There's a particular kind of restaurant sin: the hotel dining room that mistakes grandeur for hospitality. All gilt and hovering and an unbearable sense that you're being watched. Le Crocodile, which opened in the ground floor of Williamsburg's Wythe Hotel in December 2019, commits none of these crimes. Instead, it pulls off the genuinely difficult trick of feeling both upscale and utterly unguarded—a small Parisian wine bar that happens to live in a big, beautiful room.
Chefs Jake Leiber and Aidan O'Neal, both alumni of Chez Ma Tante, have designed a menu that moves with the confidence of people who know exactly what they're doing. The steak tartare arrives proper and bright. Escargot comes exactly as it should. But the real tell is the roasted chicken with herb jus—a dish that has no business being this good, and yet here we are. Steak au poivre with pommes frites hits with the kind of satisfying weight that makes you understand why this food has endured for a century. Even the sticky banana date pudding, sweet as it is, refuses to apologize for itself.
The room itself deserves credit. Mosaic tile floors, dark wood, tall windows that pull in Williamsburg light, and candlelight that flatters without trying too hard. This is what happens when you stop thinking about "hotel restaurant" as a category and just build a restaurant that happens to be in a hotel. The Infatuation nailed it: upscale feel, zero pretension. Time Out NY included it on their 2025 list of most romantic restaurants in the city, which is less a compliment than a statement of fact.
The New York Times gave it three stars when it opened, and it's landed on their Top 100 Restaurants in NYC list twice since. This is not luck. This is the result of cooks who understand that French brasserie food is popular for a reason—it works. Leiber and O'Neil know this. They're not trying to reinvent it. They're trying to execute it cleanly, and they do.
Book ahead, but don't overthink the timing. A weeknight will feel intimate; a weekend will feel alive. Either way, you'll find yourself relaxed in a way that hotel restaurants almost never allow.