Supposing I told you about a French restaurant with terrific food where, for $26, you could feast on mussels followed by rack of lamb followed by a warm caramelized-apple crêpe. Suppose I explained further that there were dozens of three-course combinations—far too many to be reproduced in a small menu box on this page, as I have been doing in this series up till now. Suppose, finally, that I assured you none of these tables d’hôte would set you back more than $28 and that some would run considerably south of that amount. You would say there must be a catch.

And there is: two actually. The first is that this dinner deal is offered only one night a week—Sunday. Any other night, expect to pay about double for the same three courses.

The other catch is you have to know about it. While the offer is not a jealously guarded secret, the restaurant in question, Paradou, doesn’t exactly go out of its way to publicize it. There is no placard on your table announcing it, no mention of it on the printed menu. The only way to learn about the special is through an obscure reference buried in a remote corner of the restaurant’s website or through word of mouth.

Paradou, in the picturesque meat-packing district, has appropriated the name of a one-voiture town in Provence, located about 15 minutes from

Saint Remy. Little West 12th Street is a long haul from le Midi, and the space that houses the restaurant hasn’t changed much from how it looked in its previous life. The battered wood floor remains in place, and so do the scarred brick walls, these days wearing a coat of white paint. The table-tops in the tiny front room are fashioned from crates that once cradled bottles of some of the world’s great vintages. All in all, the restaurant isn’t much to look at, but as the evening wears on and the room fills up with happy hip people, it takes on a conviviality that is hurt not the least by the guttural French dialogue emanating from the bar area.

The food doesn’t hurt either. Expertly cured gravlax of wild king salmon arrives in the company of warm fingerling potatoes, shavings of licoricey fennel, mache, and crème fraîche. A shimmering quail egg straddled by twin slivers of black truffle adorn an appetizer-size disc of steak tartare. The succulent beef is surrounded by a host of familiar mix-ins: lemon zest, minced shallots, pine nuts, Dijon. A trio of rillettes—one duck, one pork, one smoked trout—is a brilliant study in contrasts, showcasing the heights to which lowly potted meat can be carried. The item is realized as three glistening mesas, the duck crowned with crispy fried leeks, the trout with golden caviar.

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The kitchen knows its way around bouillabaisse. A deep ceramic pot of steamy liquid set down before you sends up an intoxicating mist that carries notes of saffron, long-cooked lobster shell, and brandy. From the briny depths, you coax up hunks of monkfish and hake, scallops, shrimp, plump mussels. You get duck two ways, as confit and as slices of crisp-skinned magret, the meats separated by a wall of spiced apples and chestnuts. My waiter counseled me to have the Roquefort sauce accompanying my entrecôte on the side so I could appreciate the flavor of the beef, which is dry-aged. Good advice. The steak has a complex mineral quality and beefy goodness to it, though it tastes just fine drizzled with the thick, golden, cheesy elixir. A pretty good potato gratin and some mesclun complete the plate.

The apples in the aforementioned crêpe could stand more caramelization, but a flourless chocolate-banana cake, almost custard-like in its consistency, is surrounded by an herbes de Provence caramel sauce that is so audaciously right in this context that it will have you wondering how you ever ate chocolate cake without it. Another imaginative sunburst, this one a bright kiwi and peppermint coulis, forms a moat around a flawless individual berry tart.

So far, Paradou is unequivocally the score to beat in the prix-fixe series sweepstakes. Nothing would please me more than to meet up with its peer at some point in researching this series. But I’m not holding my breath. Restaurants of this caliber are all too rare a commodity.
 

Paradou, 8 Little West 12th Street, nr Ninth Ave, (212) 463-8345