In the fall of 1980, Patrick Clark, the first chef at Keith McNally’s first restaurant, the Odeon, helped introduce nouvelle cuisine to New York when it was all the rage in Europe. Nearly every place Mr. McNally has built since then has been a firm rejection of all that is fashionable in food, and each one has been, at least in its first few months, the most fashionable restaurant in town.

The one he opened in early June in the meatpacking district, Pastis, was assembled partly from the salvaged bones of a nearby restaurant he closed five years ago, Pastis. (He salvaged the name, too.) The onion soup, the meaty snails sloshing around in the divots of a black iron snail pan with what must be half a pint of garlic butter, and a few other old war horses from the original menu have been summoned for one more joust on the battlefield. In short, the new Pastis takes almost everything straight from the old Pastis, which in turn took almost everything from the stodgiest, least trend-conscious sort of French cafes and brasseries. Needless to say, reservations are harder to come by than at any other New York restaurant that’s opened this year.

The paradox of this is that Pastis is really meant for those nights when you decide to cancel your reservations at the little nine-seat tasting counter where the menu is inspired by Kieslowski’s “Decalogue.” It is for those times when you get an urge to eat a Gruyère omelet after 10 p.m., cooked medium-rare, flecked with herbs, skillfully rolled and staunchly backed up by a cold white from the Savoie. Urges like that do not typically announce themselves three weeks in advance, and they don’t tend to survive exposure to rooms filled with people who have read about Pastis on the blogs but haven’t yet figured out what it is for.