happy and transnational crowd had descended on the bar, although the red booth remained unoccupied. Rouge et Blanc imagines a colonial paradise—it intends to revise, ever so quietly, an embattled history. But this retrospective reconstruction, unquestionably violent, also stimulates a powerful gastronomic imagination.

If I question Rouge et Blanc’s politics, I wholeheartedly endorse its food. Consciousness of complexity is an ethical prerequisite to eating, but it need not interfere with gustatory pleasure.