WAIT a minute. This can't be a French restaurant. Where are the silver domes and the starched waiters? Where are the patrons hunched over plates, the Gauloises between their fingers shooting up shafts of blue smoke? Where is the food, over-fussed and over-priced? But W's Entrecote is French, and not because the voice at the end of the telephone greets the caller with bonjour, although that is a nice touch.
W's Entrecote (translation: rib-eye or between-the-ribs) is a steak house, Wilson Kwok's first experiment, which opened last December when Times Square exploded with its Roman candle of restaurants.
And as the expense account brigade of expats and many locals yawned from the fancy hotel dining rooms that proffer the kind of French food that is frozen in early-80s style of nouvelle cuisine when food became precious arrangements of morsels on a plate the size of a steering wheel.
W's Entrecote has nothing in common with that. Here is a 150-seat haven, loud at times, but always friendly. It promises no more and delivers no less than a single menu of rib-eye steak in three sizes (charbroiled with herbal butter sauce), all-you-can-eat French fries, green salad and homemade bread.
The owner is 33-year-old Wilson Kwok, a native of Hong Kong. Undergraduate studies in business and marketing sent him to California, then the food-and-wine lover in him pushed him to Europe where he earned a Master's in wine from Bordeaux, cooked at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and earned postgraduate credits in hospitality at Cornell University, New York, and a hotel school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Then it was time to come home. After stints in some megastar hotels and restaurants here, he was ready to experiment: to show his friends another side of French food, the type of everyday dining he adored (and could afford) as a student, the elbows-on-the-table style of dining that endears many to France and doesn't have Michelin stars. The food that is affordable, simple and delicious, and does not swim in sauces with expensive garnishes.