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Bar Q

308-310 Bleecker St.
(212-206-7817)

The middle “B” missing from Bar Q’s name is a warning: you’re not in hill country anymore. There’s no tang of char in the air, no smoke pit seething in a back alley, no long-legged waitresses in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots. Those who come seeking barbecue—the eatery’s ostensible raison d’être—should know that, first and foremost, this is an Anita Lo restaurant, which means elegance, intelligence, and wit. Lo, who presides over the kitchen at the consistently great Annisa, earlier lent her expertise to fast food (Rickshaw Dumpling Bar), and here she seems to be striving for a middle ground. While the décor echoes Annisa’s (white walls, blond wood, swaddling leather booths), the decibel level is decidedly higher, the lighting bright and unmoody. The staff, despite their black uniforms, are almost disconcertingly enthusiastic (“I like your watch!”). One night, you might be served by a former contortionist, the next by a graduate student in clinical psychology.

When it comes to food, however, balancing the innovative and the crowd-pleasing is tricky. Early reports were not encouraging: diners, perhaps expecting sticky kalbi and rolls of paper towels, expressed dismay at the portion sizes, the prices, and the general culinary weirdness. But, to a Lo fan, the most exciting dishes here are precisely those which play havoc with tradition. Tuna ribs—a part of the fish commonly discarded—turn out to be talonlike bones with a thin, dissolvingly tender layer of meat, given subtle snap by yuzu and green chile. Unagi-and-scallion fritters simultaneously evoke the comfort of hush puppies and the delicacy of sushi. Best of all is the grass-fed Australian lamb, lean yet juicy, paired with wedges of cornstarch-thickened, garlic-infused fried milk that riff on creamy tofu, crisp on the outside and oozy on the inside. More conventional offerings are less successful, such as the pork “wings,” served with a ketchupy Asian sauce, and the tea-smoked duck, pulpy and uncomfortably reminiscent of a heart. And, while the short ribs are ably executed—the meat does indeed fall off the bone—the unusual accoutrements (a smear of spicy red-black sauce, a scattering of goji berries, a dollop of chestnut purée) fail to elevate them above the ordinary.

At intervals, Lo emerges from the kitchen, head wrapped in a pink bandanna, to take the temperature of the room. The refinement of the cuisine doesn’t prevent a sense of free-for-all—couples dabble wantonly in each other’s entrées, groups squabble over prospective Vice-Presidential candidates while knocking back shiso juleps. It appears that the experiment is working: nobody seems troubled by a contradiction between dress-up and finger-licking good. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for dinner. Entrées $18-$29.)

The New Yorker, June 30, 2008

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

South Gate

154 Central Park S., near Seventh Ave.
(212-484-5120)

There’s something resolutely male about South Gate, the new restaurant at the Jumeirah Essex House, the historic Art Deco hotel across from Central Park. Designed by Tony Chi as part of a ninety-million-dollar renovation, it’s a bachelor pad writ large: walls of mirrors, divided into angled grids, like the peel of a disco ball; leather everywhere, even on the tabletops, in various shades of latte; and, flanked by half-stocked bookshelves, a minimalist gas fireplace in which a long ripple of flame seems to leap straight from stone. All that’s missing is a bearskin rug.

But if the goal here is sly seduction, the service is slightly off-kilter. When asked which dishes best showcased the chef’s style, a waiter proclaimed, “All of them. It is like nothing you have tasted before.” Further details were not forthcoming: a pavé cut was described with karate-chop hand gestures (it turned out to be a square); the word “Lillet” drew a blank; and any question about an entrée was answered with a rearrangement of the ingredients already listed on the menu. (Of the spice-roasted cod with mustard greens: “We take the cod. We roast it with spice. There are mustard greens.”)

The exaggeration does injustice to the chef, Kerry Heffernan, formerly of Eleven Madison Park. There are no pyrotechnics here: the food is straightforward (if highly refined) American, with a gracious nod to the season, and, for the most part, it’s quite good. Tender rings of flash-seared calamari in a lobster-coriander sauce are balanced against the delicate but unmistakable earthiness of a cauliflower custard; edamame-and-ricotta cannelloni, strewn with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, stand out as a rarity: a truly inventive vegetarian dish. Other offerings suffer slightly in execution. The wild-mushroom Martini, for instance, would be better if simply presented as a soup—its flavors are foresty and deep—rather than poured muddily into a glass, with a ghostly poached egg bobbing to the brown surface and a swampy mass of “spinach fondue” sunk below. Perhaps sensing something amiss, a waiter on a recent evening attempted to spark a conversation between two neighboring tables: “Look! Everyone is ordering the mushroom Martini!” The couples addressed looked over at each other, aghast, and then without a word turned back to their private whispers. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for lunch and dinner, and Sundays for brunch and dinner. Entrées $24-$39.)

(Photograph: Sarah Mangerson)

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

Chop Suey

714 Seventh Ave., at 48th St., 2nd fl. (212) 261-5200

Chop Suey is not a Chinese restaurant. That’s fitting, since the dish it is named after was invented in America. The food served here is, instead, vaguely Korean, as filtered through the mind and the taste buds of Chop Suey’s consulting chef, Zak Pelaccio. The term “consulting chef” is a kind of warning: don’t expect to see Pelaccio in the kitchen on a nightly basis. He’s likely busy with one of his other consultant gigs (230 Fifth, Borough Food and Drink) or collaborating with a fellow star chef on a side project (rumored to be in the works: a Southeast Asian barbecue spot and a European gastropub).

A sense of absence permeates Chop Suey, which is semi-hidden on the second floor of the Renaissance hotel in Times Square. On recent visits, the dining room was barely a quarter full, which made it feel like a private aerie, perched above the neon ripple of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The interior is refreshingly free of Asian kitsch, although the décor comes across as more designy than designed: biomorphic lipstick-orange leather chairs, ceiling fixtures that resemble giant toothbrush heads, china and cups with angles that are aggressively askew.

The menu is, alas, similarly wayward. The scallion pancake, a dependable Chinatown staple, was either too salty or too bland, depending on the mouthful. A slow-poached egg, stirred into a stone pot of rice that had been (theoretically) spiked with chile, was a tasteless take on Korean bi bim bop. Ginger chicken, cooked sous vide, appeared déshabillé—a pale huddle of flesh that, if not in fact underdone, was suggestive of underdoneness. The kitchen fared better when it fell back on European technique, as with a lobster omelette, which gained body from a decidedly French beurre blanc.

Just as Pelaccio’s ghost is glimpsed only in passing, so, too, is that of the pastry chef called in to “consult” on the dessert menu, the downtown radical Will Goldfarb, famed for using squid ink and pancetta in his concoctions. A flourless chocolate cake was perfectly serviceable, and forgettable, while “Vietnamese Iced Coffee” was Culinary Deconstruction 101: a condensed-milk sponge layered with chocolate Chantilly cream and espresso granite. The only hint of weirdness came with the pomegranate-poached pear: the fruit, stained violently incarnadine, sat in an unfortunate chartreuse soup, speared with what resembled, in texture, a dog biscuit. It looked awful. It tasted delicious. (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $18-$32.) 

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

The New Yorker, March 24, 2008

Dell’Anima

38 Eighth Ave., at Jane St. (212-366-6633)

Early in the evening, the back door of this tiny enoteca is often left ajar, to reveal the red neon sign of the Corner Bistro across the street. Inside, youthful attitude and precocity abound. The executive chef, Gabe Thompson, previously worked at Le Bernardin and Del Posto but has never run a kitchen; the general manager, Joe Campanale, a former sommelier at Babbo, is only twenty-three years old. The patrons—suits and just-back-from-Turks-and-Caicos tans—nestle in sleek banquettes, so high that their feet dangle, or perch at a bar overlooking the chef and his two line cooks, working feverishly in a tiny open kitchen.

The food is both faithfully Italian and surprising. An order of bruschetta might include toppings of chickpeas perfumed with preserved lemon or a “lily” confit of translucent bulbs (shallot, onion, garlic) whose pallor belies its intense flavor. Glossy cuts of pork belly are strewn with persimmons that implode when pricked. In the pastas, ingredients are pleasingly textured, whether in a chunky calamari ragù (spooned over squid-ink fettucine, a cute joke) or a savory mix of sage, Fontina, and shaved Brussels sprouts. Standards like wild boar and seared tuna are given new contexts, the meat atop mascarpone-rich polenta, the fish surrounded by chestnuts, crisped artichoke, and a velouté-like swath of sunchoke purée. Other dishes seem designed primarily to stoke your thirst, like the chicken “al diavolo,” rubbed ferociously with smoked paprika, or a salty serving of ricotta ravioli. This is food as the consort, not peer, of drink. Fortunately, the wine list is fairly democratic, although it’s easy if you’re ordering by the glass to wind up with a single pour that costs more than your entrée. (A dark, moody Sangiovese was a breathtaking twenty-five dollars a pop.)

Dell’Anima has a stylish brashness that can be the cause of some uneasiness. On a recent night, two long-term denizens of the neighborhood (four decades and counting) were shunted nearly out of sight in a back corner. “Anaïs Nin once lived in our building,” one of them said. The couple reminisced about the site’s former tenant, Freddy Ristorante, where they’d often celebrated New Year’s Eve, then admitted that they did, in fact, like Dell’Anima’s food. Still, they couldn’t quite give their hearts to the new kid on the block. “The people moving in here now aren’t artists,” the wife said wistfully. “They’re businessmen.” (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $15-$25.) 

(Photograph: Sarah Mangerson)

The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2008

Back Forty

190 Avenue B (212-388-1990)

Traditionally, the “back forty” is the most far-flung parcel of land on a farm, where, out of sight, it’s easy to be up to no good. At this recently opened East Village spot, however, the phrase has a more innocent connotation: it refers to the acres a farmer sets aside from his regular crop, for planting whatever he fancies. Certainly Back Forty is a playful departure for its co-owner and chef, Peter Hoffman, who has helmed the sophisticated Savoy, in SoHo, for seventeen years. Back Forty proclaims itself, somewhat disingenuously, to be a mere burger joint—but the burger is made of grass-fed beef that’s thrillingly juicy and the impeccably crisp fries are sifted with rosemary-laced sea salt. As at Savoy, the buzzword here is sustainability, with a seasonal menu that reflects Hoffman’s longstanding relationships with local growers.

Back Forty shies away from outright rusticity, preferring Shaker simplicity, albeit as if filtered through the mind of John Pawson: the walls are spare and high, adorned here and there with ikebana-esque groupings of antique farm tools, tall glass cylinders stacked with apples, and curiously shaped gourds with elongated necks; electric candelabra are suspended from the ceiling in clear globes. There are touches of quaintness—a glass of wine comes to the table in a milk quartino, water is poured from recycled whiskey bottles, and candles flicker inside canning jars—but the china is resolutely modern, and the over-all ambience is one of easy, improvisational elegance.

The philosophy behind the cooking is just as deceptively simple: confront the ingredient. Flavors are asserted, never masked, resulting in dishes that are vividly contrapuntal. The almost shocking bitterness of radicchio is met by earthy cranberry beans and cubes of feta embedded with crushed almonds, hazelnuts, cumin, and coriander. Familiar vegetables and legumes take on unrecognizable forms: lentils are as small and delicate as caviar; cauliflower, melded with Gruyère, bread crumbs, and leeks, achieves uncanny tenderness (and perfectly mimics macaroni and cheese). Occasionally the accompaniments nearly upstage the main dishes, like the cilantro salsa verde lightly drizzled over the whole grilled trout or the kicky smoked paprika mayo, which one might feel compelled to put on everything. Cocktails, mixed at a twenty-two-foot bar of reclaimed pine, reveal a similar attention to detail; the standout is the Loisaida Sling, which gets its sass from cachaça and ginger beer dashed with chipotle—an eye-opener that will remind you that Avenue B was once a walk on the wild side. (Open daily for dinner and Sundays for brunch. Entrées $10-24.)

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

The New Yorker, December 17, 2007

Kefi

222 W. 79th St. (212-873-0200)

Kefi, Michael Psilakis’s casual Greek outpost, looks imposing from the outside—it’s set in the garden level of a stolid limestone town house on the Upper West Side—but once down the steps and through the heavy door you find yourself in an awkward lobby-bar, with shrunken white benches posed in a face-off. The space previously housed Onera, Psilakis’s first effort at high-end Greek (Anthos, in midtown, is his second), and was transformed in a single day by the staff themselves, who hung drapes and lanterns and replaced the fancy furniture with narrower, more crammable versions. In the dining room, at the back, the high-decibel, rapid-turnover ambience gives Kefi the hectic feel of an airport food court besieged by people of no discernible relation to one another: professorial types in sandals and socks; habitués of Lincoln Center in jabots, clinking glasses with a “Chin-chin!”; ponytailed twenty-somethings bearing Banana Republic shopping bags. Neighbors swiftly become confidants. On a recent night, one young lady was overheard confessing, “I almost went to the Guggenheim today, but I was afraid I’d have too much time”; another broke into hysterics over her date’s pronunciation of “mous-sa-KA.” (The correct Greek way, for the record.)

The food, though, is often revelatory in its sharpening of familiar, classically Greek flavors. A banal-sounding “selection of spreads,” for instance, features a voluptuous pale-rose taramasalata. Meatballs are surprisingly light and airy, with a sauce forcefully studded with garlic cloves and shards of olive. Grilled octopus melts quickly in the mouth; curlicues of fried shallots set off bombs of salt amid creamy sheep’s-milk ravioli; cinnamon sweetens the delicate strands of pulled braised rabbit. The moussaka comes “broken,” in steamy, disintegrating layers, because it’s made fresh, the ground beef and béchamel tossed in the pot to order. Each bite sends a ripple of heat through the chest, like a shot of ouzo.
It’s almost enough to make you well disposed to your voluble neighbors and the hurtling wait staff, who are raffish and indefatigable, if occasionally a bit too carefree. One, asked for the name of a decadent potato concoction (skordalia), just shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “They don’t make us learn Greek here.” (Open nightly for dinner. Dishes $5.95-$15.95.)

The New Yorker, November 12, 2007

P*ong

150 W. 10th St. (212-929-0898)

In haute-cuisine circles, it often seems that food is considered art first, sustenance second; aspiring chef-auteurs create increasingly high-tech dishes, stacking and sculpting ingredients—liquefied, freeze-dried, or otherwise rendered unrecognizable—into improbably cantilevered façades. Even so, Pichet Ong may be the only chef in New York with an actual master’s degree in architectural design (and whose Web site launches with a quotation from Brancusi—“Simplicity is complexity resolved”). His eponymous restaurant, P*ong, has an imposing, conceptual décor (recently spotlighted in Interior Design): slinky white Eero Saarinen-style chairs on single stems; illuminated geometric cutouts in a curved wall of pale ash veneer; mirrors etched with Takashi Murakami-esque flowers. With mirrored disks on the ceiling and electronica on the soundtrack, the space-pod-cum-disco feels dismayingly at odds with its sleepy West Village brownstone block. One begins to fear the elaborate confections to come.

Yet Ong—who made his name as a pastry chef for Jean-Georges Vongerichten—manages to make an appealing marriage of innovation and tradition. The menu is constructed as a set of small plates, divided into savory, sweet, and somewhere in between. So blurry are the boundaries that a dish classified one night as savory—cognac-laced foie gras, its earthiness tamped under a crust of burnt sugar—later migrated to the liminal zone. The foie gras is emblematic of Ong’s approach: the flavors are classic but the textures startle. A Bloody Mary is reimagined as a salad of heirloom tomatoes, bracing horseradish dressing and vodka jelly, and an ingenious frozen celery purée. Wild-morel-and-polenta pudding, served in a miniature cast-iron skillet, has a creaminess surpassing that of ordinary macaroni and cheese.

Occasionally, the thoughtful tips too far toward the cerebral (and the baffling). A waiter dispatched to spritz cachaça-lemongrass mist over a shrimp-and-mango seviche held the atomizer bottle at a distance, as if slightly offended to find himself on cosmetics-counter duty. And some ingredients, while likable when taken individually—an expertly seared scallop, tingly chamomile ice—lack chemistry when paired. Still, watching Ong work in the cramped open kitchen is fascinating: there’s barely enough room for him and a sous-chef as they labor feverishly back to back, with only a pint-size convection oven and a single brûlée torch between them. Perhaps Ong has taken to heart another Brancusi maxim: “Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.” (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $12-$22.)

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007

15 East

15 E. 15th St. (212-647-0015)

There’s barely time to settle in at 15 East’s sushi counter before a fellow-diner leans over and whispers, “Did you follow him here, too?” The “him” is Masato Shimizu, formerly of Jewel Bako, thirty-two and improbably boyish, with a surfer’s loungy demeanor. (One foodie Web site refers to him as “the cute one.”) Where other gatekeepers of rarefied sushi tend to be dour and secretive, he keeps within reach an illustrated almanac of seafood (“Grunt fish? Page seventy-three”) and a stack of what can only be described as fish-fetish magazines—complete with glossy, full-bleed centerfolds—which he hands to guests perplexed by unusual species.

Marco Moreira, the owner and executive chef of both 15 East and Tocqueville—which originally occupied this address and was recently relocated a few doors down—has recruited an all-star staff: the sake sommelier comes from Masa, the soba chef from Honmura An. (A dish of handmade noodles, topped with creamy uni, is so luxuriant that it feels almost immodest to eat it in front of strangers.) The sushi bar is a bright white cube; in the dining room, you are plunged into darkness. A long banquette flanks the slate-gray wall, and above hang giant box lanterns that appear to contain light without actually shedding any. It’s a sexy space, with the throb of tropicália in the background—Moreira grew up in Brazil—and low votives simmering inside wraps of kombu-textured paper.

The menu offers two divergent experiences. The non-sushi half (Moreira’s domain) has some fanciful moments, including a delicate spaghettini of yamaimo and feathery tempura latkes paired with curry, green-tea, and chile salts, but mostly it’s content with the predictable: a plate of wild salmon “five ways,” hunks of robust, oddly chewy Colorado Kobe rib eye. But at the sushi bar on a recent night, surprises were legion. The slow-poached octopus was almost absurdly tender, having arrived live at the restaurant that morning and apparently massaged to death. And a pillowy white slab—squid? swordfish?—turned out to be some two dozen baby white shrimp, curled together. (Open Mondays through Fridays for lunch and dinner and Saturdays for dinner. Sushi à la carte $4-$12; entrées $24-$45; tasting menus $75-$120.)

The New Yorker, August 13, 2007