Going a bit more East and sure to please, mahogany duck is a whole Long Island duckling with crispy skin, slow roasted with Asian seasonings and an orange fennel sauce.

I said: 'The fennel sauce on the fish, it was very crearny.'

Both a special of grilled tuna in a fennel sauce and monkfish sauteed with bacon, onions and wild mushrooms arrived atop a tangle of stone-cold fettuccine.

For an entree, try tilefish in a fennel sauce, or salmon with chick peas and asparagus.

But cornmeal-crusted oysters with celery root puree ($6) taste like cornmeal crust, not oysters, and a shrimp roll with a sweet and sour fennel sauce ($6) is similarly leaden.

Oysters trembled in a foamy fennel sauce, poached so gently that each resembled a delicate gray orchid.

With much more character salmon profited from a delicious fennel sauce, and Gorgonzola-imbued polenta absorbed the juices.

Savoy cabbage stuffed with sausage and rice and served with tomato and fennel sauce could have just as readily been in a book called "Fennel!"

The moist fish, creamy fennel sauce and tiny lentils are a perfect meld.

These delicacies serve only to tease the palate before the main course of sea bass and turbot, with artichoke coulis and fennel sauce, or sauteed venison loin in coriander sauce.