Dated was the word one friend used after going to Benno, and if you’ve eaten there, too, you’ll know why. It’s as if the past 15 years in food never happened. The menu seems to be stuck in some time between 1994, when Thomas Keller bought the French Laundry, and 2004, when he opened Per Se with a young Jonathan Benno leading the kitchen.

The restaurant will probably be a tough sell to those diners who expect all restaurants to fall on a continuum between Noma and the Salt Bae place. But I prefer it to any number of newer, self-consciously modern restaurants, some of which are so determined to be of the moment that they might as well have a time stamp. Benno is not trying to be contemporary. It’s trying to be delicious. And it is, from start to finish, almost without exception.

Benno is the third of three dining operations that Mr. Benno opened last year in the Evelyn Hotel, on East 27th Street. It is the one where the prices, and presumably the stakes, are highest. We know it is a statement restaurant because Mr. Benno has put his name on it, for the first time in his career. Whatever the statement is, it is not forward-looking.

Most of the statement is in French (barigoule, mousseline, tête de veau, béarnaise), a significant part is in Italian (carnaroli risotto, garganelli verde, pecorino ginepro) and not one word is in Danish or Mandarin. The statement has a lot to say on the topics of stocks and purées and accurate chopping and patient skimming; it is entirely silent on the subjects of fermented vegetables, or foraging, or immigration, or food deserts, or hashtags.