Mai House

Note: Mai House is closed. There was never an official announcement from Myriad Restaurant Group, but as of June 2009 the space had been shuttered for months, and it wasn’t even open for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. If you’re not open for that, then you’re not open. Mai House never truly caught on, and it did not survive the departure of the original chef with the short attention span, Michael Bao Huynh, who went on to cook many of the same dishes at BarBao on the Upper West Side, now also closed.

*

To paraphrase the song, “Mai House is a very, very, very fine house.” But business appears to be slow, based on a Tuesday night dinner that found the restaurant sparsely attended.

That’s too bad, because I think chef Michael Bao Huynh’s Vietnamese-inspired menu is terrific. I rated Mai House at two stars in November, a verdict I’m standing by today. In January, Frank Bruni of the Times awarded two stars as well, but a less impressed Adam Platt in New York awarded only one.

As this visit was a mix of business and pleasure, I didn’t snap any photos. We ordered a lot of food, of which I can only recite the highlights. We started with the Hot Spring Rolls ($11), the Wild Boar Sausage ($11), and the Frog’s Leg Lollipops ($12). The sausage has gone through a number of re-designs. This time, it was served in meatball-sized pieces skewered with toothpicks. The frog’s leg lollipops, each about the size of a large gum ball, came with an addictive hot sauce.

The highlight was the Sweet & Sour Spicy Whole Red Snapper ($28). The body of the fish was fried crisp into the shape of a cylinder, so that it could be used as a serving vessel. This was so cleverly done that I didn’t realize at first that I was looking at a dead fish. The meat of the fish itself, apparently removed before this operation, was deposited inside. Huynh balanced the spices to perfection, so that the sweet, sour, and spicy all had their turn. The fish itself was quite tender.

It would be easy to be cynical about yet another big-box Asian restaurant, but at Mai House the décor doesn’t overpower the food. Service was attentive and competent.

Mai House (186 Franklin Street between Greenwich & Hudson Streets, TriBeCa)

Food: **
Service: *½
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

Vespa

The other night, a friend suggested dinner at Vespa, a trattoria on the Upper East Side. I had never heard of it before, but a little research suggested that a lovely outdoor garden is its claim to fame. This being February, we dined indoors. It was Monday evening, and the restaurant was practically empty.

Speck & Artichoke Hearts


Beets & Goat CheeseThe menu changes seasonally; the winter 2007 menu is currently posted on the website. Appetizers are $8–11, pastas $15–18, meat and fish entrees $18.50–26.50, and side dishes $5. There choices are primarily Italian standards, but all prepared with a high degree of care.

My friend started with the Speck (smoked prosciutto) & Artichoke Hearts ($9), which I didn’t taste, but she seemed pleased with it.

The Beet & Goat Cheese Salad ($9) was a nicely balanced dish, including bits of blood orange and walnuts, with aged balsamic dressing. Beet salad has become rather common around town, but I seldom order it. This dish made me realize I should re-assess that.

 
Lasagna Bolognese (left); Pappardelle with Lamb Ragu (right)

My friend swears by the Lasagne Bolognese with mushrooms ($17.50), and from the taste I had of it, I can see why. The flavor was hearty and intense. I thought that Pappardelle with Lamb Ragu ($17.50) tasted a little more generic. I had to remind myself that I was eating lamb, and not just standard red sauce.

The space is appealing and comfortable, and the service was just fine. Vespa is a great place to have in the neighborhood. Indeed, I wish my neighborhood had one.

Vespa (1625 Second Avenue between 84th & 85th Streets, Upper East Side)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: *
Overall: *

The Payoff: Robert’s Steakhouse

Against our better judgment, we took the long-shot bet that Frank Bruni would come totally unglued, and award two stars to Robert’s Steakhouse. But Frank kept his clothes on, and awarded a journalistically defensible one star to the strip joint. Eater, who made the conservative one-star bet at 2–1 odds, wins $2, while NYJ loses a dollar.

	Eater	NYJ
Bankroll	$2	$2
Gain/Loss	+$2	–$1
Total	+$4	+$1

Rolling the Dice: Robert’s Steakhouse

Every week, we take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We track our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Robert’s Steakhouse. Eater’s official odds are as follows:

Zero Stars: 3-1
One Star: 2-1
Two Stars: 6-1
Three Stars: 25-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1

The Skinny: There are restaurants that Bruni has to review (celebrity chef; high-profile opening; famous restauranteur), and there are those he chooses to review. Robert’s is in the latter category. It has been open for a good long while, and is well off the foodie radar. Its inhospitable perch in the Penthouse Lounge at 11th Avenue and 49th Street is hardly likely to draw much walk-in traffic. It would therefore make no sense for Bruni to choose such an unexpected target, only to slam it, so we can expect a favorable review. The only question is: one star or two?

Unless Bruni is totally unhinged, this should be at best a one-star review. Indeed, we stand by last year’s zero-star rating. Great steak isn’t hard to find in Manhattan. So why go to an ugly neighborhood and pay a high premium for what is essentially a commodity item? Of course, if what you really want is a strip club, it’s nice to know a good steak is available, but Bruni reviews restaurants, not strip clubs.

Yet, Bruni’s discretionary reviews—the ones he chooses to write—have tended to bestow two-star ratings. There’s a logic to this. There are probably hundreds of one-star restaurants that the Times will never get around to reviewing. Why pick a restaurant out of nowhere, just to award one star? There’s also the Jeffrey Chodorow angle: show the man what a real steakhouse looks like.

The Bet: We are going out on a limb, and predicting (against our better judgment and Eater’s) that Bruni will award two stars to Robert’s steakhouse.

Oriental Garden

I have an unwriten list of one-of-these-days restaurants. Oriental Garden landed on that list after Frank Bruni awarded two stars in the Times almost eighteen months ago, but I only got around to trying it last weekend.

Say what you want about Bruni, but when it comes to recommending casual restaurants with great food, he’s as good as they come. At Oriental Garden, Bruni got it right. He should review this kind of restaurant every week, and leave fine dining to the folks who actually enjoy it.

At first, Oriental Garden can be a little off-putting. The large water tanks crammed with creatures awaiting their doom aren’t as appetizing as the restaurant thinks. When the staff need to weigh a king crab, the scale sits on the floor in the vestibule. Reservations aren’t taken, and there is practically no waiting space to speak of. Tables are crammed together, and the décor is not much better than any generic Chinese restaurant that you’ve seen.

The menu is confusing, and far too long. Like many Chinese restaurants, Oriental Garden seems to serve every dish you’ve ever heard of, and it’s hard to figure out what the restaurant really does well. Ordering felt like throwing at a dart board.

 
Seafood in bird’s nest (left); Lobster with noodles (right)

The Seafood in Bird’s Nest just sounded good, and so it was: a bounty of sea creatures — shrimp, scallops, conch, cuttlefish — all immaculately prepared without over-seasoning or additional distractions. We chose the Lobster with Noodles merely because we saw it at an adjacent table, and it looked good, and so it was. Two dart throws, and two hits.

We marveled at the food that came out to other tables, including king crab, jumbo prawns, multiple preparations of lobster, and a grilled fluke expertly filleted tableside. We also marveled at the guy sitting by himself who ordered chicken with cashews. What was he doing here?

We waited to be seated for about fifteen minutes at around 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday evening. The wait was not pleasant, but once seated the service was competent and fast. The wine list offers about a dozen reds and a dozen whites, none of them Chinese, but all of them quite reasonably priced.

Oriental Garden (14 Elizabeth Street between Bayard and Canal Streets, Chinatown)

Food: **
Service: *
Ambiance: Minimal
Overall: *½

Kefi

Note: Click here for a review of Kefi in its current location. This is a review in its former location.

I was a big fan of Onera, Michael Psilakis’s haute Greek restaurant on the Upper West Side. It was one of the few very good restaurants, in a neighborhood where great ones are in short supply. But I guess there’s a reason why the Upper West Side isn’t a fine dining destination: yuppies with strollers prefer casual cafés and take-out.

The new interior


Cuttlefish, Spinach & Manouri


Braised Lamb Shank, Orzo, Root Vegetables


Walnut Cake, Walnut Ice Cream

So Psilakis converted the formal Onera to the casual Kefi. Anyone who visited Onera will recognize the space. But the white tablecloths are gone, and the décor is much more informal. Reservations are not accepted.

Prices are astonishingly low, with appetizers $4.50 – 9.95, pastas $9.95 – 11.95, main courses $13.95 – 15.95, and desserts $4.95 – 7.95. Most wines by the glass are only $6, and cocktails are only $7. (I can’t remember the last time I had a cocktail below $10.)

Even at these prices, a three-course dinner for two, including drinks, is likely to go above $100 with tax and tip. So we were irritated to find that Kefi doesn’t take credit cards, and we noted other patrons taken by surprise. If McDonald’s can take credit cards nowadays, why can’t Kefi?

I started with the Cuttlefish ($8.95), which were grilled, stuffed with spinach, and perched atop warm tomatoes. It was an ample portion, and impressive at the price, as it must be a fairly labor-intensive dish.

For the entree, I had the Braised Lamb Shank ($15.95), which was just as tender and flavorful as you could ask for. It compared favorably to versions of the same dish that upscale Greek restaurants sell for twice as much.

I was also quite pleased with dessert, a moist walnut cake with walnut ice cream.

We were sad to see Onera go, but there’s no denying Kefi is more in keeping with the area. It’s doing a brisk, if not crowded, walk-in business, and also offers take-out. I hope it survives and thrives.

Meanwhile, the concept of Onera remains very much alive. Psilakis is planning a similar restaurant called Anthos at 36 West 52nd Street near Fifth Avenue, a neighborhood where high-end Greek dining should find a much warmer reception.

Update: Kefi will be moving to 505 Columbus Avenue near 84th Street, sometime around July 2008. The new space will seat 200 and will accept both reservations and credit cards (the current restaurant takes neither). Chef Michael Psilakis hopes to open a new restaurant in the existing space — “something I haven’t done before.” Psilakis gave the exclusive to a practically breathless Frank Bruni, who loves the place, although he never bothered to review it.

Kefi (222 W. 79th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave., Upper West Side)

Food: *½
Service: *
Ambiance: *
Overall: *½

La Grenouille

La Grenouille is the grandest and the oldest of the city’s few remaining classic French restaurants. It’s not an every-day restaurant (at least, not for most people), but for that rare special occasion, I’m glad it’s there. My girlfriend and I paid a visit last week with my mom, on her 70th birthday.

The death of this type of fine dining has long been forecast. In a January 1991 review (the last of three that he would write), Bryan Miller said:

If you listen to some restaurant-industry pundits, La Grenouille is just the type of expensive, opulent institution that is slated for extinction as ineluctably as the dinosaurs. In this era of austerity and a return to more ingenuous foods, they say, the dining public is turning away from haute cuisine and embracing little pizzas, pasta, coq au vin and grilled chicken.

So welcome to La Grenouille, Tuesday night, mid-January, traditionally the slowest time of the year for restaurants. The dining room is as packed as Bloomingdale’s during a post-holiday clearance.

That is how we found it last week, on a Tuesday evening. Nor was the clientele composed entirely of retirees and their families. To be sure, while the restaurant’s center of gravity is clearly the 55-and-over set, I saw at least three tables with young couples that appeared to be under 35. I’m sure that some kind of special occasion lured them to La Grenouille.

The experience here may have once been about the food, but those days are long since past. A book for sale in the vestibule, The Flowers of La Grenouille, hints at the restaurant’s calling card. Even in 1980, when Mimi Sheraton awarded four stars in the Times, La Grenouille’s annual flower budget was $75,000. The three-course dinner back then was $35.75. Today it is $95, so I would imagine that the flower budget has nearly tripled.

Bryan Miller, probably the paper’s toughest grader in recent times, demoted La Grenouille to two stars in 1985, and then just one star in 1987, before elevating it back to three stars in 1991. Ruth Reichl reviewed it twice (1993, 1997), awarding three stars on both occasions. In the latter review, she found it “the most frustrating restaurant in New York,” finding both “flashes of brilliance” and “deep disappointment.” She said, “It could so easily be a four-star establishment.”

By all evidence, the current Times critic finds French food boring, so I doubt he plans to spend much time at La Grenouille. But were he to review it again, I doubt that it would retain its three-star status, as I can think of any number of better restaurants to which he has awarded only two. The overall experience is still one of gracious luxury, but the cooking has probably seen better days.

I believe the amuse-bouche was a celery root soup — certainly competent, but not a patch on the sunchoke soup amuse we had the night before at Perry St.

 
Sweetbreads (left); Le Choix des Hors d’Oeuvre (center); Lobster Ravioli (right)

La Grenouille charges $95 for three courses, and it can easily be more, as many of the dishes carry supplements. Prices are in the range of the city’s four-star restaurants, but there were no “oohs” and “ahhs” at our table, except perhaps for my mom’s sweetbreads. I started with the plate of mixed cold hors d’oeuvres, an impressive portion, but entirely forgettable. Equally forgettable were my girlfriend’s lobster ravioli, which carried a $15 supplement.

My mom and my girlfriend had rack of lamb. With only two ribs offered, it was an ungenerous portion, and my girlfriend reported that one of hers wasn’t warm enough. I ordered the Pike Quenelles, a classic French dish that few restaurants serve any more. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage to report on it, as I’ve never had this dish before, but like my girlfriend’s lamb, it seemed not as warm as it should be, and the accompanying white rice tasted like Uncle Ben’s.

We all ordered soufflés for dessert ($9.75 supplement). My mom and I had the grand marnier soufflé, which was the best thing I had all evening. My girlfriend went for the chocolate soufflé, which she found not as impressive as the one we’d ordered at Etats-Unis a few weeks ago.

The wine list at La Grenouille is notoriously expensive, so I was happy to find a very good 2003 Châteauneuf-du-Pape for $95. The service had all of the traditional French trappings, beginning with the host’s greeting, “Bon soir, Madame,” when we arrived. The bill had separate tip lines for the captain and the waiter, a distinction that has disappeared almost everywhere else. (I just tipped a bulk amount; how they divide it shouldn’t be my problem.)

If the food was not the superb experience that it could be or should be given the price, the room remains extraordinary, the service polished and courteous. New York has better restaurants, but for some types of special occasions, La Grenouille remains incomparable.

La Grenouille (3 E. 52nd Street between 5th and Madison Avenues, East Midtown)

Food: **
Service: ***
Ambiance: ****
Overall: **½

Perry St.

After two previous visits to Perry St., I had mixed feelings. It’s certainly a very good restaurant, but is it a great one? My mom was in town, and she hadn’t been to any of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants, so I thought it was time to give Perry St. another try.

We had a 6:00 p.m. reservation on President’s Day, and it was totally empty; even a couple of hours later, it was only a bit over half full.

The menu at Perry St. remains short and focused, and it changes frequently. There are just nine appetizers ($10–29) and eight entrees ($24–45). The wide price range means that you can get out of Perry St. fairly cheaply; but if you want to spend a bundle, you can. (The most-expensive appetizer is poached eggs with caviar; the most expensive entree is poached lobster.)

The amuse bouche was a sunchoke soup with a black truffle (above, right).

 
Mixed Green Salad, Toasty Goat Cheese, Kumquat Vinaigrette (left);
Toasted Barley Risotto, Parmesan, Dried Sour Cherries and Pecans (right)

My mom loved the Mixed Green Salad with toasty goat cheese ($13), which came sculpted in a tall cylinder. I found Toasted Barley Risotto ($13) dominated by the taste of tomatoes, and couldn’t really perceive the dried sour cherries that the menu promised.

 
Sweet & Sour Glazed Short Ribs, Spaghetti Squash and Crunch Cheddar (left);
Spicy Laquered Halibut, Grilled Broccolini, Clementine (right)

My mom also had the better of the main courses. Sweet & Sour Short Ribs ($28) were wonderful, as was the accompanying side of spaghetti squash topped with cheddar. But I found the Spicy Laquered Halibut ($28) over-seasoned, with the taste of the fish literally lost in the sauce.

The petits fours (photo, right) were excellent, although I’m afraid I didn’t catch the explanation.

The bread service remains a definite weakness. Over the course of three visits, this was the first time that bread rolls arrived slightly warm, but they were still hard enough to be lethal weapons in the wrong hands. After I’d used my knife to spread the butter, a server removed the used bread plate but left the knife behind for me to re-use on my appetizer.

The wine list is brief and underwhelming. If I were being really picky, I would point out that we ordered a burgundy, and they served it in bordeaux glasses. I am not suggesting that this actually matters to me, but it does show Perry St.’s definite casual side. And in a restaurant that is so pleasant and comfortable, serving food that is as ambitious as this, can’t they do better than brown paper placemats?

Frank Bruni awarded three stars to Perry St. in September 2005, although his endorsement came with more caveats than he normally allows in a three-star review, calling it “undeniably flawed and surprisingly inconsistent.” Several of Bruni’s complaints — the sub-par bread service, the paper placemats — remain unremedied, presumably because Mr. Vongerichten, is getting exactly what he wants.

But what that is, is a two-star restaurant.

Perry St (176 Perry Street at West Street, Far West Village)

Food: **½
Service: **
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

The Payoff: Momofuku Ssäm Bar

As predicted, Frank Bruni awarded two stars to Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Both Eater and New York Journal took the two-star wager at 2–1 odds. On our hypothetical $1 bets we are $2 richer.

	Eater	NYJ
Bankroll	$0	$0
Gain/Loss	+$2	+$2
Total	+$2	+$2

Rolling the Dice: Momofuku Ssäm Bar

Today, New York Journal introduces a new feature, Rolling the Dice, wherein we’ll take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we’ll track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We will keep track of our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Eater’s official odds are as follows:

Zero Stars: 5-1
One Star: 3-1
Two Stars: 2-1
Three Stars: 6-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1

The Skinny: Ssäm was reviewed in $25 and Under less than four months ago. There are no official statistics, but this must be the fastest transition ever to a rated review. Bruni wouldn’t do it unless he had a Statement To Make. Besides, virtually everyone who’s had the food at Ssäm has been wowed. A measly star is therefore unlikely—bearing in mind that, despite the official definition, one star almost never truly means “Good.”

Bruni has shown, again and again, that traditional formality means nothing to him, but we just can’t see him giving out a trifecta here. Even David Chang, the chef, said, “It would be embarrassing for every other restaurant that actually deserves three stars to have some one-trick pony like us in the mix. For fuck’s sake we don’t even have silverware and we use paper napkins.”

The Bet: We agree with Eater that Bruni will award two stars to Momofuku Ssäm Bar.