Blue Smoke Battery Park City

Blue Smoke, Danny Meyer’s barbecue joint, now has a second Manhattan location, sharing a building in Battery Park City around the corner from Goldman Sachs with his other new restaurant, North End Grill.

The new location feels a bit smaller than the original Blue Smoke, in the Flatiron District. (The earlier restaurant also has a club attached, Jazz Standard.) The Flatiron outpost takes reservations for parties of all sizes; here, they’re taken only for parties of 6 or more. Flatiron transferred my bar tab; this one did not.

My view of Blue Smoke hasn’t changed much from when I reviewed the Flatiron restaurant. It feels a bit corporate and inauthentic, because it serves a mash-up of multiple regional barbecue styles, not really nailing any of them. In compensation for that, you get the excellent Danny Meyer service, and a better beverage program than almost all barbecue places.

We loved the Grilled Oysters with Spinach and Toasted Breadcrumbs ($8.95; above left), though it is a bit annoying that such a readily sharable dish comes with an odd number of oysters.

There are three kinds of ribs: Kansas City spareribs, Memphis-style baby-backs, and Texas Salt-and-Pepper beef ribs. A sampler of four, four, and two respectively, is $38.95 (above right). The Texas ribs, with their meager allotment of beef on the bones, were disappointing. My girlfriend liked the smaller, more dry, Memphis ribs the best; I had trouble deciding between those and the larger, saucier K.C. ribs.

There’s an abundance of sides, and I wish we’d had the appetite for more of them. The cornbread ($3.95; below left) was just fine.

I checked in on foursquare when I arrived, as I do at many restaurants, and by mid-meal a manager type came over to say hello (sent by Danny Meyer himself). Now, many restaurants check social media, but I haven’t often been noticed while the meal was in progress; usually it’s the day after. Finding me here took some sleuthing, as I hadn’t given my name. It says a lot about Danny Meyer’s attention to detail, when they go to the trouble at a barbecue place that doesn’t take reservations.

A warm strawberry rhubarb pie (above right), for which we weren’t charged, was excellent. I’d drop in again just for that pie.

There’s an excellent list of whiskies, bourbons and ryes; more beers on tap and by the bottle than you’ll get around to trying; and even a short but reasonable wine list. I had a fine Sazerac at the bar ($9) and an inexpensive Montepulciano at the table ($40).

The neighborhood—really, any neighborhood—is better with Blue Smoke in it. The crowd is a mix of Wall Streeters and young families. The restaurant was doing a good business at 7:30 p.m. on a weeknight, but wasn’t completely full. Blue Smoke will be a hit, make no mistake about it.

Blue Smoke (255 Vesey Street near North End Avenue, Battery Park City)

Food: Corporate barbecue with some good accompaniments and great dessert
Service: Danny Meyer’s strong suit
Ambiance: What you expect a barbecue place to be

Rating: ★
Why? There’s better ’cue in the city, but I’d be here all the time if I lived nearby

Le Cirque

There’s a tradition at Le Cirque not quite like any other in town. Sirio Maccioni, the patriarch of the family business, still holds court, as he has done since 1974, and before that at the fabled Colony, which once defined elegant high society dining in Manhattan.

Ironically, Mr. Maccioni conceived of Le Cirque as a more hip, casual alternative to The Colony. As William Grimes explained, in a New York Times obituary of Jean Vergnes, the restaurant’s founding chef:

Le Cirque, as the name implied, would dispense with the fussiness of the old-style haute cuisine restaurants and incorporate some of the pizzazz that Mr. Maccioni had observed at Maxwell’s Plum, Warner LeRoy’s wildly popular restaurant for swinging singles.

Today, with The Colony and others of its ilk long gone, Le Cirque is practically the last surviving example of the very formality that Maccioni had sought to replace. Once progressive, it is now the old guard.

Le Cirque is now in its third location, and as of four months ago, under a new chef, Olivier Reginensi (left). To be exact, he is Le Cirque’s ninth executive chef—so the website tells us—the rare example of a restaurant that wants to remind you how many names have passed through the kitchen’s revolving door.

It’s an impressive list. At a 35th anniversary dinner in 2009, the chefs who came back to cook included Alain Allegretti, David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, Iacopo Falai, Craig Hopson, Michael Lomonaco, Pierre Schaedelin, Pierre Poulin, Dieter Schorner, Alex Stratta, Bill Telepan, Jacques Torres and Geoffrey Zakarian (see photo below).

If you expand the list to include those who’ve worked for a chef who formerly worked at Le Cirque, you’ve got a Who’s Who of the NYC culinary universe, including many who now cook in idioms far removed from the classics Le Cirque is best known for. What the city’s dining scene would have been, without Le Cirque, is difficult to imagine.

Management realizes there’s a delicate balancing act between playing up the old tradition and developing a new one. As a Eater.com reported when Chef Reginensi was appointed:

The Le Cirque team is hoping the new push will bring the brand to new diners while reminding current and former clients that they haven’t been put out to pasture. “It will show people this is not your dad’s Le Cirque any more.” says Carlo Mantica, Le Cirque’s co-general manager.

The perception that Le Cirque is strictly old-school is difficult to efface, so pervasive has it become. By today’s standards, it is comparatively formal, with one of the most expensive à la carte menus in town, and jackets required in the main dining room. (The adjoining café is less formal and less costly.)

How to attract a new generation? Sirio’s three sons, who now run Le Cirque and its sister restaurants day to day, are alive to the problem. The hipsters dining on park benches in Bushwick won’t be coming here anytime soon. But the recent success of premium menus at places like Brooklyn Fare and Atera, to say nothing of the continuing appeal of the traditional four-stars, shows that there are still plenty of diners willing to spend big in restaurants.

Mauro Maccioni invited us recently to sample Chef Reginensi’s new menu as his guest at the chef’s table, just inside the kitchen. All of the usual caveats about a comped meal apply: we experienced Le Cirque as few do. Restaurants can adjust the service for VIPs, but the food is what it is—and at Le Cirque it’s excellent.

The cuisine has always been difficult to classify. Its roots are French, but the owners are Italian, and a spaghetti primavera is a fixture on the menu. And there is ample room for a chef’s individual expression on the flesh of the restaurant’s classic French bones.

 

The amuse bouche (above left) was a tweak on traditional escargots, with Burgundy snails, parsley, and croutons, baked in tiny, half-eggshell ceramic bowls. Here they’re lighter and sweeter than usual, and not as garlicky.

Then came a duo (above right) of very good octopus with white bean and tomato confit; and a langoustine on a bed of spring vegetables (carrots, snow peas, leeks, and red peppers).

 

Next came a very rich rabbit porchetta (above left), similar to a roulade or a ballotine, mixed with vegetables, one of the more technically impressive dishes on the menu. We were also quite pleased with asparagus (above right) with a poached egg and morel mushrooms.

 

I believe we were served two pastas, one of which we neglected to photograph. Fresh peas, ricotta gnocchi, and morel mushrooms (above left) were wonderful, even if the morels were repeated from the previous course.

I also made note of ravioli stuffed with vegetables, braised romaine lettuce, prosciutto, and mozzarella. It was difficult to make out all of those ingredients, but it was the hit of the evening: “like eating oysters,” my girlfriend said.

Sole Florentine (above right) was another techical achievement, with spinach, crayfish, and a red and white sauce unfamiliar to me, which the chef described as a sauce cardinal.

 

Duck (above left) was comparatively pedestrian and slightly overpowered by olives, though the pairing with turnip was better than I would have expected.

Romina Peixoto, Le Cirque’s first female pastry chef, deserves to be better known. Baked Alaska (above left), was flambéed tableside. This was followed by Rhubarb (below left), a lemongrass panna cotta, pistachio financier, and rhubarb sorbet; and a Tropical Vacherin (below right), with mango sorbet, pinapple forzen yogurt, tropical cilntro salsa.

 

 

We concluded with an embarrassment of petits fours, the last of these presented in a small upholstered jewelbox.

Some of my readers will no doubt believe that a comped review is compromised—although I’ve been here twice before on my own dime, and also to the same owners’ Italian place, Osteria del Circo, so clearly this is cuisine and an atmosphere I am predisposed to like. Those who find Le Cirque old-fashioned, may fail to appreciate how many careers it has launched, and just how progressive it originally was.

Keeping Le Cirque in the conversation is a tall order. I’m glad I can watch as a fan.

Le Cirque (151 E. 58th Street between Lexington & Third Avenues, East Midtown)

The NoMad

You’ve got to hand it to Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, chef and restaurateur of the city’s hottest new restaurant, The NoMad: they know how to make an entrance, whether it be the Goodfellas-inspired promo video, or the publicity machine that generated eleven Eater.com posts in a nine-day span.

Humm and Guidara are the team behind Eleven Madison Park, which Frank Bruni elevated to four stars in 2009. The pair later bought out restaurant’s former owner, Danny Meyer, after they signed onto the NoMad project without their boss in tow. Meyer no doubt recalled a similar split, when Tom Colicchio opened Craft without him, while remaining the absentee chef at Gramercy Tavern: it was bound not to work in the long run, and this time Meyer chose not to delay the inevitable.

It’s news whenever a four-star chef opens a new place, but I don’t recall anything quite like the breathless coverage here. One month in, The NoMad is packed every evening, at almost any hour. It sets up gargantuan expectations that the restaurant might struggle to meet in the long run, after the excitement dies down and the chef is once again spending most of his time at the mother ship.

The NoMad is a major opening, no question about it. Although it lacks tablecloths, everything about it screams luxury. One of its five rooms, the Atrium, is “inspired by the great courtyards of Europe.” Another, the Parlour, is a “stately room featuring dark oak furnishings, richly textured fabrics and over 100 pressed antique herbs.” Yet another is an “intimate cove [with] the original fireplace imported from a great French château.” Or if not there, the “fully curated, two-level library connected by an original spiral staircase imported from the South of France.”

The staff, dressed in crisply pressed suits, look the part. Under GM Jeffrey Tascarella’s direction, they put on a well-choreographed show. I should note that Mr. Tascarella recognized me as soon as I arrived. I’d like to assume they do the same for everyone, but I can’t vouch for that: a couple in front of me was quoted a 45-minute wait to be seated for drinks in the library, whereas they accommodated me immediately. (At the bar, revelers were stacked three deep.)

The house cocktails ($15) are outstanding, including two of the best drinks with brown spirits that I’ve had in a long time, the Satan’s Circus (rye, chili-infused aperol, cherry heering, lemon) and the Old Alhambra (Islay scotch, vermouth, sherry, creme de cacao).

Like many a hotel restaurant, The NoMad will be serving three meals a day, plus (I assume) room service, which gives the owners many more meals over which to amortize their investment. Nevertheless, dinner is expensive here, with snacks $8–16, appetizers $14–24 and entrées $22–39. Only the vegetarian mains are under $30: Eater has already made its share of jokes about the $22 carrot entrée.

Breads, baked in-house, change daily. A flat mini-bread fried with fingerling potatoes and spring onions was as good as anything of its kind that we’ve had in a restaurant this year.

 

We started with one of the snack items, a rich Beef Tartare ($16; above left) with cornichons and horseradish, with crisp slices of toasted brioche to spread it on.

The house sent out a “Grande Plateau des Fruits de Mer,” normally $24 per person. I didn’t note the components, but it was far more impressive than your usual seafood platter, in that most of the items were composed, and were not just raw shellfish on the halfshell.

 

The kitchen also sent out two mid-courses, which I think were variants on the two vegetarian entrées on the normal menu: asparagus with button mushrooms; carrots and parsnip. These were the two best dishes we had all evening.

  

A whole chicken for two ($78) is the restaurant’s signature dish, the only large-format item on the menu. The whole bird is presented tableside (above left), then sent back to the kitchen for plating (above right).

It’s an impressive technical achievement, with truffle, foie gras, and brioche under the near-blackened skin. But just like the duck for two at Eleven Madison Park, one can’t help feeling that what comes back is rather meager, especially at the price.

There’s a whole Chowhound thread about the inconsistencies in this dish, which I wish I’d read in advance, as I might not have been so keen to order it. I didn’t really taste much foie gras or truffle. The chicken itself wasn’t bad, but the accompanying fricassee of dark meat (above) was not very pleasant at all. A few days later, we had the fried chicken at Peels, a much more satisfying dish that costs only $21.75.

We dined in the luxurious Parlour, which struck me as a much nicer space than the other main dining room, the Atrium, which is louder, and in which the tables seem closer together. There is much on this menu that I’d love to try. The chicken was a disappointment, but also an anomaly, as we loved everything else we tried.

The next evening, we dined at Café Boulud, which like The NoMad, is the next peg down the scale, below a four-star chef’s flagship. But whereas the former is small, quiet and understated, The NoMad is massive, brash, and a little exhausting. Messrs. Humm and Guidara must, of course, choose their own path, but it will be interesting to see if all of this excitement is sustainable.

The NoMad (1170 Broadway at 28th Street, NoMad)

Food: A focused Euro-American menu, just a notch below luxurious
Service: Crisp, correct, and attentive
Ambiance: An over-the-top dining palace, without the tablecloths

Rating: ★★
Why? Humm is a great chef, and there’s nothing in NYC quite like The NoMad

Corsino

Corsino never made it to the top of my review list when it opened in late 2009. I was put off by the repetitiveness of the Denton brothers’ restaurant proffer: all they seemed to do was clone their original casual Italian spot, ’inoteca, with minor tweaks from one installation to the next. (An attempt at upscale Italian, Bar Milano, was a spectacular flame-out.)

In the meantime, the brothers split up recently, with Jason buying out Joe, who has moved to Australia.

Corsino sits on an ideal West Village street corner, with big glass windows on two sides letting in plenty of sunlight. The casual rustic décor is right out of the Dentons’ playbook.

The menu is a lineup of “the usual suspects,” with a few twists for the more adventurous, such as: tripe soup; oxtail ravioli with bitter chocolate; heritage brisket meatballs.

Prices are inexpensive, with crostini $2.50 apiece, antipasti $5–13, pastas $15–18, entrées $15–21, sides $7–9. The antipasti and pastas looked a lot more interesting, so we ordered only from those categories.

Affetatti (sliced meats) are $10 individually, but for $18 you get an impressive spread of testa (pig’s head), lingua (tongue), soppressata, prosciutto, mortadella, and speck.

 

The pastas were exemplary: strascinati (above left) with pork shoulder, pecorino & nutmeg; and clever special of buckwheat ravioli filled with spinach, decorated with flower petals (above right).

The wine list, too, is far better than you’d expect: eight pages, all Italian, grouped by region. You could spend hundreds, but there’s an ample selection below $40—as there should be (ahem: Gabe Stulman). Service was attentive, but our visit early on a slow Sunday evening, with the restaurant less than half full, may not be typical.

It’s hard to call Corsino a destination, when so many neighborhoods have Italian food of this quality, but it is certainly enjoyable here (especially when it’s not busy), and the wine list will reward repeat visits.

Corsino (637 Hudson Street at Horatio Street, West Village)

Food: good, seasona, casual, Italian
Service: friendly and attentive
Ambiance: cookie-cutter rustic chic

Rating: ★
Why? The food is pretty good and the wine list is even better

Bohemian

 

Any popular restaurant must decide how to ration access to its scarcest resource: seats. The two most common strategies are accepting reservations and taking walk-ins—first-come, first-served. Even those basic strategies have variations, from the funky online reservation system at Momofuku Ko, to the transferrable tickets sold at Grant Achatz’s Next.

Some restaurants that take reservations the old-fashioned way—by phone—are in such high demand that a prime-time table is practically inaccessible by normal means. Blue Hill Stone Barns takes reservations two months to the day in advance, and routinely fills up within minutes. You won’t find me anytime soon at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, the tasting menu at Roberta’s, or the three-day-a-week pop-up Frej, to name a few: there are too many hoops to jump.

Taking walk-ins is said to be more “democratic,” but the hassle we endured recently, just for the privilege of eating at Danji in Hell’s Kitchen, is a reminder that this often isn’t any fun at all.

At first blush, the door at the Japanese restaurant Bohemian seems more seems more impenetrable than all of these put together. There’s no listed telephone number, and it takes creative googling to find the website, the hopelessly unguessable playearth.jp, which it shares with sister restaurants in Nishiazabu, Japan, and Bali, Indonesia.

It doesn’t appear to be a restaurant website at all. After a few clicks, you find an explanation, and it’s not encouraging: “Please keep in mind that the location and contact info is not open to the public, so please be referred by somone who has already visited us.

“If there are people feeling, ‘I haven’t been there, but I really want to visit!’ please send us a brief introduction of yourself to the email address below. We may contact you to come over!”

I tried the latter, and within an hour had a favorable response by email, which included the “secret” telephone number. A day or so later, I called and secured a Sunday evening reservation, and that was that.

The system is strange, but try getting someone on the phone at Mario Batali’s Babbo: I remember getting busy signals for weeks, before I finally spoke to a human being. The first time I booked at Per Se, it took 45 minutes to get through—and I had to call exactly at 10:00 a.m. the day that bookings opened for the date I wanted.

I’m not here to defend Bohemian’s Byzantine ways, only to point out that it’s a lot more accessible than many restaurants that ration access using far more traditional methods. Plenty of folks have cracked the code: Bohemian has a 27/25/28 rating on Zagat.

Like everything else about Bohemian, the location is not at all obvious: at the back of a long, mysterious corridor fronted by a NoHo butcher shop on Great Jones Street. You ring a doorbell, and if you’re on the list (walk-ins aren’t accepted), the server admits you.

There are twenty-five seats, most at low-slung tables and sofas, as if you’re the guest in someone’s rec room. We were offered seats at the bar, which might be preferable. It’s a very deep bar, with ample room for placemats and drinks; seating is comfortable.

Despite various news stories and blog posts describing Bohemian as “private” or “mysterious,” they do not discourage publicity, once you finally get in. Illustrated blog posts, like this one, aren’t hard to find. But most reviewers honor the restaurant’s request not to disclose the address or phone number, as will I, even though neither is all that hard to find.

An evening here progresses, more or less, as it would at any restaurant. The izakaya style menu offers various small and medium-size plates, in a wide price range, but not expensive for what you get. (Click on the miniature image above to see more.)

The style of the cuisine might be called fusion, with traditional sushi and sashimi and the ever-present miso black cod, standing alongside “Mac & Cheese,” fresh oysters, and mini-burgers.

We had the six-course tasting menu, which at $55 might be one of the best bargains in town. However, I get the impression it seldom changes, as most of the other reviews I’ve read, featured mostly the same dishes.

  

The three starters were just fine, though not really memorable on their own: a fresh vegetable fondue (above left), an uni croquette (above center), and assorted cold cuts (above right).

But the entrée was one of the best dishes I’ve had all year, a pan roasted branzini with a bounty of seasonal vegetables, including potatoes, asparagus, olives, onions, garlic, Brussels sprouts, and several others I’ve forgotten. The skin of the fish was nicely crisped, and succulent inside.

We were served the whole fish, which (with the vegetables) was more than we could finish. It shows on the à la carte menu at just $28, which I assume is a half portion.

  

The fourth course is the only one for which a choice is offered. I had the mini-burger (above left), described as “Washu,” one of the breeds that appears on most menus as “Wagyu.” Served medium rare, it had a rich, fatty taste, served with two fried potato slivers. The other option was the Ikura Caviar Rice Bowl (above center), a dish so luscious it could almost be dessert.

A simple but effective Almond Pannacotta (above right) with black tapioca concluded the evening.

The restaurant was fully booked on a Sunday evening. Our tasting menu progressed at a comfortable pace. With its relatively small dining room, a couple of servers seemed to have no trouble keeping diners fed and lubricated.

The quality of the food took a notable step up mid-way through, with the arrival of the branzino, which was so good that it might almost have been worth $55 all by itself. To pay that for five courses was remarkable.

Bohemian

Food: Traditional Japanese and fusion cuisine
Service: Attentive and personal
Ambiance: The feel of a private club in someone’s home

Rating: ★★
Why? Relaxing and enjoyable. “Secrecy” works to its advantage.

Molyvos

Have you been to Molyvos latelty? Once at the vanguard of the city’s Greek dining scene, in recent years it had fallen into irrelevance, seldom mentioned, a scene for revelers and tourists. Of course, any decent restaurant near the Theater District is going to have customers, but Molyvos surely considered itself better than that.

I don’t know if it was the lack of press or a paltry 19 rating for décor on Zagat that made the owners finally take notice. On my last visit, I don’t remember disliking it. But I recall it was dark and and kitschy, dominated by amphorae and other Greek bric-à-brac. (There’s a slideshow of the old décor at New York.)

The space is now brighter and less cluttered, more in Aegean blues than archeological browns. This isn’t a bid to reclaim the three-star rating the restaurant once had (from Ruth Reichl) when it opened in 1997, before Eric Asimov knocked it back to two, five years later. It remains a Theater District restaurant at its heart, turning out food at too hectic a pace to be as careful and as luxurious as it should be.

But this is still very good Greek cuisine, a genre under-represented in Manhattan, and the wine list is fabulous. The website claims the most extensive selection of Greek wines in the United States: 400 bottles, with no bail-out for timid drinkers hesitant to order labels they don’t recognize. I have certainly never seen more Greek wines on one list. There are nearly 40 wines available by the glass, and should you find yourself at sea, the staff know the list well and give sage advice.

On the menu, there’s a separate category of about a dozen Mezedes, or small plates ($7–10) for the bar crowd. Appetizers are $12–18, entrées $22–36 (most $30 and up), with a separate list of a half-dozen whole fish by the pound, perhaps a trap for the unwary.

I’ve no basis for comparison with older menus, but there’s continuity here: the same executive chef, Jim Botsakos, has been around from the beginning.

 

I didn’t sample the Soupia (cuttlefish) on a bed of orzo ($24; above left), but both my guests said it was far too salty, and it was left half-uneaten. Arni Kokkinisto ($30; above right), a slow-cooked lamb stew, was tender and full of flavor, but an unimpressive presentation at the price.

 

I loved the Barbounia ($30; above left), four whole fish with a rich, wood-grilled flavor. You would expect the fish to be excellent here, as the same owners also run Oceana, midtown’s best seafood restaurant without four stars; and Abboccato, where the seafood is likewise a strength. A side of spinach ($7; above right) was quite good, as well.

Molyvos isn’t suffering for business at all. At 6:30 p.m. on a Monday evening, there was a large banquet at the back of the restaurant. By the time we left, most tables were taken, and there was a lively bar crowd. Post-renovation, Molyvos no longer looks old-fashioned, and its wine list has quietly grown to the best of its kind in New York. The menu must be carefully navigated, but I suspect the whole fish will never let you down.

If you haven’t gone in a while, Molyvos deserves another look.

Molyvos (871 Seventh Avenue between 55th & 56th Streets, West Midtown)

Food: Very good classic Greek cuisine and whole fish
Wine: 400 bottles, 40 by the glass, all Greek; the best of its kind in New York
Service: Knowledgeable and attentive, bearing in mind the size of the place
Ambiance: Bright, modern, less touristy than before

Rating: ★★
Why? For the incomparable wine list and the excellent whole fish

Lani Kai

Note: Lani Kai closed in September 2012. It has been replaced by The Dalloway, a Lesbian-themed bar and lounge.

*

When the Hawaiian-themed Lani Kai opened eighteen months ago in the old Tailor space, it got plenty of publicity, but the major critics ignored it. I dropped in for cocktails in late 2010, but never felt like going back for dinner. A favorable Times review last week made me wonder what I had missed.

Julie Reiner, the owner, is known mainly for a couple of excellent cocktail spots, Flatiron Lounge and Clover Club. But she is from Hawaii, so this seemed like the obvious choice for her first restaurant.

I gather it has been a struggle: the restaurant is routinely available on OpenTable, practically any day, any time. It’s on a dull block in Soho’s southwest corner that doesn’t attract a lot of foot traffic. The cocktails, naturally, are first-rate, but that isn’t enough, especially with a rather large bi-level space to fill.

I suspect that, to most people, Hawaiian cuisine doesn’t set the pulse racing. The image that comes to mind is the luau, often an over-priced, mediocre tourist trap.

Ms. Reiner hired a new chef recently, Japanese native Sawako Okochi, who worked previously as a sous-chef at Annisa. Her challenge is to make the food relevant, while staying within a fairly tight price point: appetizers and sharing plates are $7–15, entrées $19–26.

Cocktails are $13, a good $2–3 less than many locations get away with these days. During Happy Hour they’re even less. The Bearded Lady (below left) was just $10, the 808 State (below center) just $6. Both of these seemed like cruise-ship cocktails to me. I liked the Flatiron Martini (no photo) a lot better.

  

The wine list is pretty bare-bones. A Pouilly-Fuissé was $29; it came in a decorative wooden ice bucket (above right).

The Pu-Pu platter plus a side order of pork buns was enough for the three of us to eat. There’s a choice of seven items that can go on the platter, of which you choose four, but they all have a different à la carte price. The crab wantons ($8) were the best of these. Baby back ribs ($13) were thick and meaty. Chicken wings ($10) and Chicken yakitori skewers ($8) were just fine, as were the pork buns ($8 for two). The platter also comes with a mound of chips (which dominate the front of the photo).

But for the most part, this has the distinct feel of beach-resort food, prepared with a bit more care, but ultimately not very memorable. I say this without having sampled the entrées, but The Times thought that those were even less exciting.

We had a quite early reservation on a Tuesday evening and had the place mostly to ourselves, except for a rather loud group taking up most of the communal table. I spotted Ms. Reiner briefly, but she was working mostly out of sight.

The space has been remodeled slightly, but the bones of the old Tailor space are quite apparent. There is now a small bar on the ground floor at the back of the dining room, and as before, a large cocktail lounge downstairs. I assume that this space gets a lot busier later in the evening and on weekends.

I might drop in again one of these days, more for the cocktails than the food, although there is plenty to snack on if you don’t want to drink on an empty stomach.

Lani Kai (525 Broome Street between Sixth Avenue & Thompson Street, SoHo)

Food: Populist Hawaiian cuisine that transports you to a Honululu beach
Cocktails: The real reason for coming here, but I’d avoid the cruise-ship ones
Service: Fine
Ambiance: Upscale Club-Med

Rating: ★
Why? Good for cocktails — but so are a lot of places 

The Bread Man at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria

In Pete Wells’s ecstatic three-star review of Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, he was rapturous about the bread:

Is it … logical to fall for a restaurant because of sliced bread in a basket? It was remarkable stuff, with the gradually unfolding nuances of taste that are achieved only through a slow and patient fermentation of dough with wild yeast.

In my own review, I was respectful but far less excited:

The bread service is pretty good, but not quite deserving of critic Wells’s near-orgasmic description. It’s made in in-house and a tad fresher than you’ll get most places, but hardly anything to change your life.

This led to an email from Kamel Saci, the head bread baker at Il Buco A&V. From the photo in my review, he inferred I’d been served the ciabatta, a “very good” but “simple” example of his work, and asked if I’d revisit the restaurant for a “bread tasting.”

Mr. Saci works from 3:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., so we agreed I would drop in on a Saturday at about noon, near the end of his shift.

I little reckoned what I was in for. After I arrived, Mr. Saci emerged from the restaurant’s basement with a huge box, about twenty inches square, and led me to the second-floor dining room (which is unused during the day). The box contained about a dozen loaves of bread, all in different flavors and styles.

 

Over the next half-hour or so, Mr. Saci patiently cut a half-slice of bread from each loaf, delivering a mini-lecture on how it is made. My favorites were the parmigiana reggiano, black & green olive, and walnut & raisin breads, but this is without disparagement to the others, nearly all of which were very good. (There were one or two not to my liking, but it would be silly to complain when there are a dozen to choose from.)

Mr. Saci says that nowhere in town, outside of wholesale bakeries, makes so many different kinds of bread in house. I have no reason to doubt this. Even at restaurants reknowned for their bread service (Bouley, for example), I’ve never seen more than five or six choices at any given time.

But most of the breads I tried are not offered to the dinner guest. This is the drawback of a restaurant that doubles as a grocery, and wasn’t prepared to be quite as popular as it has become. By dinner time, the more interesting breads are gone. I had a fascinating lesson in the science of bread-baking, but most people couldn’t duplicate my experience.

 

After our tasting was over, Mr. Saci took me down two flights of stairs into the sub-basement, where there is a prep kitchen (above left) and the bread ovens (above right). The dough at Il Buco A&V is house-made and fermented with a natural leaven (not yeast), a process that takes 24 to 36 hours. He would prefer 48 hours, but I gather the cooler where the bread cures overnight (below left) doesn’t have enough space for that.

A circuitous route brought Mr. Saci, a French native, to Il Buco A&V. After several years on the ultimate fighting circuit, he took up baking in 1999. After training in Bordeaux, he eventually moved to London, where he supplied the breads for Pierre Gagnaire and Joël Robuchon. He then moved to Barcelona to open “the best bakery in Spain,” and in 2009 to a wholesale bakery in Miami, before coming to New York in 2011 to open Il Buco A&V.

  

After our tasting was over, Mr. Saci sent me home with about 10 pounds of bread, which we enjoyed over the next several days. Needless to say, we could not finish all of it. Several loaves are now in the freezer, which would probably make Mr. Saci cringe.

So, there are very good things, great things, going on in Il Buco A&V’s subterranean bakery. But it’s a pity that so little is left by dinner time.

Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria (53 Great Jones Street west of Bowery, NoHo)

Danji

Is there a “right way” to ration access to a popular restaurant? Our experience at Danji last weekend makes me wonder about that. (If you don’t want to read a rant about getting seated, page down to the asterisk below.)

Danji doesn’t take reservations, which is hardly a novelty in the casual dining scene. But many such places will at least take a phone number, and offer to phone or text when space frees up. Danji won’t even do that. The frequently-disappearing hostess quoted us a 30–45 minute wait, although it later became clear this was extremely optimistic.

“Can we put in our name?”

“What’s your name?”

“Marc.”

“OK, Marc.” She said it quickly and darted away, obviously not writing it down, not keeping a list, or offering to call whan a table freed up.

Had we elected to wait, there is nothing to do but stand against the wall in the narrow slip of a restaurant, as many do. (It’s even worse down the street at Totto Ramen, where a long line snakes out the door.) Instead, we hiked over to Ardesia for wine and crab dip (excellent!).

When we returned, about an hour later, we found the situation not much changed. A 2-top was vacant, and the hostess was nowhere to be seen. When she re-appeared, she gave it to a party whom she said had been waiting an hour; no indication of where we stood on the (non-existent) list.

We were ready to pack it in after another 20 minutes, before she finally seated us. At least we got one of the few tables, where the banquettes are comfortable (although very cramped) and the chairs have backs. Most of the seating is on stools at the bar or a communal table.

I don’t usually spill so much ink on the process of getting admitted to a restaurant, but we thought the service here was particularly poor—even within the context (with which I do not disapprove) of the no-reservations business model.

*

Having said all that, once you finally make it in here, the food is fine. It is not, in my opinion, good enough to justify the effort of getting in, especially as there aren’t any good bars nearby, where you can cool your heals. (Ardesia is a long walk.) But plenty of people endure the wait every day. Their priorities must be different than mine.

The chef here, Hooni Kim, has a distinguished pedigree, with brief stints (or stages?) at Daniel and Masa. He serves Korean small plates, designed for sharing, in a style somewhat resembling Momofuku Ssäm Bar, but the menu is more static and not nearly as good.

The plates are in two categories, Traditional and Modern, with about ten choices for each, $8–20 apiece (most in the $10–15 range). The menu has the usual nods to sourcing, with shout-outs for Satur Farms, Creekstone Farms, Niman Ranch, and Bell & Evans.

The server suggested that four to six plates was about right for two people, and that we could start small and order more later on. Kudos, at least, for that last bit: most places of this ilk ask for the whole order at once. It takes a while to get seated, but once you’re in they are in no hurry to push you out the door.

And to their credit, the four items we ordered came out in a sensible sequence, one at a time, as opposed to the dreaded “as-and-when they’re ready”; but the sharing plates were not replaced.

 

The first two dishes were from the “Modern” section of the menu. Spicy yellowtail sashimi ($15; above left) packed delightful heat from jalapeño and chochang, which (according to Wikipedia) is “a savory and pungent fermented Korean condiment made from red chili, glutinous rice, fermented soybeans and salt.”

Bossam ($20; above right) would impress you, unless you’d had the much better version of it at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The idea remains the same: braised pork, scallions, daikon, and cabbage wrap. The pork was terrific, but you get only six bites of it for $20.

 

Our second pair of dishes was from the traditional side of the menu. Poached Sablefish ($18; above left) in spicy daikon was flavorful and tender, although the sauce was a bit goopy.

Short Rib ($14; above right), with fingerlings, pearl onions, and toasted pine nuts, may have been the least satisfying: properly cooked short ribs are pretty easy to come by, and this version did little to distinguish itself.

The wine and sake list is short, on the order of twenty-five bottles. The server recommended the 2010 Cuvée Gyotaku Riesling ($38), a Pinot Blanc from Alsace that pairs well with the food. He offered to keep it on ice at the bar, but was too busy to keep tabs when we needed refills.

The reviews here have been all favorable: a Michelin star, one star from Sam Sifton, two stars from Bloomberg’s Ryan Sutton, and four out of five underground stars in New York. The project was obviously assembled with some care (see this blog chronicling its construction).

But Danji has not dealt well with prosperity. The menu has stagnated, and the servers cannot cope with the crowds. Considered on its own, the food is good enough (and inexpensive enough) to be of interest. But I do not think it is worth bothering with, given the hurdles you must jump to get seated. You can do better elsewhere.

Danji (346 W. 52nd Street between Eighth & Ninth Avenues, Hell’s Kitchen)

Food: Traditional and Modern Korean, adequate but not truly exciting
Wine: 25 bottles of wine and sake, well suited to the cuisine
Service: Hostess with an attitude; competent servers stretched to the limit
Ambiance: A cramped, minimalist space, seating 36, many at communal tables

Rating: Not recommended
Why? The food is good enough, but not worth the extremely long waits

La Quenelle

 

Note: La Quenelle closed after an extremely brief run. The chef, Cyril Reynaud, says he hopes to re-open in a “more intimate setting.”

*

During the Great Recession and its long aftermath, one chef after another substituted grand ambitions for humbler ones. You can’t blame the chefs for this: they have families to feed. Still, you can’t help cringing every time it happens. Or celebrating the opposite.

Enter La Quenelle, chef Cyril Renaud’s return to his métier after three years serving crêpes and flipping burgers.

The backstory in brief: Renaud worked for six years as chef de cuisine at Bouley and another four as executive chef at La Caravelle, where he earned three stars. Then in 2000, Renaud opened Fleur de Sel in a jewel box space in the Flatiron District. William Grimes awarded two stars; a Michelin star followed. I dined there twice, the first an ill-advised Christmas Eve (the usual rule about holiday meals) and a much better visit in 2006, to which I gave three stars.

In 2009, the chef added a casual spot around the corner, Bar Breton, dedicated to savory crêpes (called galettes), small plates, and of course a burger. We liked it—for what it was—but no one would mistake it for his flagship. But shortly thereafter, Fleur de Sel closed; unsurprisingly, the chef cited the economy.

Almost three years to the day, Renaud shuttered Bar Breton and re-christened it La Quenelle, returning to the more elegant classic French cuisine he was known for in the first place. (It’s named for the quenelles, a dish for which he was especially well known at La Caravelle.)

La Quenelle is necessarily a compromise, in many respects. It’s built on the bones of a much less elegant space, though he’s added tablecloths, lowered the lighting, and decorated it with his own paintings, which Grimes (at Fleur de Sel) called “wobbly efforts in the manner of van Gogh.” I’m not sure if the chandelier (above left) built from inverted glassware is Renaud’s work, but it’s a beaut.

He’s trying to bring back a more elegant class of service that Fleur de Sel had nailed, but the staff are still learning. When asked if he could transfer the bar tab to our table, the bartender took on a pained look, as if his dog had just died. “We prefer that you settle it here.” But after a conference with the manager, he transferred it anyway.

Memo to staff: no restaurant should tell you what it prefers: if you can accommodate what the customer has requested, just do it; better yet, offer before they ask. (When the Pink Pig dined here, a few days before we did, a similar request was not granted.)

The menu resurrects memories of Fleur de Sel to a considerable extent, but at a lower price point. Tellingly, although all the mains are above $25, only one surpasses the psychologically crucial $30 barrier. Appetizers are $13–17, and a five-course tasting menu is $75. In contrast, the last meal I had at Fleur de Sel was $79 prix fixe for three courses—and that was six years ago.

The lower prices probably limit the quality of the ingredients in ways I’m not able to articulate, but to me, this meal was a pretty good approximation of Fleur de Sel’s best.

 

I started with a Foie Gras trio ($18; above left), with a torchon, a terrine of glazed artichoke and black truffles, and another with smoked almonds. My girlfriend had the Burgundy Snail & Polenta ($15; above right) with a red wine maple sugar reduction and parmesan tuile. Both dishes were labor intensive, beautifully plated, and excellent.

 

So too were Maine Sea Scallops ($30; above left), with curry roasted carrots, fresh grapefruit, curry foam, and artichoke chips. The Quenelle de Brochet ($29; above right) is the chef’s signature dish, as well as the restaurant, so it is no surprise it’s superb: a delicate fish dumpling in a seafood and roots risotto, and bathed in a lobster foam.

When we don’t want a meal to end, we order dessert. The Mascarpone Banana Mousse ($12; right) with langue du chat, coffee ganache, and a white chocolate crisp, could do battle with the best of the dessert card anywhere in town.

The wine list could be broader and deeper. A 2002 Saint Emilion at $47 was one of the few bargains at the lower end. As they did at Fleur de Sel, the staff kept the wine on a cart in the middle of the dining room, a system that can only work if they are attentive about refilling empty glasses—which they were.

The only reviews so far are from Gael Greene and the aforementioned Pink Pig, both of whom had mixed, although largely positive, reactions. They also sampled more of the cuisine than we did.

Is La Quenelle the rebirth of Fleur de Sel, or a last gasp? Time will tell, but this cuisine is a notoriously tough sell with the professional critics. In the early going, Renaud can fill the place with old friends. Longer term success depends on reaching a new audience.

La Quenelle (254 Fifth Ave. between 28th & 29th Sreets, Gramercy/Flatiron District)

Food: Classic French, beautifully done, by a master of the trade
Wine: Mostly French, with some good bottles, but could use more breadth
Service: An approximation of the old Fleur de Sel, with some rough spots
Ambiance: The casual Bar Breton space, made more elegant and slightly redressed

Rating: ★★★
Why? If you treasure this cuisine (as we do), where else have you to go?