Connecticut
Tiny Le Penguin In Greenwich, Connecticut, Is A Model FrenchBistro
Small and intimate but full of bonhomie, Le Penguin is a classic French bistro on the Gold Coast.
Greenwich, Connecticut, has in the current century earned a reputation for having a few very good restaurants, which draw people from beyond its Gold Coast. One of the best was for years a tiny, quite serious French restaurant named Jean-Louis on Lewis Street whose owner, Jean-Louis Gerin, retired in 2012 to teach and consult. The premises were replaced in 2013 by a bistro named Le Penguin (does anyone remember a(unrelated) long-gone restaurant in Bronxville named Le Gai Penguin?) run by Anshu Vidyarthi and Antoine Blech, who also run the excellent Asian restaurant Orientale next door, as well as Le Fat Poodle, Siren RestoBar and JuJu in Old Greenwich.
Le Penguin’s owners, Anshu Vidyarthi and Antoine Blech, run several restaurants around Greenwich.
Vidyarthi has a long career in hospitality, including at some of Los Angeles’s notable restautrants like The Ivy at the Shore, as well as the opener of Le Colonial in Manhattan and L’Escale in Greenwich. Blech, too, has his bonafides with stints at Spago and L’Orangerie in L.A. and Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia, as well as Le Bilboquet, Le Comptoir and Le Colonial in New York. Clearly they know what they’re doing for all their restaurants have a faithful crowd who go from one establishment to the other.
Small but not cramped, le Penguin can be noisy until 9 PM.
Le Penguin is full of bonhomie (though from six till nine the crowd gets loud), with French blue accents and banquettes against a pumpkin-colored wall hung with sconces and mirrors, with well-set tables and good lighting. The women dress with a welcome casual chic. The waitstaff knows the menu and acts with dispatch (though after nine they tend to linger at the bar, ignoring the dining area).
The menu toes the line of traditional Parisian bistros’ offerings.
The menu, appended with specials, is solidly French bistro in style, listed in French with English subtitles. Careful seasoning and spicing is key to the success of dishes like escargots ($17) with plenty of garlic butter and buttery puff pastry and ravioli ($17) with wild mushrooms, pea shoots, a touch of sage and parmigiano. Tender calamari cooked on the plancha griddle ($18) take on welcome flavors from a salad of arugula and cherry tomatoes. A tomato tart ($17) with puff pastry, arugula sand spicy tomato sauce should have started off with better, sweeter tomatoes.
TUna tartare with chips is a popular starter.
Among the main courses, I thoroughly enjoyed the fat scallops ($40), pan seared and served with celery root puree and the smart idea of peppery, crumbled chorizo. I always order trout when I see it on a menu, and Le Penguin’s is a classic rendition à l’amandine ($ 35), roasted with plenty of brown butter that add crispness to the almonds, along with haricots verts and fingerling potatoes. The fish of the day ($46) was a nice slab of swordfish, somewhat overcooked that night. Lamb chops ($52) were a good choice, both generously proportioned, juicy and medium rare, and priced sensibly.
le Penguin uses filet mignon for its au poivre rendition.
The desserts are all those favorites no one can turn down, from a rich chocolate mousse ($15) to tangy-sweet lemon tart ($15). A tarte Tatin ($15.50) needed more caramelization, and the floating island ($15) looked more like a floating lily pad.
The wine list by the glass and bottle is printed on one page, and I’m perfectly happy with its brevity for a good bistro, its choices and its prices— plenty by the glass at $14—though not with its lack of vintage dates.
Good French bistros are not as numerous as they should be in the Connecticut/Westchester area, so Le Penguin is one to be treasured by locals proud of its existence as well as by those driving out of the city in search of a good meal far from the Manhattan crowd.
Le Penguin
61 Lewis Street
203-717-1200
Open daily for lunch and dinner.
As winter fast approaches, in the wake of Connecticut’s most recent housing bill passing into legislation, it is clear that we are ignoring one of our most vulnerable populations: unsheltered homeless individuals.
Housing First is the only approach proven to significantly reduce the number of people living on the streets, and it is actually more cost-effective than leaving people outside.
Research shows that supportive housing dramatically lowers hospitalizations, emergency room use, psychiatric crises, and shelter stays, which creates net savings for taxpayers. It is the humane approach and the financially responsible one.
With the exception of promising a pilot program for portable showers and laundry services, Connecticut’s new housing bill (HB 8002) offers nothing to the 500+ people sleeping outside tonight. These are people who cannot wait for zoning reforms, planning committees, or long-term market shifts.
HB 8002 may reshape how development occurs and create a savings account for middle-class home-buyers, but none of its provisions will bring unsheltered homelessness down and help people trapped in a vicious cycle of trauma. Only Housing First could do that.
I know this not just from policy research, but also from seeing it affect the lives of people I love.
I was grateful to meet a woman in recovery who shared with me her incredible story. She told me about how she once lived unsheltered for over a year. While on the streets, she became a victim of human trafficking, was sexually assaulted by a group of men, and fell deeply into addiction and psychosis, which layered trauma on top of already existing complex post-traumatic stress disorder and schizoaffective disorder.
This wasn’t the result of laziness on her part. She was set up for failure from childhood after being abused by her family, and later faced more abuse in romantic relationships. She bounced around from one unsafe situation to another, without the tools to get help or help herself.
The turning point in her life did not come from punishment, policing, or incarceration. It came when she was enrolled in a free, stable housing program funded through the state’s Department of Rehabilitation.
Having a door that locked, a safe place to sleep, and supportive services, as well as just one supportive person in her life, empowered her to stabilize and probably saved her life.
After a few years of stable housing, safety, and trauma therapy, she found the strength to get sober and pursue higher education and a good career. She is still healing, but she is alive today because someone believed she deserved housing first.
I think about her every time I hear about some new catastrophe with my younger brother, who lives with his partner in Hartford. He is also struggling with addiction and mental illness, and is always one crisis away from getting kicked to the street.
If that happens, he will not qualify for most housing programs because he is unwilling to give up drugs and alcohol at this time and has behavioral problems. This would exclude him from qualifying for disability or for a sober living home. And shelters, as we know, can be dangerous places where violence and assault are far too common. On top of that, the waiting lists are long.
As the state of Connecticut stands currently, if my brother ends up on the street, he is far more likely to die than to get better.
“ Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:9).
How we treat the people with the least in our society says everything about who we are. Connecticut calls itself compassionate and justice-driven, yet we allow hundreds of people to sleep outside every night, including in winter, because it’s easier to ignore what makes us uncomfortable.
The reality of high unsheltered numbers results in real effects on our communities. We see increased emergency calls, more unsafe encampments and public places, higher public health costs, an increase in policing and incarceration, and a greater risk for violence.
If Connecticut wants to address housing, I believe it must adopt solutions that actually address homelessness. Housing First is an effective method that has been tested in cities all over the United States and Canada , as well as in countries like Finland .
Housing First looks like: permanent supportive housing on a statewide scale, deeply affordable units, not just more market-rate buildings, mental health, harm-reduction, and trauma-informed services, and strong community bonds between service recipients and providers.
What does HB 8002 do for the unsheltered homeless population in our state? Nothing.
A bill cannot be called “housing reform” when it ignores the people with no housing at all.
If Connecticut wants cities that are safer, more stable, cost-effective, and more reflective of our values, the way forward is Housing First.
Everything else is neglecting the human rights and safety of our most vulnerable nutmeggers.
Rachel Kohn is a Master of Social Work Student at the University of Connecticut.
An ongoing surge in state borrowing to rebuild Connecticut’s aging transportation infrastructure must be rolled back, Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration projects, because of stagnant fuel and sales tax revenues.
But business leaders and a key legislator insist Connecticut has other options to maintain expanded financing for highway, bridge and rail upgrades, including scaling back one of the governor’s favorite programs: an aggressive effort to pay down pension debt.
And while Lamont downplayed the revenue challenges last week, saying the impact wouldn’t be felt for several more years, his budget staff projected borrowing levels to be reduced starting in the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.
Just 12 months after the Lamont administration reported that Connecticut was ready to increase a key element of its transportation construction budget by 40%, from $1 billion to $1.4 billion, by 2028, a new forecast held that three-quarters of that planned growth is unaffordable under the current system.
That $400 million in new borrowing anticipated for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 fiscal years should be stalled, according to recommendations in the Fiscal Accountability Report issued Nov. 20 by the Office of Policy and Management, Lamont’s chief budget and planning agency.
Reversing plans to invest hundreds of millions in infrastructure work will have a chilling effect on industry hiring plans, said Donald Shubert, president of the Connecticut Construction Industry Association.
“The minute they see any kind of uncertainty, or the minute they get any clue things are slowing down, they pull back,” Shubert told the Connecticut Mirror. “We pull back and that slows the economic activity or the economic benefits — immediately.”
The Connecticut Business and Industry Association’s vice president for public policy, Chris Davis, said that “any business that’s on the fence” about hiring or otherwise expanding, “they need that [state funding] stability to make those types of investments.”
Twelve months ago, in the 2024-25 fiscal year, while Connecticut was borrowing $1 billion for its transportation rebuild, Lamont’s budget staff said that should grow to $1.3 billion in 2025-26, $1.4 billion in 2026-27, and then remain at that level through at least 2029 – a prediction that excited industry and construction trade leaders.
Now the administration wants to stick with $1.3 billion in borrowing for 2025-26, but drop to $1.2 billion in 2026-27, $1.1 billion in 2027-28, and remain there through 2030. And given inflation in the construction industry, $1.1 billion in the late 2020s would reflect little increase, if any, beyond the $1 billion Connecticut borrowed last fiscal year.
Borrowing through bond sales, coupled with matching federal grants, are the two ways Connecticut pays for the overwhelming bulk of its transportation construction projects.
Slowing revenue growth is a solvable problem
So why does Lamont now expect to forego most of that funding growth he envisioned just one year ago?
The administration points to the $2.3 billion Special Transportation Fund, which represents 8% of the overall state budget, and covers the principal and interest payments on infrastructure projects, as well as operating expenses for the Transportation and Motor Vehicles departments.
Twelve months ago, Lamont’s budget office expected annual tax revenues supporting the fund to grow almost 4.5%, or $84 million, by 2028. Now they say those sources — two fuel levies, a portion of sales tax receipts, and a highway mileage fee on most large trucks — will effectively remain flat, growing by less than $6 million over the next three years.
The administration projects this sluggish revenue growth, coupled with rising costs, will push the STF into insolvency by 2029. But this is common outcome when projecting a state program’s finances out four or five years into the future, at which point inflation normally outpaces revenue growth.
Still, learning $84 million in expected extra tax receipts by 2028 largely won’t happen is problematic.
Tens of millions of extra dollars for annual debt service payments would allow for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional yearly borrowing for construction work. That’s because the state pays off various projects across 15 or 20 years.
But compensating for losing roughly $80 million in expected revenue growth also is far from unsolvable.
And some of the first solutions that might come to mind are untenable or unnecessary.
Lamont would not need the electronic highway tolls he sought in 2019 and 2020, nor the $600 million they would generate annually, far more than needed to fill an $80 million gap.
And given that both the governor’s office and all legislators are up for reelection next November, any hike in fuel or sales taxes — which would raise far less than tolls but still enough to cover the gap — also is likely off the table.
But there are still more options.
Will Lamont ease budget controls to grow construction work?
The overall state budget’s General Fund, which covers about 90% of all operating expenses, has been sharing some of its resources with the transportation fund since the late 1990s. The last major change occurred in 2015 when legislators and then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy assigned about 1/13th of annual sales tax receipts, which currently exceed $5.2 billion — to the STF.
And the General Fund has generated unprecedented surpluses, averaging more than $1.8 billion or 8% to 9% of the fund, since 2017, thanks to aggressive budget caps installed at that time that force big savings.
Most of those unspent dollars, about $10 billion in total since 2020, have been used to reduce the massive pension debt Connecticut amassed across seven decades prior to 2011. And that’s in addition to the more than $3 billion in mandatory pension contributions Connecticut makes annually.
Lamont, a fiscal moderate, has been reluctant to scale back that savings effort, though, given Connecticut still owes more than $33 billion in this area. His critics, including many of his fellow Democrats in the General Assembly, say this effort is too aggressive and is draining funds from education, health care, municipal aid and other core programs.
They also note the governor has proposed saving less, himself, on a few occasions.
He signed big state tax cuts, which take hundreds of millions annually away from surpluses, in 2022 and 2023, just before and after he successfully ran for a second four-year term. He also proposed and won legislative approval last year for a new endowment to bolster affordable child care. That last initiative took $300 million from last year’s General Fund surplus and is expected to collect tens or hundreds of millions from future surpluses indefinitely.
Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, co-chairwoman of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, said Connecticut should not abandon what amounts to a huge planned investment in new construction jobs and in the state’s economy.
“If we really do something like that, we’re not looking at the big picture,” she said, adding that by rebuilding the state’s aging highways, bridges and rail lines, “we create a vibrant economic picture for our state.”
Cohen also praised Connecticut’s savings habits in recent years and said the state should continue to whittle down its pension debt.
But “I also recognize times change,” she added, “and sometimes minor adjustments are needed.”
Shubert’s association has asserted for years that Connecticut should be borrowing more than $1.5 billion annually to rebuild a transportation network that is one of the nation’s oldest.
According to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, Connecticut ranks 35th in the nation, 1st being the worst, in terms of the share of its highway bridges considered “structurally deficient.” But when it comes to the percentage of bridge area that falls into this category, Connecticut ranks in the worst 15 states, according to the association.
Being “structurally deficient” doesn’t mean the bridge is functionally obsolete but at least one key component, such as a deck or culverts, is rated in “poor” or worse condition. And though not necessarily unsafe, the bridge requires significant repair or monitoring.
Lamont’s budget spokesman, Chris Collibee, declined to say what changes the governor might recommend when he proposes his next budget to the General Assembly on Feb. 4 but added “We expect considerable discussion around this [transportation] question in the coming months.”
Lamont has pressed lawmakers in recent years to consider cutbacks to public transit programs, including higher rail and bus fares to reduce the need for state subsidies. This also could help offset sluggish revenue growth and make more borrowing for transportation construction possible.
But Cohen was skeptical the Democratic-controlled General Assembly would look to tighten belts further in this area.
“I certainly hope not,” she said. “I want to see more people on public transportation and that means putting investments there.”
Governor downplays transportation funding challenges
The governor downplayed the transportation funding challenges when discussing them with reporters last week.
Federal transportation funding has been on the rise since 2021, when President Joe Biden and Congress enacted an aggressive $1.2 trillion transportation infrastructure program, Lamont said, adding that “2030 is a long way away. A lot can change.”
But President Donald Trump already rolled back some of that infrastructure funding in July when he signed an omnibus federal spending and tax measure.
Trump also has told states he intends to link future federal transportation funding, “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” to local compliance with federal policies on vaccines and immigration enforcement — issues on which many Connecticut officials and the president disagree.
State Department of Transportation Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto said the transportation fund revenues and changes at the federal level do present challenges to Connecticut’s construction program.
But the department also has adjusted its capital program to ease demand for more state investments “without compromising the long-term health of our transportation system. [The department] will also continue seeking competitive federal grant opportunities.”
The DOT has more than 650 active infrastructure projects, Eucalitto said, adding “We will continue to invest strategically in aging infrastructure … directing funds where they deliver the greatest benefit to Connecticut residents, communities and businesses.”
Keith R. Brothers, president of the Connecticut Building Trades Council, said that since Lamont took office in 2019, a robust 90% of his organization’s members in transportation construction-related trades have been employed.
“I have all the confidence in the world,” Brothers added, “that Gov. Lamont is going to keep us working.”
Connecticut
Sheehan vs. Woodland live stream: Watch Connecticut high school football Class S state semifinals
The 2025 Connecticut (CIAC) high school football state playoffs continue on Monday, Dec. 8 with the Class S semifinals. Sheehan (9-2) and Woodland Regional (11-0) will meet in the first S semifinal at 5 p.m. ET. You can watch the Sheehan-Woodland Regional game live here:
- WATCH LIVE: Sheehan vs. Woodland Regional football is streaming live on NFHS Network
Woodland Regional is coming off a 42-14 victory over Bloomfield in the S quarterfinals. Junior running back Nico Scampolino racked up 126 all-purpose yards and three total touchdown in the win.
Sheehan blanked North Branford 42-0 in the other quarterfinal behind 202 total yards and four total touchdowns from senior quarterback Jake O’Brien.
The Sheehan-Woodland Regional CIAC Class S football state semifinal is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. ET on Monday with a live TV broadcast on NFHS Network.
High school football championships on NFHS Network
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How to watch Sheehan vs. Woodland Regional Class S football state semifinals
What: Sheehan vs. Woodland Regional 2025 CIAC Class S football state semifinals
When: Game time is set for 5 p.m. ET on Monday, Dec. 8
Where: Woodland Regional High School | Beacon Falls, Connecticut
Watch live: Watch Sheehan vs. Woodland Regional live on the NFHS Network
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