The 21 best French restaurants in America

New York dining mores have experienced a seismic paradigm shift in the past decade, toppling Old World restaurant titans and making conquering heroes of chefs that champion accessible food served in casual environments. But Le Bernardin—the city’s original temple of haute French seafood—survived the shake-up unscathed. Siblings Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze brought their Parisian eatery to Gotham in 1986, and the restaurant has maintained its reputation in the decades since. Le Bernardin is still a formal place, with white tablecloths, decorous service and a jackets-required policy in the main dining room. But a recent overhaul modernized the room with leather banquettes and a 24-foot mural of a tempestuous sea by Brooklyn artist Ran Ortner. Guests who find the $190 tasting menu or $120 four-course prix fixe out of reach can still experience the kitchen’s finesse in the lounge area, via stunning bar snacks.

The eponymous Bouley—the airy flagship of David Bouley’s growing empire—exists in its own fantastical bubble: a place where the Dow still surges and expense-account spending never dried up. The original Bouley, once one of the city's great haute cuisine destinations, had over the years become increasingly marginal—the chef's dated devotion to an opulent late-’80s aesthetic is as unwavering today as it was when the restaurant first opened 29 years ago. The newer locale is a tricked-out version of the old one. The aromatic apples that greeted diners as they walked through the door are still at the entrance—but now there are more of them, a whole wall on wooden shelves. The vaulted ceilings have also returned—constructed from scratch and given an over-the-top coat of golden paint.

Nothing signifies fine dining more than crisp white tablecloths and servers in suits. Mélisse has both. Hidden in plain sight in Santa Monica, this French gem offers tasting menus only (starting at $135 per person), highlighting quality seasonal ingredients selected by chef Josiah Citrin. Featured dishes include Maine diver scallops with black truffle coulis, Millbrook Farms venison with foie gras and porcini mushrooms, and sticky toffee date pudding. The beautifully plated fare is enhanced by the warm ambience of a purple-hued dining room, giving visitors an entirely elegant dining experience. Don’t miss Citrin’s “Egg Caviar” ($25 supplement), a soft poached egg served in an egg shell with lemon crème fraîche and topped with American Osetra caviar. “Fine” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The namesake master was Spanish and so is executive chef Julian Serrano. Nevertheless, one of the most astonishing monuments to modern French cuisine in the country rests on their combined artistry. As you’d expect from a VIP destination in the Bellagio, the setting is palatial from the jaw-dropping 11 framed Picasso canvases dotting the walls to the view of the fountains beyond the lavishly draped windows. The seasonally changing multicourse menus are equally extravagant with caviar, truffles and signatures like the medallions of fallow deer in green apple-Zinfandel sauce. And of course—speaking of wine—the cellar is superlative, with an emphasis on world-class French reds as well as the crème de la crème of Spain and a crackerjack floor staff, led by Master Sommelier Robert Smith, to walk you through it.

Menton the town is a gem of the French Riviera. Menton the restaurant is in Boston’s rather-less-glamorous Fort Point neighborhood. Yet given a choice between a night in either, we’d be hard-pressed to turn down the trip to Beantown. This exemplar of European refinement is where local-girl-done-remarkable Barbara Lynch proves she’s at the top of her game. (Or so we say, knowing full well we’ve said so before only to watch her surpass it.) At the heart of the Menton experience are two eight-course tasting menus, one composed of recurring favorites like the by-now-legendary butter soup, the other of seasonal creations such as sturgeon caviar-topped blini in cucumber velouté. Their presentation is as disarming on the plate as it is gracefully served by the ultra-professional staff—who are equally adept at explaining longtime Lynch cohort Cat Silirie’s wine program, a jaw-dropper for Old World aficionados. All that said, if you did nothing but belly up to the Gold Bar for the cult-worshipped foie gras dog and a cocktail to remind you that Lynch pioneered the local craft-bartending movement 20 years ago at her flagship No. 9 Park, you’d be making a trip to France’s worth of memories.

To watch an omelette being made at Petit Trois is a thing of beauty. First there is the butter, a massive pad that swirls around the pan before being flooded with whipped eggs over low heat. The mixture sits, briefly, then is taken off the stove and gently poked and prodded for minutes until it is finally folded into one uniform, buttercup-hued omelette. Oh, and did we mention that Boursin cheese is piped through the middle? Perceived simplicity is what Chef Lefebvre aims to perfect at Petit Trois, which sits right next to his first brick-and-mortar success, Trois Mec. The menu is a sparse list of classic French dishes—steak frites, mussels marinières, chicken leg—and the playlist is ’90s hip hop and classic rock, an unusual mix but one that furthers Lefebvre’s ethos of this being a casual French spot, a place to indulge in simple, good food without pretense. If the Hollywood strip mall exterior doesn’t sell you on this idea, the fantastic food certainly will.

In the monument to bygone opulence that is the Biltmore Hotel, this low-lit, country-clubby haven of prestige pampers at every turn. The much-ballyhooed bread service and cheese cart, amuses bouches and gourmandises bookend a feast offered in four, six or eight courses by the highly pedigreed chef, whose menus are a study in extravagance. But to the groundswell of edible objets d’art in which foie gras, truffles, langoustines and Kobe beef luxuriate amid foams and dots and sprigs, there’s a charmingly rustic undercurrent: lobster reimagined as cassoulet with duck-gizzard confit here, suckling pig with mustard greens and black garlic there. Meanwhile, service flows like the trophy wines dominating Palme d’Or’s 370-bottle list all the way to the bar, where a weekend pianist sets the mood for one final indulgence in the form of a nightcap.

French cuisine feels fresh at this elegant-yet-unstuffy Lincoln Park restaurant. Chef Jason Paskewitz’s menu is packed with traditional dishes—and you’ll find staples like escargot, rillettes and a whole section devoted to foie gras—but he makes genius twists, encasing foie gras in a black-truffle crust, for example. Simpler dishes are also well-done, like Dover sole bathed in brown butter and studded with capers and tender blanquette de veau with crispy sweetbread nuggets; pastry chef Marjorie Easley draws the meal to a close with graceful desserts, including a pistachio mousse bombe paired with raspberry accents, and a coconut financier with passionfruit curd and roasted fruit, a tropical riot of flavors. The Blanchard’s sommelier Anthony Mathieu and bartender Arunas Bruzas pour excellent French wines and classic cocktails, and pastry chef Marjorie Easley ends the meal perfectly with a pistachio bombe.

Boston’s dining scene would simply look a whole lot different without L’Espalier. Opening nearly four decades ago, it won instant fame for dislodging the town from the stuffy surf-and-turf rut it was stuck in—paving the way for an embarrassment of contemporary French riches today embodied by Craigie on Main, Deuxave, Lumière and Café ArtScience, to name but a few notables. And now that it’s an icon, this special-occasion bastion of the Back Bay continues to push the envelope it stamps with New England flourishes (a mission not even a move from the townhouse it occupied for years into less historic, if even more posh, digs could derail). While chef-owner Frank McClelland’s prix-fixe menus change near-daily, his audacious yet painterly imprint remains unmistakable: think warm Wellfleet oysters in a seaweed- and hazelnut-oil accented bath of emulsified bone marrow or seared scallops atop parsnip-white chocolate potage scented with lemon pith and mushroom powder. Or don’t think: the butter-poached lobster’s an all-time no-brainer paired with with grower champagne by the glass.

In 2013, celebrity restaurateur Stephen Starr lived up to his surname once again when he opened this instant Logan Circle magnet for modern-day magnificos, flâneurs and Francophiles. Perhaps the cheeriest facsimile of vintage Paris on this list—in-house boulangerie, check; flowerbox-lined patio, check; fans and ferns and zinc bar, check—Le Diplomate nails every detail of the quintessential sidewalk café. Those details are there in the textbook baguette in the bread basket, the bubbling blanket of fromage atop the soupe à la oignon gratinée, the dollop of maître d’hotel butter on the steak frites or the chocolate sauce pooled around the towering profiteroles. The bar operates with equal panache, pouring beaucoup glasses of café au lait and pastis, cocktails in coupes and carafes of house wine while maintaining a comme-il-faut carte des vins that spans the regions of France at all price points. So you can kick back over an everyday Muscadet with oysters one visit, splurge on the stuff of Bordelais legend the next—and revel in joie de vivre at every turn.

With the breezy, buoyant vibe of a brasserie classique, this downtown staple has charm to spare, all the more when you know its backstory: chef-owner Russell Klein and his wife-partner Desta held their wedding reception in the restaurant that preceded it. And it proves a labor of love in more than one way: “When we opened, French food was on the outs, and many people told us we were crazy to do it. But it was our passion,” says Klein, who upped the ante with the local anomaly of an oyster bar. Fast-forward eight years, and Meritage is such a smash that it can book up for weeks on end during theater season. Its magnetism starts with pitch-perfect renditions of such classics as chicken ballotine and billi bi, but it deepens with au courant whimsies like trotter cromesquis, duck-heart pastrami, escargot popovers and roast duck breast with fruitcake in walnut sauce. And wine director Nicolas Giraud’s lovingly compiled, very fine bottle list seals the deal.