One weekday night in late summer, midway into the cocktail hour with friends who live in Fair Haven, we decided to bag the barbeque we’d planned to have…and dine around instead. Grabbing our trusty issue of Currents, we ran-down the restaurant guide to find a place we hadn’t tried yet, and found two. “Do you have room for four people, say in ten or fifteen minutes?” we asked the first place. “Let me put you on hold, while I check”. Seven minutes later, still on hold, we hung up. Believe it or not, we suffered the same fate at the second place we tried…but here, we listened to background noise from an obviously “happening restaurant” for almost five minutes before folding.

“What about that little place, Le Fandy…which is only three blocks away?” our hostess said, and, our good luck, there was room for us, and we didn’t even need to drive!

If you do drive by – and blink – it’s easy to miss this tiny little place, tucked-in next to a hairdresser with a much more prominent sign on River Road. But what a little jewel it is inside: sparkling white linens, sparkling votives and a sparkling greeting from the hostess too.

            The food has a jewel-like quality as well: Most things are very simply prepared – but with especially fine and fresh ingredients, a very special way with seasonal vegetables and with sparkly and sometimes surprising dashes of fresh herbs and spices…like Coriander-crusted seared scallops with a creamy corn-leek hash…or roasted halibut, confit Portobello, caramelized onions with rosemary glace de veau…or medallion of yellowfin tuna, parsnip puree, spaghetti squash, in an aromatic sauce. Our salads looked as if they’d just been picked, with each leaf hand-selected. In fact, every dish that was brought to the table was jewel-like in the way the food was presented on the plate. (The steak, which one of our diners had, was superb too – and the duck, which someone at the next table had, looked equally tempting.)

            “What is Le Fandy supposed to mean?” we asked our waitress, thinking to learn a new bit of French slang, but she didn’t know either: “I think it was the former owner’s nickname,” she said. “And what about the current chef?” we wanted to know. Turns out that chef/proprietor Luke Ong was born in Indonesia - which explains the special way he has with fresh fish, vegetables, herbs and aromatics, we think - and has been here since he was six…except for stints in France, where he worked with such distinguished chefs as Roger Verge and two other Maitre Cuisiniers de France, Michele Bourdeaux and Pierre Paumel. No wonder his food is so wonderful!

            We predict that all of Fair Haven – and Red Bank, Rumson, Little Silver and points north and south will soon be blazing a path to the door and that, aw shucks, before long we’ll be on-hold there too, unless we reserve well in advance, but that’s just the way it is in an area that’s as sophisticated and as knowledgeable about food as ours is.