Welcome to the Fauxdeon

New brasseries strive to capture some familiar magic.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

THERE'S A NICOTINE light-a warm, dim, dangerous flicker that suffuses a certain kind of brasserie. Bad decisions are made here gladly. It's been years since anyone smoked in New York restaurants, but bathe in that luminescence and you can believe, for a second, that you could, maybe even that you should. Never mind that it's usually the work of highly paid lighting consultants. We flutter like moths to char ourselves in it. If a martini with fries has become the New York Happy Meal, as my colleague E. Alex Jung wrote earlier in the year, this is the New York Tan.