Libertine
You have until May 23 to eat some of the best duck in New York.
I’ve had my heart broken twice in New York. Once when Ensenada closed last October, and another time… well, right now. Libertine, a West Village French bistro, is closing at the end of the month after just three short years. This newsletter, above all, is a love letter to Libertine… and their iconic mound of butter that excites and terrifies me all at the same time.
Love is on my brain for many reasons: a friend’s wedding at the end of the month is one, and I’m looking at the thousands of dollars of jeans that I’ve amassed instead of investing in formal wear, panicking about what to wear. I’m also just feeling a bit soft right now, a bit emotional. As is natural in the spring, April was a month of growth. But, it was also filled with beautiful moments, like attending a graduation ceremony, or when I teared up while watching Justin Bieber sing along to a video of his younger self at Coachella. (I was there! No, I won’t stop talking about it!)
I’ve been finding myself falling in love with little things all around me, because a life without appreciation for all the weird quirks of living—the friendships and the little pleasures and the one time I laughed so hard I couldn’t stop the tears from pouring out of my eyes—is no life at all. And undeniably, restaurants are a fantastic thing to fall in love with, because with the attention and nourishment they provide, they kind of… love you back?
So, as you can imagine, I take it quite personally when a restaurant that is so intertwined with the love story of me and Viraj in New York closes. Libertine opened in 2023, the year Viraj and I moved in together. Shortly after settling into our new apartment, still marveling at the fact that we had one place to call home together, we ate at Libertine for the first time.
I’ve said before that French food isn’t my favorite, and yet I find myself at French restaurants all the time because of Viraj. (Compromise… another element of love.) But, apart from the food, there’s a certain charm that draws me to Libertine. The true commitment to the “bistro” theming captures the analog joy of dining out, where the menu is written out on a chalkboard that your server will sometimes carry to you, and the light filters in through the window in this picture-perfect way, especially if you’re at my favorite table, the booth in the corner. Magic.
During our first visit, Viraj and I were enthralled by the duck deux façons, a dish that has (thankfully) remained on the menu as others have rotated in and out. Chalk dust to chalk dust… or something like that. This duck comes in two parts: sliced breast with skin that cracks like glass and a pepper sauce, and a confit casserole of duck meat hidden beneath dollops of buttery potatoes aligot. And it might be the best French duck preparation I’ve had in this city.
Almost exactly one year later, prior to starting his full-time job, I took two days off to be a tourist in my own city. Viraj and I each planned a day, and his ended with a meal at Libertine, where we talked about our excitement for the future over a meal of bread and butter and steak tartare and… oh yes, duck. The dish tasted the exact same—if there’s one thing Libertine has mastered, it’s a perfect execution of this duck served two ways—and once again, eating it symbolized the start of a new phase in our lives.
And then we didn’t go back to Libertine for a long time, even though we talked about the restaurant a bunch, because taking something for granted is so easy that it takes a tremendous amount of effort to do the opposite. Also, there is no shortage of restaurants to go to in this city.
I’ve never made a reservation faster than when I learned that Libertine was closing, and it was only in the moment of finding out the news that I realized how much the restaurant meant to me. Since that day we ate at Libertine in September 2024, maybe nothing much in our lives has changed; there was no milestone to commemorate, and therefore no reason to go. But that doesn’t ever stop me.
Walking into Libertine last Saturday evening, everything was, reassuringly, exactly how I had remembered it. I tried to commit everything to memory, knowing that it was going to be my last time in this exact space, dining at this exact restaurant. (The team is keeping the space, by the way, just transforming it into something new.)
We started with bread and butter, and their butter tastes more like butter than any other butter, if that makes any sense. We had scallops with (more) butter, Café de Paris butter, to be precise. We had fried puffs of mashed potatoes that we spread a mixture of caviar, chives and crème fraîche on, and an onion tart that (to my delight) was a cross-section of onion nestled inside a puff pastry that shattered when we cut into it.
And, of course, we had the duck.
Eating this same dish we had eaten twice before, we found ourselves talking once more about the future; a future that was shaping up to be even more than what I could have hoped for, one duck dish ago… or two.
Libertine, we had a good run. And what a reminder that nothing ever lasts… and I should go to my favorite restaurants more often while I still can.
Bite It!
Book Libertine on Resy here. You have until May 23!