At Chez Ma Tante in Brooklyn, the first restaurant Aidan O’Neal and Jake Leiber ran together, early press reports portrayed Mr. O’Neal as the executive chef and Mr. Leiber as his second in command. But in interviews they gave — always in tandem — it was clear that they were equal partners and that they agreed about everything from their preferred cooking surface (Teflon) to the ideal art to hang in the dining room (none). They share the job of executive chef at their second restaurant, Le Crocodile, also in Brooklyn. This is probably fortunate for them, given how popular the place has become since it opened in December. It is definitely fortunate for us, because another thing Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Leiber apparently agree about is how the food at a modern New York brasserie should look and taste. The menu’s long, single page cascades from one category of appetizer to the next, from shellfish to snails, before arriving, about midway down, at Entrées. That’s a head fake: the word is used in the French sense, and denotes more appetizers. Ten main courses follow, under Plats Principaux, and then come a dozen desserts that more or less describe themselves: profiteroles, chocolate pot de crème, a cheerfully sour lemon tart. There are so many dishes you’re not quite sure at first whether two guys whose best-known creation is a pancake will be able to keep up. They do that and then some. Nearly everything I’ve had at Le Crocodile has made me want to come back for more. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story This is not the easiest feat in a genre as thoroughly pawed-over and cliché-ridden as brasserie food, although to be precise we are dealing here with New York City’s peculiar notion of brasserie food. In a New York brasserie you almost never see choucroute, but you may well see Jonah crab salad, which at Le Crocodile, is stirred with yuzukosho mayonnaise and sits on a cushion of avocado purée. It’s delicious. So are other cold things from the raw bar: sea scallops in a spicy green pool of parsley juice, herbs and lemon; Wellfleet oysters, their deep pearly cups holding a splash or two of bay water. ImageThe industrial bones of the Wythe Hotel are the backdrop for Le Crocodile, a new brasserie. The industrial bones of the Wythe Hotel are the backdrop for Le Crocodile, a new brasserie.Credit...Daniel Krieger for The New York Times Despite this distinctly broad-minded understanding of brasserie cooking, though, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Leiber do get in a lot of recipes that either come from France or make you think of it. Onion soup is mandatory in a place like this, but Le Crocodile makes it pull its own weight. The broth is almost velvety, fortified by lardons, and there are good crunchy mouthfuls of toasted sourdough croutons instead of the usual limp blobs of drowned bread. You have 3 free articles remaining. Subscribe to The Times Pickled mussels, plump and orange, nod distantly to the plate of herring at every other brasserie in France, down to the pickled onions and carrots that ride along. Cold leeks in vinaigrette make an appearance, too, though they’ve undergone a little remodeling: trimmed into bite-size segments that are stood on end in a foundation of ravigote sauce and then covered with toasted hazelnuts. There’s a sort of salade lyonnaise — I say sort of because the lardons you’d find in Lyon have been replaced by smoked eel. The idea is great; the salad is smokier than the original, and with the wonderful added oily softness of the eel. In its framework, it is not too different from the smoked-herring Caesar found at M. Wells Steakhouse, and before that at the original, too-pure-to-last M. Wells in a stainless-steel diner. Mr. O’Neal cooked in the diner, and was later put in charge of M. Wells Dinette inside MoMA PS1. His cooking still has that half-crazy gleam in its eye, but the characteristic M. Wells urge to drive every dish to the edge of a cliff and then step on the gas is not much in evidence at Le Crocodile. He and Mr. Leiber, whose formative years as a cook were spent at Barbuto under Jonathan Waxman, are at home making food that seems perfectly normal and ordinary right up until you taste it.