Blenheim

Note: Chef Ryan Tate left Blenheim abruptly in March 2015. Mazen Mustafa is the restaurant’s third chef in its first year of existence.

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When a restaurant announces that it’s “closing temporarily,” it’s usually done-for. So I promptly crossed Blenheim off my to-do list when opening chef Justin Hilbert was canned, and the restaurant shuttered, after a month in business.

Blenheim escaped the usual fate of such establishments—and recovered brilliantly, in fact—when Tribeca’s Le Restaurant closed, and the Michelin-starred chef Ryan Tate became a free agent. A couple of weeks later, Tate was in, and Blenheim had recovered from the dead. Full disclosure: I wasn’t a fan of Le Restaurant. I must’ve caught it on a bad day, as no one else disliked it as much as I did. The food at Blenheim is terrific.

The owners are husband-and-wife team Min Ye and Morten Sohlberg, best known for the Smörgås Chef mini-chain of Swedish restaurants. In 2007, they bought the Blenheim Hill Farm in the Catskill Mountains, which dates back to the 1700s, but had been abandoned since the 1970s. They restored the farm, and started raising pesticide-free produce and heritage breeds of pigs, cattle, and lamb.

You might’ve guessed that a farm-to-table restaurant wouldn’t be far behind. Welcome to Blenheim, which will remind you of that other restaurant with an affiliated farm, Blue Hill, in its humbler days, before it started serving S. Pellegrino cuisine and playing host to presidents. (Even Smörgås Chef now touts its farm-to-table bona fides, which wasn’t the case when we visited in 2007.)

The v1.0 release of Blenheim had no online menu, but The Pink Pig sampled a Guinea Hen dish that was $32; the same is now $27. Further comparisons aren’t possible, but I gather the new chef has thoroughly re-habilitated the menu, which is now firmly mid-priced, with appetizers $10–19 and entrees $20–34. There are no snacks or side dishes to plump up the bill.

There are also two so-called tasting menus: four courses ($65) and seven courses ($95). Wine pairings are $35 and $55 respectively. We chose the former. If I’m picky, the four-course option isn’t really a tasting menu, although it did come with a couple of amuses. The wine pairing came with four pours, and at the price would have to be called generous.

The amuse (above left) was a tomato carpaccio with lovage emulsion, about as perfect as tomatoes can be. The bread service (above right) offered a choice of three varieties, served warm, with soft butter from the farm.

 

Blenheim 1.0 was criticized for serving “overly precious creation[s] made mostly from greens that humans don’t typically eat for a reason.” You see it, too, in The Pink Pig’s far more favorable review.

There’s still some evidence of that at Blenheim 2.0 (a $15 gin and lime cocktail served with ice plant) and on the plates above, where farm greenery is tossed about, mainly because they can. Le Restaurant, the chef’s last place, suffered from similar self-indulgence, but here the dishes succeed.

We started with White Asparagus (above left), not from the local farm, but from northern Italy, with a poached egg, sorrell, and pine juice. “Mix it up and have fun,” the server exhorted, in case you were wondering. There was a crunchy, crouton-like ingredient, and something sweet I couldn’t identify. The chef had done something incredible with very little.

Greenery on the next plate was purely decorative, but the Skate Wing (above right) was exquisite.

 

Pork Loin (above left) had a pungent, “hammy” taste that was wonderful. I also enjoyed the salted peaches on the plate, but didn’t need charred okra or smoked onion.

The dessert amuse was a cucumber sorbet, tasting something like a key lime pie, which I didn’t photograph. The dessert was a cream cheese panna cotta (above right) with plums, whey, and buckwheat crêpes that was one of the best desserts I’ve had in a while.

The ambiance at Blenheim straddles the line between high-end informal and low-end formal. Despite the tablecloth-free décor of exposed wood and farm implements hung from the walls, the dining room feels upscale: it’s a third-date place. The staff are extremely attentive about the small things, such as the setting and clearing of plates and silverware. There are butter knives on the tables, and when was the last time you saw that outside of a three-star restaurant.

The dining room was quiet, and only about half full at 8:00pm; by 10:00 it was almost empty. There is nothing wrong with the location, an ideal West Village street corner, in a part of town where many restaurants have thrived. Blenheim has got the chef; now it just needs the buzz.

Blenheim (283 W. 12th Street at W. 4th Street, West Village)

Food: Haute barnyard
Service: Upscale
Ambiance: Straddling high-end informal and low-end formal

Rating: ★★

Racines NY

If there’s a restaurant story of the year, it’s the explosion of casual restaurants with good—I mean, really good—wine lists right out of the gate. I’ve mixed feelings about the claptrap ambiance of such places, but if the wine selection is good enough, the other sins are nearly forgiven.

Welcome to Racines NY, with a two-letter suffix to distinguish it from the original Racines, which opened in 2007 on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. Practically all of the pre-opening press describes it as a wine bar. With its ample selection of offbeat wines by the glass, you could be very happy if you came here only to drink.

But the owners prefer the term “neo-bistro.” The chef, Frédéric Duca, is straight off the plane from Paris, where he earned a Michelin star at L’Instant d’Or. He serves a tightly-edited and frequently-changing menu of just five appetizers ($14–18), four mains ($31–38), and three desserts ($10–12).

Hardly a restaurant opens these days without a separate list of bar snacks, seemingly for noshers who don’t want to commit to a full meal; or, more cynically, a ploy to lure diners into ordering an extra course. Racines goes the opposite way: the only item really suitable for snacking is a cheese course ($18). Exactly what the lithe, 108-pound starlets sipping rosé at the bar are nibbling on is a mystery I leave for another day.

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Barchetta

These days, the usual career path of successful chefs is to open a second restaurant, and then a third; in fact, to keep going until the public says “Enough already!” And sometimes even past that. See the dictionary entry under “English, Todd”.

Not so, David Pasternack. Despite the accolades rained upon his Hell’s Kitchen Italian seafood restaurant Esca, the chef has been surprisingy slow-footed about growing his personal brand. Aside from the short-lived Bistro du Vent (2005–06), Pasternack has resisted expansion in New York. (I don’t know for sure, but you’d have to think there’ve been offers before now.)

Pasternack finally got the proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse, partnering with LDV Hospitality (Scarpetta, American Cut) to open Barchetta (“little boat”) in the space that was last home to Alain Allegretti’s La Promenade des Anglais. This site has had trouble holding onto restaurants. Located in West Chelsea, close to Tenth Avenue, it is not convenient to mass transit. It needs to make a passionate case for our attention.

The immediate impression is that this is a cheaper and more casual version of Esca: an Esca without tablecloths. At the flagship, you won’t find an entrée for less than $30; here, they hover mostly in the $20s. Servings of crudo, the Italianesque sashimi that Pasternack introduced to New York, are similar to those served at Esca, but a couple of dollars less. You can order spaghetti with lobster at Esca for $30, or fettucine with lobster at Barchetta for $28.

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Decoy

Decoy opened in mid-May in a former laundromat below Ed Schoenfeld and Joe Ng’s hit Chinese restaurant, RedFarm.

There’s a faux mysteriousness about the project: the website is just a landing page, without so much as a menu, hours of operation, or really anything except a phone number and social media links. It doesn’t take much googling to find out everything you’d want to know about Decoy, so why the deliberate obfuscation?

In many ways, Decoy is just an extension of RedFarm. Call the phone number, and the RedFarm staff answer. Show up for dinner at RedFarm, where they don’t take reservations, and they’re liable to send you downstairs to Decoy’s ample bar, to cool your heels during the epic wait.

Decoy itself takes reservations (I already like this place better), and the menu is different. For $65, a party of two gets a whole Peking Duck, two small plates from a list of 13 choices, and one rice or side dish. Larger parties receive extra courses from the à la carte menu, in addition to the duck.

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The Black Ant

The Village Voice wrote recently of a “Mexican Food Moment” in New York City, including The Black Ant (La Hormiga Negra), a new restaurant in the East Village from the same folks behind Ofrenda across town.

It certainly does seem that there are a lot of new Mexican restaurants lately—and not merely the cookie-cutter TexMex kind that serve standard-issue burritos, enchiladas, chimichangas, and the like. For a while, it seemed like every other chef was opening a gourmet taco joint.

The focus here is inventive dishes inspired by chef Mario Hernandez’s native Oaxaca. The website declares on its landing page, Cocina de Autor—referring to the chef as “author” of a cuisine—which would sound pompous if written in English, but seems to describe this restaurant exactly.

True to the name, there are a number of dishes with dehydrated edible insects shipped from Mexico: a guacamole made with ant salt; a tortilla topped with fried grasshoppers; a side order of crickets. Ant salt even appears in several of the cocktails. Several bloggers have reviewed and photographed these items (here, here, here). We weren’t about to go near them.

Fortunately, if you’re insect-averse, there’s plenty to enjoy. There’s a variety of smaller plates in various categories that serve as appetizers ($8–14), entrées ($22–27) and sides ($6), most not exactly resembling anything I’ve ever sampled in a Mexican restaurant.

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Bacchanal

Note: Well, that was fast. Four months in, chef Scott Bryan left the restaurant to take over at Corvo Bianco on the Upper West Side. That’s not exactly a hotspot, so the difference of opinion between Bryan and the owners here must have been substantial. As noted below, it seemed to us that there was a disconnect between Bryan’s inexpensive casual menu here and the deep wine list. Alas, the new chef at Bacchanal, couldn’t rescue the concept either, and the restaurant closed at the end of 2015.

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Years from now, perhaps the early twenty-teens will be called the VeriCru diaspora. Veritas and Cru, perhaps the two best wine restaurants the city has seen, both expired in 2009–10, victims of the Great Recession.

(For the history buffs out there, I do realize that Veritas re-modeled and somehow soldiered on until 2013. I prefer to remember Veritas as it was conceived, not the watered-down replacement that tried and failed to replace it.)

Since then, we’ve seen openings like Pearl & Ash and Charlie Bird, where great (but not “VeriCru” epic) wine lists pair with good (but not great) food in drastically pared-down rooms. To me, it seems odd to pair a $250 Brunello with a $29 roast chicken, in a room where you can barely hear yourself talk. But if you want it, you can have it. Veritas and Cru had it all; these places do not.

Welcome to Bacchanal, the latest entry in the genre. The pedigree is obvious, starting with the chef, Scott Bryan, who opened Veritas (lasted eight years there), consulted a bit, spent five years at the mediocre Apiary, and is now back in his element.

Owner Peter Poulakakos has a stable of Financial District restaurants, anchored by Harry’s at Hanover Square and the more recent Vintry Wine & Whisky, where the reserve list goes as high as a 1945 Château Haut-Brion for $9,975. No doubt Poulakakos borrowed from those superb lists to open Bacchanal, as it’s almost unheard of to build such a cellar from scratch at an untried restaurant.

On a wine and spirits list that runs to 40 pages, you’ve got 1970 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti ($9,125), 1978 Château Pétrus ($2,900), and 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild ($1,950), to name a few. For those who don’t want to spend a mortgage payment on dinner, there are many excellent offerings in the $45–60 range. But how can you not splurge, at least a little bit? A 2001 Château Moulinet, which the sommelier decanted, was well worth the tarrif at $75.

The knock on Scott Bryan at Veritas, was that the food never approached the wine list’s pyrotechnics. It was quietly competent and seldom disappointed, but it never left you with enduring memories, the way the wine did. He has built a similar menu here. It is surprisingly affordable, with no entrée more expensive than a $26 steak.

I am still left with the question that left me perplexed at Charlie Bird and Pearl & Ash: who is ordering three- and four-figure wine bottles, but demands a food menu that is practically budget-priced by today’s standards? Where’s the 28 dry-aged prime ribeye that Harry’s Steak sells for $48.

On paper, the food doesn’t exactly set the pulse racing. Listen to this list of entrées: pasta, ricotta agnolotti, risotto, chicken, codfish, salmon, skirt steak. As he did at Veritas, Bryan executes all of this with cool precision that makes it worthwhile, especially if the prices remain as low as they are now. If the food doesn’t get in the wine list’s way, it has done its job.

 

An Escarole Salad ($10; above left) wasn’t as blurry in real life as my lousy photo, but it was exceedingly pedestrian, with an anchovy vinaigrette that barely registered. Why not charge a couple of bucks more, and give us real anchovies? But Bryan can still cook. A Chilled Corn Velouté ($10; above right) was a soup of astonishing clarity, drizzled with roasted poblanos, sweet tomatoes, and basil.

 

Both entrées were wonderful, bearing in mind the price point: Atlantic Codfish ($26; above left) with white bean purée, manila clams, roasted garlic, and parsley; Roasted Chicken ($22; above right) with polenta, chanterelles, madeira, and tarragon.

Dessert was a delightful Peach Tarte Tatin ($10; left) with créme frâiche ice cream and caramel.

Bacchanal occupies the southern frontier on the new Bowery, with its own street entrance in the boutique Sohotel. It is a more polished restaurant than Charlie Bird or Pearl & Ash, but like those establishments, it has a distinctly downtown vibe. Low ceilings and brick walls ensure a punishing sound level. My wife and I had to shout at each other all evening, and we were seated at a two-top in a corner, with no one on either side of us.

The well-executed food and excellent wine list are somewhat undermined by the service, which was a bit slow. The restaurant was close to full on a Wednesday evening.

It will be interesting to see how Bacchanal and other restaurants of the VeriCru diaspora evolve. If you want vast wine lists without paying three-star prices for the food, these restaurants are the places where you find them. But such a large room is hardly the place where I would contemplate a three-figure Brunello. The chef does a thoroughly professional job, especially at the absurdly low price point. You have to wonder how the clash between such luxurious wine and the quotidian surroundings will eventually be settled.

Bacchanal (146 Bowery at Broome Street, Soho)

Food: Casual American, mostly well executed at a surprisingly low price point
Service: At times slow, but otherwise good
Ambiance: A punishingly loud, low-ceilinged room

Rating: ★★

Bâtard

Bâtard-Montrachet is a grand cru appellation of Burgundy, producing wines of 100% Chardonnay. A bastard is “a contemptible, inconsiderate, overly or arrogantly rude or spiteful person.”

Both are applicable at Bâtard, the latest restaurant in the hallowed space that was once home to the beloved Montrachet, and more controversially, Corton. The constants at all three establishments have always been excellent cuisine, Burgundy-centric wine lists, and owner Drew Nieporent, the mayor of Tribeca, who also owns nearby Nobu and Tribeca Grill.

The list of chefs who cooked at Montrachet reads like a culinary Who’s Who. As they left one by one, to pursue other projects, Nieporent kept replacing them, holding onto three New York Times stars until the very end. Montrachet finally closed in 2006, re-opening two years later, named for another Burgundy appellation (Corton), with a much larger kitchen and the talented but difficult chef, Paul Liebrandt, at the helm.

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The Gander

 

Four years after Recette charmed the West Village, chef Jesse Schenker has expanded to more upscale digs at The Gander, which takes over the space that briefly hosted the doomed Alison Eighteen.

I thought Alison Eighteen would last longer. It turns out the goodwill accumulated at Alison on Dominick and her Hamptons restaurants did not travel with her to the new location.

I mention this, because Schenker may have to overcome similar challenges. The restaurant is on a charmless, lightly-traveled block. The newly-remodeled space is attractive and comfortable, but so was Alison Eighteen.

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Heartwood

Note: Heartwood closed in November 2014. We weren’t impressed, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. The restaurant was tweeting out free pizza deals in October, so it was obviously not doing well. Donatella Arpaia, who still controls the lease, expects to replace it with Prova, yet another pizzeria.

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The remains of Donatella Arpaia’s once-formidable restaurant empire continue to crumble. Her mediocre pizzeria, Donatella, closed in January after a shade over two years in business.

Heartwood opened recently in the same space. The pizza oven imported from Naples still dominates the open kitchen, decked out in a sober terra cotta, rather than Donatella’s blinged-out gold plating.

Ms. Arpaia remains a partner here. There’s an impressive list of other names involved, perhaps too many: Mark Fiorentino, a former bread-maker at Daniel, is in charge of the pizzas. Bradford Thompson (ex. Lever House, Miss Lily’s) writes the rest of the menu. Nick Mautone (ex. Gramercy Tavern, Eighty One) runs the front of house.

Put those folks together, and you get a restaurant designed by committee, with menu categories like: Snacks, Bowls, Salads, Pizzas, Proteins, and “Grains and Veggies”.

It’s priced for a recession we are not currently in, with appetizer-like plates $11–14, entrée-like plates $22–26, pizzas $14–21 (they are easily sharable), and side dishes $8. Unfortunately, many of the dishes read better than they taste.

 

The Bibb and Bacon Lettuce Wraps ($13; above left) aren’t “wrapped” at all. You get three fists of Bibb with chunks of soggy maple-candied bacon perched on top. Slices of tomato and stray droppings of smoked pecan sandwich the bacon, but as soon as you touch it the tower collapses. You eat the piece parts, and I suppose the idea is that they’ll be reunited in your stomach.

On this bacon-happy menu, Warm Spinach and Frisée ($14; above right) is a better bet, as the kitchen has mixed the ingredients together, which is how a salad is supposed to work. There’s a poached egg, maple vinaigrette, and house-cured lamb bacon.

 

In the photo, you can’t make out the Heritage Pork Chop ($26; above left), as it’s hiding beneath peach chutney and honey-glzed turnips. It never should have left the kitchen at all. Three meager medallions, cooked off the bone, had been roasted to the texture of dry cereal. If pigs could sue for wrongful death, this pig should.

Pizza was a far happier choice. I’d heartily recommend “When Peter Luger Goes Out For Pizza” ($21; above right), with braised short rib, creamed spinach and horseradish on a charred, thin crust, smoky enough to remind you of a good porterhouse steak.

Duck Fat Potato Wedges ($8; above right) aren’t nearly as compelling as they sound, but they grew on me. You could do a lot worse.

The mostly domestic wine list is short and recent (nothing older than 2011), but fairly priced in relation to the menu. There’s a summery list of slightly-overpriced house cocktails ($15), many with smoky names like the Firecracker Martini (peppered vodka, cucumber, BBQ rub).

Service was friendly, but a bit discombobulated at times: there was a substantial gap between the arrival of my cocktail and Wendy’s glass of wine; another gap between the delivery of my entrée (the pork) and her pizza.

The space is casual, but a little nicer than I remember at Donatella. Sound ricochets off the brick walls and the low pressed-tin ceiling, so be ready for the assault on your eardrums. But the restaurant was full on a Tuesday evening. For a hot summer in Chelsea, this is probably what the neighborhood wants.

Heartwood (184 Eighth Avenue between 19th & 20th Streets, Chelsea)

Food: An uneven menu of American grill standards, salads, pizzas
Service: Casual and discombobulated
Ambiance: Casual and noisy

Rating: Not Recommended (no stars)

Chez Jef

Note: Chez Jef closed in July 2014, as expected, for a re-vamp. It is expected to re-open in fall 2014.

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Earlier this year, Mathieu Palombino (of the Motorino pizza chainlet) closed his indifferently-received Bowery Diner, replacing it with a French pop-up, Chez Jef.

The re-do was modest: the “Diner” sign remains, with most of its neon letters no longer functional. A few red-and-white checked curtains are basically all that stands between the former diner and a cute little French bistro, with the words “Chez Jef” stamped on the butcher paper that covers ever tabletop.

In February, Palombino told Eater.com that he intended to run the pop-up “for two to three months.” Four months later, it’s still there, although the customers are not: we practically had the place to ourselves on a Wednesday evening.

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