RESTAURANT NEWS | SAVANNAH
Le Flâneur Gives Savannah a French Brasserie Built for Lingering
Inside Recess Hotel & Club, chef Zach Chancey's brasserie runs from croissants and crêpes to escargots and sea bass meunière.
LE FLÂNEUR | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton
7:29 a.m. ET, Oct. 20, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
The new Le Flâneur restaurant in Savannah's Historic District, and it’s built for the full arc of a day, from an espresso and a croissant in the morning to oysters and an icy martini after dark.
The French brasserie is the flagship restaurant of the newly opened Recess Hotel & Club, the 221-room hotel that overlooks Johnson Square. The name, Le Flâneur, is French for a stroller, someone who wanders a city and watches it go by, and Savannah's squares reward exactly that pace.
From its first-floor tables, the restaurant looks west along Bull Street. Inside, the familiar brasserie pieces are all here, bistro chairs, subway tile, varnished mirrors, and brass, but the colors run to mauve, burgundy, and creamy off-white over dark wood paneling, with café curtains softening the tall windows.
Chef Zach Chancey came to Le Flâneur from The Alida in Savannah and High Hampton Resort in Cashiers, North Carolina, and he sought the job out, contacting the Left Lane team when he saw Recess taking shape. His menu interprets French-American classics through a Southern lens, which in practice means the brasserie standards are all here, handled with care.
The morning starts with house-made pastries and viennoiserie, crêpes, tartines, and pain perdu with vanilla sugar and warm maple syrup, plus a French omelette with Gruyère and fines herbes and the croque monsieur and croque madame. Lunch keeps much of that and adds French onion soup, a Niçoise salad, and a chicken paillard pounded thin and served with Picholine olives, tomato, arugula, and Parmesan.
Dinner is where the menu settles in. It opens with oysters, shrimp cocktail, steak tartare, and escargots in garlic-parsley butter, then leeks vinaigrette with hazelnuts and a selection of five French cheeses. The entrées run from sea bass meunière with haricots verts, toasted almonds, brown butter, and lemon to moules frites in white wine and garlic, a saffron risotto, and a half roast chicken. A whole section is given to dishes served avec frites, with fries, among them a hanger steak with maître d'hôtel butter, duck leg confit à l'orange, a maitake mushroom au poivre, and a petit filet mignon, also au poivre.
Dessert stays classic, a profiterole with vanilla ice cream and warm chocolate sauce, an apple tarte Tatin, crème brûlée, and a chocolate crémeux with hazelnut and Maldon sea salt. Recess skips room service by design, so Le Flâneur carries the hotel's eating from morning to night, and locals are plainly part of the plan. Savannah has no shortage of Lowcountry cooking. What it has now is a brasserie that treats lingering as the point, and that makes it a useful addition to the Historic District.
