L'Abeille – a Tribeca corner where Robuchon meets honey

On the cobblestone corner of Greenwich and Laight in Tribeca, L'Abeille serves French food bent through a Japanese sensibility inside a 48-seat dining room built around an open kitchen. The restaurant opened in March 2022, the project of Tribeca resident Rahul Saito, who had spent the pandemic lockdown funding weekly dinners cooked by Mitsunobu Nagae – then working at the Michelin-starred Midtown restaurant Shun – simply to keep him working while the city's restaurants stood shut. Those dinners became the template for L'Abeille, and the name is itself a small piece of autobiography: Nagae's childhood nickname was Mitsu, the Japanese word for honey, so the restaurant borrowed the French word for the insect that makes it – l'abeille, the bee. It earned its One MICHELIN Star within months of opening, recognition for a kitchen built on Nagae's years inside Joël Robuchon's restaurants in Tokyo, Paris and New York, now reworked into a menu few other Tribeca addresses attempt.

01The room and the setting

L'Abeille occupies a corner site at 412 Greenwich Street, and early reviewers were struck less by the velvet banquettes than by how little stuffiness they implied – the room reads as polished rather than precious, helped by an open kitchen that lets the dining room watch the pass. The crowd skews young and mixed, and neighbours have long noted that the place fills every night it's open. In warmer months the restaurant extends onto the sidewalk with a short outdoor menu of cheese plates, foie gras, pâté, shishito peppers and gazpacho, a looser way into the same kitchen.

02The chef

Mitsunobu Nagae was born in Japan and started cooking at fifteen, preparing lunch and dinner for his sisters in a single-parent household before the habit turned into a vocation. He moved to Lyon in 2007 to train at the Tsuji Culinary Institute, graduating with the school's top award after a Joël Robuchon documentary reshaped his idea of what French cooking could be. His first kitchen job was at the three-Michelin-starred Régis et Jacques Marcon, followed by a posting at Ledoyen under Christian Le Squer, before he joined Robuchon's own three-starred Tokyo restaurant, working alongside chefs including Alain Verzeroli and Yuichiro Watanabe. Senior roles followed at e.t.c. in Paris, L'Osier in Tokyo and L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York, the training that now underwrites L'Abeille's menu. Nagae owns and runs the kitchen with Rahul Saito, and also serves as Corporate Executive Chef for Kuma Hospitality Group.

Insider tip

Dining room offers fixed menus only; à la carte is served at the bar.

03The cooking

The tasting menu has always opened with a foie gras crème brûlée, its caramelised crust cut by a small scoop of onion-flavoured ice cream – a dish regulars still talk about from opening week. Scallop carpaccio arrives with a beet-and-gazpacho sorbet and a shard of pastry built to shatter like a turnover crust, while a course of petits pois pairs green peas and maitake mushrooms with beef cheeks and a hazelnut mousse. Miso-glazed roasted squab, lacquered and set over charred, salted quinoa, has stayed on the menu in various forms since launch, and lobster appears warm and poached with morels and a green pea purée – the kind of dish that justifies ordering it even when the bill makes you think twice.

04What to order

Recent menus have carried a run of dishes that sum up the house style: a foie gras crème brûlée, a miso-glazed roasted squab, a butter-poached lobster and a fried tilefish with sauce vierge. To finish, the long-running Chocolat Blanc et Fleur d'Oranger pairs white chocolate marshmallow and a burnt-honey ice cream with a honeycomb-shaped cookie and dots of bright orange sauce – a dessert built, fittingly, around the restaurant's own emblem.

05Wine and drinks

L'Abeille built its reputation partly on a wine and cocktail programme that draws its own praise alongside the kitchen's. The cocktail list has included A Sleepin' Bee, made with chamomile-infused Barr Hill gin, alfalfa-honeyed vanilla bean, pear and lime, and the Sterling Mason, built on banana-infused Ron Zacapa 23 rum with espresso-muscovado syrup and coconut water. Non-drinkers aren't an afterthought either: the Sauvignon Jardin mocktail mixes sencha-infused lemon verbena with garden vinegar, tomato water, yuzu marmalade and elderflower tonic.

06When to go and booking

L'Abeille is open Tuesday to Thursday from 5:30pm to 10pm and Friday and Saturday from 5pm to 11pm, closed Sunday and Monday, with a smart-casual dress code that rules out tank tops, flip-flops, shorts and sweatpants. The dining room offers only the two fixed menus – the longer Chef's Tasting Menu and a shorter Discovery Menu – while à la carte dishes are reserved for guests seated at the bar. Next door, the more casual L'Abeille à côté offers a lighter route into the same kitchen for anyone who wants Nagae's cooking without committing to the full evening.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.