Business & Tech

Le Penguin Is A GQ Magazine Top New Restaurant of the Year

The downtown Greenwich bastion of French gastronomy is ranked among the top 25 new restaurants in the country.


Award-winning restaurant reviewer Alan Richman has turned the national spotlight onto a Greenwich restaurant gem.

With its cornflower blue window and door trim, it's hard to miss Le Penguin restaurant on Lewis Street in Greenwich. For nearly 20 years, it was home to another popular French restaurant.

But that all changed last June when new owners and veteran restauranteurs Antoine Blech and Anshu Vidyarthi opened Le Penguin — a French bistro featuring local seasonal ingredients with farm-to-table freshness. 

GQ's Richman described Le Penguin as "Your Perfect Parisian Bistro in Connecticut" where "Every French ex-pat living in the surrounding area, which includes chunks of New York and Connecticut, is hanging out at this undersized, overcrowded bistro with longtime restaurateur Antoine Blech running the dining room."

In the GQ March issue, Richman wrote in his story on the Top 25 New Restaurants of 2014, "The food is mostly classic bistro, but it seems livelier, re-energized. The salty frites are crunchy, perfectly Frenchified, and the garlicky escargots have flair ..."

Blech's career has taken him from Spago and L'Orangerie in Los Angeles, and Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia to Le Bilboquet, Le Comptoir, Le Colonial, and Orienta in New York. Vidyarthi's career also started in LA, at 'The Ivy at the Shore', Brentwood Bar & Grill and The Olive, before opening the NYC landmark Le Colonial and working as operations director a l'escale at The Delamar in Greenwich.

Le Penguin is at 61 Lewis St., Greenwich. Open for lunch and dinner daily:  11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Telephone: (203) 717-1200.


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