There are no extras at Le Veau d’Or, the restaurant doesn’t try to insidiously jack up the price of your meal. There’s something perversely democratic about that, in a city full of restaurants that haphazardly smear extra caviar on ice cream. On my first visit, I was fascinated, trying to somehow manipulate the menu and strategically choose the dishes that could give me the most bang for my buck. Why would someone start their evening with a small omelette or a tomato salad when they could have the much more classy pâté? in the doughor Potato soufflés with crème fraîche and trout roe? The answer, I realised, within the strangely liberating confines of the fixed-price format, is simple because it wants to be: pleasure is its own (not insignificant) form of value. The omelette is silky and exquisite, a prime example of technical precision, although the pie is as well: savoury and well-seasoned in its pastry frame, streaked with golden veins of jellied consommé. The ApplesLike three-dimensional potato chips, paper-thin and hollow inside, it’s great fun to break them open and stuff them full of cream and red fish eggs.

This feeling of having entered a perfectionist time machine continues until the next course. Crispy, with a pepper crust, perfectly tender Duck breast— the breast of a duck whose liver was used for foie gras — is served on a pile of sweet and tangy cherry compote, pink on pink. The chicken in a cocottebraised with cream and savory yellow wine from the Jura region, is one of those gorgeous classics that is at once rustic and opulent; it is served with a dish of buttered Carolina Gold rice pilaf, a combination so unexpectedly old-fashioned, so self-consciously out of fashion, that it becomes too fresh and silly and brilliant, straight from an Alice B. Toklas dinner party. A pound-and-a-half lobster is poached to a silky texture and served chilled in its shell; the accompanying macédoine, a salad of finely diced vegetables, gives it the appearance of something you would eat at the most elegant lunch possible (not lunch, Lunch). There’s a lovely little steak, either au poivre or with bearnaise, with lovely golden-brown fries, but I’d recommend you try the leg of lamb instead: thick, ruby-red slices with the tenderness and intensity of prime rib, alongside a pile of pearly white beans, fragrant with rosemary and tarragon.

This kind of old-fashioned dining in this kind of old-fashioned space inevitably gives the whole thing a certain air of pomp. But the most wonderful thing about Le Veau d’Or is how human and welcoming it feels. Despite the dapper pink jackets worn by the staff, there is little starch to be found here. The service is attentive, but in the way that friends are attentive. Jorge Riera, the restaurant’s wine director and, in my opinion, a true genius of wine lovers, wanders around the jigsaw-piece dining room, doling out spritzes of this and that from his all-French menu and offering tips on how best to serve the caviar rouge on a broken Apple souffléThe drinks menu includes a strikingly inventive martini “our way” (a two-in-one drink: a desert dry gin cocktail and a sidecar spritz of vermouth and Vichy Catalan), a version of the Marie Antoinette garnished with an upside-down raspberry, and an unimpeachably posh selection of shots. When it’s time for dessert (overseen by pastry chef Michelle Palazzo), trays appear with great old classic like strawberry sabayon and a Melon soup which contains fresh fruit balls in a fluffy pudding with a dollop of sorbet. But almost every table seems to understand the need to floating island (floating island), an elaborate sweet with an ancient tradition and a long-standing signature of Le Veau d’Or. It’s a swirling meringue drizzled with caramel and slivered almonds, floating on a pool of sweet, smooth crème anglaise. It’s been around for ages, it’s not a good idea for most people, it’s almost forgotten – but in the right hands, a heavy classic becomes a dizzying delight. ♦