For most restaurants, Restaurant Week ended on Friday. But Fleur de Sel, a small French restaurant in the Flatiron District, extended the Restaurant Week price of $20.04 to their three-course tasting menu through Saturday. (I'm told it's normally $25 -- still a bargain.) So I made a reservation for lunch on Saturday.

On my way there, I passed a woman with the biggest hair I've ever seen. (I mention this solely so I can have an excuse to post the picture.) Fleur de Sel is in a townhouse on a quiet street (East 20th, between Fifth and Broadway)...just ignore the slightly alarming graffiti across the street. (Yet another reason why I love New York.)

The dining room is smallish and elegant, with curtains, a big picture window, a marble-topped bar along one side, and a funky exposed brick wall decorated with chef Cyril Renaud's simple and colorful paintings. When I sat down, I noticed to my surprise that the water glass was a Spiegelau.

Unfortunately, I didn't catch the names of any of the staff, but they were all pleasant, welcoming, and most accomodating of my eccentricities -- one waiter explained the preparation of my entree at length, while my waitress very kindly gave me the menu so I could scribble notes on it and take it home. The service was friendly indeed, but I observed that they moved you right along -- several other parties' coats would be brought to them at their table right after they paid, discouraging lingering. (I should note that this didn't happen to me personally...but then again, my reservation was for 1pm and it was maybe 2:30 when I was ready to leave, so the restaurant wasn't in crunch mode.)

On to the food! My first course was delightful: a Spanish mackerel tartare with mustard sauce and a teeny dab of rosé mignonette. The mackerel had a nice, mild flavor that the mustard sauce (thick and I think mayo-based) complemented perfectly. Have you ever had appetizers that were too big and heavy? The kind that make you just want to order maybe another appetizer and call it a day? This was the antithesis -- a few simple flavors that went well together, whetted the appetite, and cleared the way for what was to come.

As I did the other day at Tabla, I ordered the optional three-course wine pairing to go along with my lunch. The wine that accompanied my appetizer was a 2001 La Roche Blanche Pouilly-Fumé...or at least that's what I think it was called. (My handwriting is messy and semi-legible, and I can't find anything with this name via Google.) Anyway, it was tart, with grassy notes and green apple up front. It opened up with the food, and some nice citrus came out. (By the way, the bread that arrived with the appetizer was good country bread, nice and crusty.)

My entre was a braised veal breast with Honshmeji mushrooms, cranberry beans, and roasted potatoes. The veal was stringy, (á la pot roast, or the pork shin I had at Lupa), but very tender and had good flavor. The sauce had a wonderfully intense veal flavor -- I thought it'd been made with veal stock, but the waiter explained that it was just water and mirepoix vegetable stock, and that the veal breast had slow-roasted in the stock for 4-5 hours.) He went on to explain that it was "almost like a confit", and that the cut of meat had a fat coating on top, which had been removed after it had been roasted. As for the accompanying vegetables, I'd never heard of Honshmeji mushrooms, (and once again there are no references on Google), but these long-stemmed mushrooms were good and pleasantly earthy. The cranberry beans were underdone, crunchy, and not terribly interesting, while the roasted fingerling potatoes were fine. A small kvetch: both the appetizer and the entree were served on square plates with slanted sides. Attractive, to be sure, but it was hard to find a place to balance my knife without it winding up among the beans and mushrooms.

The wine that went with this course was a 1998 Domaine Beau Mistral Rasteau from the Côtes du Rhône-Villages. It was plummy, jammy, and only slightly tannic -- a big soft (dare I say "voluptuous"?) wine that worked well with the intense sauce.

The dessert was fantastic -- truly great. It was a raspberry feuilleté, with white chocolate caramel ganache and fleur de sel. I'd never seen fleur de sel in a dessert before, but it was a nice touch -- a few flakes (and yes, they were flakes rather than grains) of salt on top of the ganache appealingly cut its richness. The ganache was silky-smooth, with a good caramel flavor. Underneath it sat eight raspberries (which surrounded a dollop of raspberry jam) sandwiched between two thin crisp leaves of puff pastry. Crunchy, smooth, caramel, raspberry -- swoon. You could equal this dessert, but you couldn't top it.

Unfortunately, the wine chosen to accompany this was a very tart Prosecco that didn't seem to have much going on with it. I tasted acid and bubbles, and not much else...definitely the least successful of the three wines I tasted. Incidentally, I noticed that neither of the first two wines (and I didn't have enough information about the third) were listed on the restaurant's online wine list. Perhaps they were trying out some new stock before making it official?

So: A very good restaurant with some real standouts, but overall it didn't quite knock my socks off. I shall return -- if not for the pricey but interesting-sounding á la carte menu, at least for the $25 lunch tasting menu.