Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson named their new restaurant after a David Johansen song from 1978, “Frenchette.” The first line is, “You call that love in French, but it’s just Frenchette,” and later when he rhymes that with “naturalette” and “leatherette” you know the suffix isn’t diminutive, it’s dismissive. The song is about what you do once you figure out that you’re not going to get the real thing, and Mr. Johansen’s answer is simple enough. “Let’s just dance,” he sings. Never mind love.

Frenchette, which opened in TriBeCa in April, isn’t fake French, but it isn’t the real thing, either. Since 1997, when Keith McNally hired them as the opening chefs at Balthazar, Mr. Nasr and Mr. Hanson have cooked side by side, building a kind of brasserie-steakhouse hybrid out of standards from both genres. Mr. McNally kept loading them up with new restaurants, giving them joint command of Pastis, Schiller’s Liquor Bar and Minetta Tavern, none of which could really be called chef-driven.

Frenchette, their own place and their first without Mr. McNally, takes some liberties with the formula, but not enough to get them recognized as visionaries on the level of Pierre Gagnaire. Frenchette says: Never mind art, let’s just cook.

The restaurant is divided into two chambers. In front and on display to the street is a lounge with Art Deco curves, where bartenders percussively clack shakers behind a long river of zinc. If you have a seat, this room is the height of metropolitan civility. If you are waiting for one, as many people are on any given night, it’s purgatorial.