Duck breast with figs and lavender honey

Photograph: Jeff Gurwin

For all its bistros and brasseries, New York’s still hurting for traditional French regional cooking. Sure, our top French toques dabble here and there in the foods of their youth—witness Olivier Muller’s fine Alsatian choucroute at DB Bistro Moderne and the defunct La Côte Basque’s famed cassoulet (still on the menu at Benoit)—but their menus, for the most part, range far and wide, mixing and matching from Strasbourg, Dijon, Marrakech and Hanoi. Beyond the occasional bouillabaisse special, authentic fare from the south of France in particular has rarely been very well represented.

Allegretti, which opened not long ago near the Flatiron Building, sets out to change that. The restaurant, highlighting the region’s sun-dappled flavors, offers the sort of refined seasonal Mediterranean cooking you’d expect to discover at a Michelin-starred spot on a country road near Marseille. Alain Ducasse, who forged an empire from this sort of deceptively simple upmarket cuisine, served an exorbitant version at his late New York jewel box on Central Park South. As it happens, Alain Allegretti—the Frenchman self-confident enough to name his first solo venture after himself (and charge $34 for entrées)—used to work for Monsieur Ducasse at the Louis XV in Monaco. He also seared and sautéed in other venerable kitchens in and around his native Nice before helming top spots in New York (Le Cirque, Atelier). Still, even among Francophiles, he’s hardly a household name. While his eponymous newcomer may not up his Q rating, his food—as the Michelin Guide might put it—is certainly well “worth a detour.”

The restaurant trots out all the usual haute cuisine extras—like amuse-bouches (lush tomato soup with mussels and caviar one night) and postdinner petits fours. The dining room—a grown-up affair attracting a mature, buttoned-up crowd—features not much in the way of decor: an imposing burnished-wood bar giving way to off-white walls clutching hurricane lamps and small abstract prints of coral silhouettes. The muted space, policed by an efficient battery of waiters, is ideally suited to hashing out business or entertaining out-of-town in-laws. Though the room probably won’t transport you to the French Riviera, the chef’s food certainly will.

Allegretti, who grew up on this stuff, serves what may be the city’s most elegant niçoise salad, a diminutive starter featuring hard-boiled quail eggs, flaky Sicilian tuna and a pristine bouquet of miniature vegetables (artichokes, radishes, fingerlings, haricots verts). Even America’s Next Top (Starving) Model couldn’t make a meal from this dish, which is a far cry from the heaping salads New York diners are used to.

The chef’s fish soup, also modestly portioned, is a rich classic enriched with Pernod and saffron and built from the traditional triumvirate of Mediterranean fish—rascasse (scorpion fish), rouget (red mullet) and lotte (monkfish). Slurping it down, I was left craving one thing: more of their croutons, Gruyère and garlicky rouille—the usual accompaniments—for soaking it up.

Rouget also takes top billing in a supremely photogenic entrée—airlifted from the port of St.-Tropez—featuring baby zucchini and four gorgeous crisp-skinned fillets sauced tableside in an aromatic saffron-laced clam-and-mussel jus. The menu also touches on the influences and ingredients coming into the region from across the border in Italy, with ricotta salata shaved onto salad, and a small section devoted to pastas—including plump Franco-Italian ravioli filled with earthy braised oxtail.

While the cooking here won’t win awards for ingenuity, the chef’s technique and presentation are flawless. Duck breast roasted perfect-pink is textbook crisp on the outside and buttery within. It anchors an artfully composed seasonal dish featuring provençal accents like fresh figs (folded into a bundle of shredded leg meat) and lavender honey (whisked with orange juice, sherry vinegar and duck drippings into a sweet-tart warm vinaigrette).

Desserts, like silken licorice panna cotta and a mini brioche topped with a refreshing lemon mousse, are as restrained as the rest of the meal, but lack the savory side’s low-key dazzle and regional focus—characteristics more aptly represented in the delicious crisp fennel cookies (an original recipe from the chef’s grand-mère) that come free with the bill.