How French Should a Restaurant Be?

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These days, it seems like you can’t flick a cigarette in this town without it smacking into a brand-new French restaurant with an old-fashioned point of view. An ocean of Le and La and L’, Chez Whoever and Maison So-and-So, This or That d’Or. If, in a haze of butter and white Burgundy, you sat down to write a parody of the ur- resto for our current culinary Franco-cacophony, you could do worse than to title it “Chateau Royale,” a phrase both spectacularly generic and hilariously evocative. It is also the name of a place that opened this summer, in a century-old carriage house just south of Washington Square Park, the latest spot from the restaurateur Cody