Wong

Note: Wong closed in July 2014. Nine months later, it re-opened with the somewhat unappetizing name Chomp Chomp, serving “Singaporean Hawker Food.” (Plans for a Vietnamese restaurant in the space called Vuong were abandoned.)

*

For all of my complaints about New York Times restaurant critics, I typically can’t make much use of their advice—even when they are right. By the time they get around to reviewing a place, there’s usually enough press that I have a pretty good sense of what is going on, even if I haven’t already been there myself (which I often have).

Wong was different. It was totally off my radar until Pete Wells gave it an enthusiastic two stars, three weeks ago. I went to the restaurant on his say-so, and ordered the dishes he recommended. I almost never do that.

Ya know what? He’s right. Wong is a great restaurant.

The chef, Simpson Wong, is Malaysian. His cuisine purports to be “Asian locavore,” although many of the dishes defy ready classification. Naan bread (left), served before the meal, seems to be the main nod to India; and I saw nothing Japanese.

The menus seem to be freshly printed, and the staff eagerly assure you that “97 percent” of the menu, including even the beers and wines, is sourced locally (and of course, sustainable, seasonal, yada yada yada). I have never visited Wong’s earlier restaurants—the now-closed Jefferson or the still-open Café Asean—so I have no basis for comparison.

There isn’t a huge selection, which for an Asian restaurant is unusual. I find it admirable that the chef focuses on a few things he does well. There are just eight appetizers ($9–15), eight rice dishes and entrées ($17–31), three sides ($6–7), and three desserts ($8–10).

About half the dishes are marked with a stylized “W”, indicating that they’re house specialities. This silly custom ought to be abandoned: either serve a dish proudly, or not at all.

Hakka Pork Belly ($13.50; above left) is as good a pork dish as you’ll find; it shares the plate with little tater tots made from taro root. Sea Scallops ($15; above right), as Wells noted, come with little deep-fried duck tongue fritters that steal the show.

Cha Ca La Wong ($17; above), Wells tells us, is a pun on a famous Hanoi restaurant, Cha Ca La Vong, where the only dish served consists of rice noodles and partly-cooked fish that you finish yourself at the table. The version here comes fully cooked in a sizzling cast-iron skillet; the fish is Hake, topped with tumeric (a kind of ginger), just slightly spicy.

Lobster Egg Foo Yong ($24; above) is a tour de force, not at all resembling the traditional dish that many Chinese restaurants serve. This winning combination of lobster claw, leeks, shrimp crumble, and two fried duck eggs, is an early candidate for dish of the year.

We don’t usually order dessert but had to try the Duck à la Plum ($9.50; above), with the incredible roast duck ice cream, plum sake, and a crispy tuile 5-spice cookie.

Wells complained about the minimal wine list, but the white wine we tried, a Rhone-inspired Patelin de Tablas Blanc, paired well with the food, and was reasonably priced, at $39. (The server called it a white Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which might be a stretch, though I see what he means.)

Crowds at Wong have picked up since the Wells review came out. It wasn’t quite full on a Thursday evening, but our reservation was fairly early. And yes, they do take reservations, a welcome rarity these days for restaurants of this kind.

Service, in fact, is a strength here, with plates and silverware promptly cleared and replaced after every course Chopsticks come in an attractive woven leather sleeve, and are better than the disposable kind most Asian restaurants give out. Staff understand the menu and give sensible ordering advice.

But there is nowhere to hang coats, and the space is not at all comfortable. We got a seat at the so-called “chef’s table” (really a bar) facing the open kitchen, which is preferable to the cramped and closely-spaced tables. Wherever you sit, you’ll be on a chair or a stool so diabolically uncomfortable that you’d think David Chang was an investor.

Despite that, Wong is one of the most original restaurants to have opened in New York in quite a while. I would suffer its uncomfortable stools to have more, please.

Wong (7 Cornelia Street near W. 4th Street, West Village)

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

Veritas

Note: Veritas closed in October 2013. A restaurant called élan, from former Chanterelle chef David Waltuck, is expected to open there in 2014.

*

The owners of Veritas must have been frustrated with their Odyssean quest to find a chef worthy of their four-star wine list.

Founding chef Scott Bryan left in October 2007 with no destination in mind (he is now at Apiary). Journeyman Ed Cotton replaced him, couldn’t get reviewed, and was fired after just eight months. His replacement, the excellent Gregory Pugin, served the best food Veritas ever had, but he couldn’t get reviewed either, and the owners pulled the plug after two years and declining customer interest.

This time, there were no half-measures. One day in August 2010, management locked out the staff and closed abruptly for “renovations.” I assumed “renovations” were a prelude to winding up the business—it usually works that way. But three months later, the “new” Veritas duly re-opened with Sam Hazen as chef and partner, along with the original owners (mainly, wine mega-collector Park B. Smith).

I thought that this was total capitulation. Despite some pretty impressive restaurants on Hazen’s C.V. (Quilted Giraffe, Le Gavroche, Quatorze, La Côte Basque), he spent the last decade wallowing in mediocrity (Todd English Enterprises, Lucy’s Cantina Royale), and had created Tao, possibly the worst restaurant of the century, if measured by the number of copycats (all terrible) that it has inspired. If you had to pick one restaurant that encapsulates everything wrong with contemporary dining in New York City, it would have to be Tao.

And they chose this guy??

Gone was the $92 prix fixe, replaced by a menu said to be “more affordable.” Now, I’m all for affordability, but the open question was whether Hazen could offer anything better than over-priced stoner food, to go with co-owner Smith’s incredible wine collection. A three-star review from Sam Sifton was the first indication that, perhaps, Hazen was capable of better thngs than his resume suggested.

That new “affordability” is all relative. On Hazen’s New American locavore menu, appetizers are $13–22, entrées $29–49, desserts $11–13. That’s hardly bargain dining. But our food bill at the new Veritas was $107 for two (that’s before alcohol, tax, or tip), and we skipped dessert, an option the old menu wouldn’t have permitted. Remember, at the old Veritas it was $92 for one.

They’ve also banished the tablecloths. To be fair, even when table linens were fashionable, décor was never the strong suit at Veritas. The Brooklyn design firm Crème (Red Farm, Marc Forgione, Danji, La Promenade des Anglais) created a striking new look with painted white brick, stained wood accents, dark wood floors, filament bulbs, and floor-to-ceiling wine racks stocked with empty old bottles. It feels like a slightly derivative, more upscale version of what the one- and two-star restaurants are doing these days. But it is not unpleasant.

To my surprise, chef Hazen is serving very good, serious food, at the new Veritas. How he ever became involved with a shitshow like Tao is utterly beyond me, but the man hasn’t forgotten how to cook for real, and it seems he really is here to stay: he was in the house on a random Tuesday evening in January, with the restaurant about half full.

Wine is and always was the main point of dining at Veritas. Co-owner Park B. Smith told The Times that, to the 75,000 cellar that was already one of the city’s best, he’d added a “market list” with “quite a few choices for around $50 a bottle.” That is not really true: the majority of the market list is $60 or more (often way more), and you soon find yourself in the fifty-page reserve list, where practically all bottles are in three, four, and five figures.

Hazen’s menu is certainly as good as Veritas has served for most of its history (the all-too-brief Pugin era excepted), but it is not good enough to justify a visit unless you’re prepared to spend—and spend big—on wine. Even at a budget of $100 a bottle, 98 percent of the list will be out of your reach. It’s a pity that the $50–75 range is so anemic, but if you’re a wine lover you’ll drool with envy at the reserve list. Budget accordingly.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape remains a Veritas specialty. The section of the list devoted to it goes on for 3½ dual-column pages, with prices ranging from $105 to $5,500, and years ranging from 1978 to 2007. That nothing younger is offered (and indeed, the 2007s are not numerous) suggests that the restaurant is admirably waiting for younger bottles to mature before offering them for sale.

Anyhow: Châteauneuf-du-Pape is my own personal favorite, so there was no doubt what I would order. The 2000 Panisse Noble Révélation at $105 was sublime. (The staff decanted it, as they have done on past visits.) It only makes me wish I could afford more.

The amuse bouche (above right) was a warm winter vegetable soup. A choice of three breads was offered, along with soft butter. We both chose the house-made olive brioche, which was excellent.

Ibérico Ham ($19; above left) was offered as an announced special. Although there was nothing wrong with it, I thought that Hazen had defaulted to a luxury ingredient without doing much to augment it. In contrast, Merguez & Farm Egg ($15; above right) was superb, a hearty mix of spicy stewed tomatoes and lamb sausage.

Both entrées were well conceived, but were a bit less succulent than they ought to be. Striped Bass ($36; above left) is served crisp with the skin on, with eggplant, sweet peppers and sauce vierge. Wooly Pig ($37; above right), having a slightly more gamey flavor than other breeds, is brined in maple syrup overnight and served with a breaded stick of pork confit, which was excellent.

The evening ended with a plate of petits fours (right), and the staff gave us muffins to take home for breakfast. (The pastry chef is Emily Wallendjack, formerly of Cookshop.)

The staff are inclined to upsell, which we resisted. Sommelier Rubén Ramiro, having been asked for a recommendation around $100, suggested a bottle priced at $135. And the server had the temerity to encourage us to purchase a third entrée to share—the vegetarian item—although both entrées came with vegetables already.

Although it is easy enough to ignore the staff’s attempts to extract more money from the customer, it comes across as greedy and low-class, at a restaurant that is already very expensive.

But perhaps these compromises are the necessary evils to keep Park B. Smith’s extraordinary wine collection in the public eye. The “Brooklyn plus” décor is inoffensive; Chef Hazen’s cuisine is pretty good and might even be excellent on the right day. The service, aside from upselling, is acceptable.

Veritas (43 E. 20th St. between Broadway & Park Avenue South, Flatiron District)

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

Uva Restaurant and Wine Bar

I am leery of accepting dinner invitations from publicists, as it’s sometimes a signal that the restaurant is desperate.

At Uva Restaurant and Wine Bar, it is entirely the opposite. On a Wednesday evening, the charming, rustic space was bustling, full of the young, energetic, value-conscious diners that most people think the Upper East Side doesn’t have.

After it opened in 2005, Uva received just one professional review that I can find, a mostly favorable write-up from The Times in $25 & Under. It has received little media attention since then. Our visit was at the publicist’s invitation, and all of the usual caveats apply. However, between the four of us we were able to sample a good deal of the menu, and my friends didn’t hesitate to share their critical reactions, both positive and negative.

Uva is owned by the Lusardi family, whose sister restaurant down the block, Lusardi’s, serves a very similar Northern Italian menu in considerably more upscale surroundings. To the younger crowd that favors Uva, Lusardi’s is the old-fashioned white-tablecloth place where they’d take the grandparents. My age is about midway between most of Uva’s patrons and grandpa, and perhaps I’d probably enjoy the higher-priced (but much quieter) Lusardi’s a bit more. Uva is more cozy: with low ceilings and exposed brick right out of the downtown playbook, it does get loud in there.

But Uva has its charms, with 40 wines by the glass, most of them $12.50 or less; and 250 wines by the bottle in a wide range from $28 to a few reserve selections in three and four figures. (I assume Uva shares stock with Lusardi’s, which has a 500-bottle list.)

Although Uva is marketed as a wine bar, it has a full menu of antipasti, cheeses, pastas, and entrées. Portions are ample, and nothing costs more than $22. There is also a late-night menu from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., a rarity in this neighborhood.

Chisolino ($9.50; above left) is a dish I’ve not had before, an Emilian-style focaccia with Robiola cheese and preserved black truffles. This was one of the more satisfying and memorable dishes of the evening.

Of the two bruschette we tried (both $6.50), our table voted a slight preference for the Sundried Tomato Puree, Pesto & Pine Nuts (above left) over the Wild Mushrooms, Arugula & Parmigiano Cheese (above right).

The appetizer course was the evening’s best, with a quartet of excellent dishes:

1. Insalata di Barbabietole ($9; above left), a salad of red beets, goat cheese and fava bean salad. Some version of this dish seems to appear in every restaurant, but this was a fine rendition of it.

2. Involtini de Melanzane ($10; above right), eggplant stuffed with ricotta and spinach, baked in a pink sauce with mozzarela. This is a dish I’ve not seen before, and frankly one of the few eggplant dishes I have ever liked.

3. Polenta Tartufata ($9; above left), fresh polenta filled with robiola cheese in a black truffle sauce. This was probably my favorite dish of the evening, and like the stuffed eggplant, I haven’t seen anything quite resembling it before.

4. Burrata Barese ($13; above right), creamy mozzarella with yellow beef tomatoes, fava beans, and a balsamic glaze.

The pasta course (right) was competently executed, but less distinctive:

1. Gnocchi di Ricotta ($18), home made ricotta gnocchi in a creamy black truffle and chive sauce. (Truffles seem to figure in a lot of the dishes here.)

2. Pappardelle al Ragu di Vitelo ($17), house-made pasta ribbons sautéed with ragout of veal and montasio cheese.

3. Cavatelli al Pesto ($18), house-made pasta shells in a creamy pesto sauce with shaved ricotta.

All three were acceptable, but the sense of the table was that we’d had better versions of them elsewhere.

The entrées were all quite heavy, plated and sauced in a style that isn’t fashionable these days. Three of the four seemed to be swimming in the identical dark brown sauce, which was too much of a good thing.

Anello de Capesante e Speck ($22; above left), was the most striking of these dishes, with five scallops arranged in a pentagon held together with a string of smoked prosciutto, resting in sautéed spinach and a white wine sauce. The whole production had a rich, dusky flavor.

Polpaccio d’Agnello ($21; above right), a braised lamb shank, seemed (like most of the entrées) over-sauced.

Vitello Gratinato con Melanzane ($22; above left), veal topped with eggplant and soft pecorino cheese in a rosemary sauce, was a higher quality and more tender veal than the pounded-into-dust versions served at lesser restaurants.

Petto d’Anatra ($22; above right), a pan-seared duck breast in a thyme sauce, was served with sautéed oyster mushrooms, spinach, and fingerling potatoes. Here, the suace was so overwhelming that it was hard to taste much of the duck at all.

All four desserts we tried were excellent:

1. Torta di Mandate ($8; above left), an almond tart served warm with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.

2. Baci Perugina Mousse ($8.50; above right), a chocolate and hazelnut mousse topped with chocolate sauce and toasted hazelnuts.

3. Salame del Papa ($6.50; below left), a chocolate “salame” Venetian style.

4. Fragole con crema al mascarpone ($7.50; below right), fresh strawberries topped with mascarpone cream.

There wasn’t a dud among these, but if I must choose, the first two were more memorable.

To summarize, the starter and dessert courses were clear winners. The pastas were about typical of a good Italian restaurant in New York, while the entrées struck us as a tad old-fashioned and somewhat heavier than many diners are looking for these days. Having said that, they are certainly good for the neighborhood, especially at just $22, a good $4–5 less than many places would charge.

The service was excellent, as you’d expect at a pre-arranged meal, but if Uva is packed on a Wednesday in January after seven years in business, they are probably doing something right.

Uva (1486 Second Avenue between 77th & 78th Streets, Upper East Side)

Bigoli

Note: This is a review under chef Alex Stratta, who left the restaurant in March 2012 after Eater.com put the restaurant on “deathwatch.” In a rare admission, the owners actually thanked Eater for getting deathwatched: “It got our butts in gear and forced us to make changes more quickly.

But Deathwatch is not escaped so easily. The restaurant closed in October 2012.

*

Bigoli is the new Italian restaurant from Vegas transplant and Top Chef: Masters alum Alessandro (“Alex”) Stratta.

Stratta trained with Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud, and his first few restaurants were in the elaborate French mold: Mary Elaine’s at the Phoenician in Scottsdale, Renoir at the Mirage in Las Vegas, and Alex at the Wynn (since closed), which earned two Michelin stars. He followed that up with an Italian place, Stratta, also at the Wynn, with which he is no longer involved.

Bigoli is a serious, comfortable, and mostly enjoyable restaurant. It’s also a little disappointing.

Stratta told The Times that he “didn’t want to do fancy any more.” You can hardly blame him: the city’s critics are skeptical of fancy restaurants, and they usually hate imported chefs. A Michelin multi-star concept transplanted from Vegas would practically be begging to get panned, no matter how good it was.

But “unfancy” Italian is the most over-represented cuisine in New York City. Does Stratta have a point of view? The opening menu is completely anonymous. If I stripped off the logo and showed it to a dozen food-savvy New Yorkers, none would guess where it came from. No dish would leap off the page: “Oh my, who’s serving that?” You’ve seen it all before.

The only possibility Bigoli allows at the moment, is to prepare the food well, at a fair price, in a comfortable space. That it mostly does, but so do many of its competitors. Antipasti are $9–15, pastas $19–25, entrées $23–49. Except for the obligatory prime ribeye and rack of lamb, all the entres are under $30. A wood-burning oven features prominently in an open kitchen, but the current menu gives no indication of which dishes actually use that oven—not that this feature is at all unique these days.

The meal opens with a helping of thick bread, a pesto dipping sauce, and a selection of olives. A Burrata appetizer ($15; above right) was rather an odd grab bag, with a lonely eggplant crostino, a thin slice of prosciutto, and a few salad greens.

As my girlfriend noted, when you put Seared Sea Scallops ($28; above left) on the same plate with roasted cauliflower, pine nuts, raisins, and brown butter, good things are bound to happen. I could do without the schmear of what looks like baby food on the right side of the plate, but the taste I had of the scallops was excellent.

Braised meats are likewise sure-fire—here, Tuscan Veal ($26; above right) with tomatoes, Swiss chard and chickpeas.

The wine list is a starter set. The Torcicoda Primitivo 2004 seemed like a good buy at $50, but the server returned with a bottle of the 2009 and had no idea that it wasn’t what I ordered.

After I pointed this out, his absurd retort was: “Don’t worry. It’s fresher that way,” apparently unaware of the principle that older bottles are usually more desirable.

A manager appeared and offered to take the bottle back if I didn’t like it. It was decent enough for a 2009 (still priced at $50), and I kept it, though it’s not the bottle I would have chosen had it been listed as a 2009 on the printed list.

Aside from that, the service was friendly and attentive, but the food took quite a while to come out, even though it was not busy on a Wednesday evening. The restaurant is only a month old, and I suspect it will get better, but there is some work to do.

Bigoli occupies an historic townhouse on a West Village side street. Eater.com commenters hated the décor, but we rather liked it: I don’t think the photos do it justice. The banquettes are comfortable, and the tables don’t seem as tightly packed as they often are at such places.

The chef told The Times, “we’re coming here with an incredible level of humility. New Yorkers really know food but I’m hoping they’ll be kind and patient.” Unfortunately, New Yorkers aren’t known for patience. If Stratta has bigger and bolder ideas for the cuisine, I can’t imagine what he’s waiting for.

We found Bigoli comfortable and pleasant, and if the entrées weren’t especially memorable, they were at least well made. For that, I would go back again. But I think the chef needs to do more to make Bigoli stand out from the mine run of good Italian restaurants, of which the city has no shortage.

Bigoli (140 W. 13th Street between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Village)

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

Slightly Oliver

Slightly Oliver is a new “cocktail-themed gastropub” on the Upper West Side. That description is both a selling point and a constraint, the former because there isn’t much like it nearby, the latter because in any other neighborhood it would seem derivative.

The basic idea, we must admit, has been tried before—but not here. If you’re in the area, you ought to be delighted to find Slightly Oliver (Cockney slang for “slightly drunk”), which is unique, as far as I know, on the Upper West Side.

The formula is tweaked for uptown sensibilities. The “commonwealth-inspired” menu (mostly comfort-food standards) breaks no new ground, but it is extremely well made. We tried eight dishes, and I’d be happy to have them all again. Prices are low: most entrées are $20 or less. Cocktails are in three categories: punches ($7); house recipes (described somewhat annoyingly as “tasty” cocktails) ($9), and prohibition-era classics ($12) — a good deal less than you’d pay downtown.

The owner is Stanton DuToit, who also runs Tolani Wine Restaurant a few blocks away, and formerly Sojourn on the Upper East Side. I didn’t much care for Tolani, though I haven’t been back in a while. The idea here seems more carefully edited and focused. DuToit is a trained winemaker, and the wine lists are a strength at both restaurants. As at Tolani, there’s a glass-enclosed wine room visible from the dining room; here, it shares space with a mad-scientist chemistry set that’s used to make home-brew infusions.

There are three connected spaces: a bar in front, a narrow corridor with several comfortable booths separated by gauze curtains, and a dining room in back. It feels more spacious and comfortable than most downtown restaurants with a similar proffer. We visited on New Year’s Day, when neither of the two back rooms were very crowded. There are plenty of exposed hard surfaces (brick, wooden tables) that could reflect sound, if the space were full.

Dislosure: My visit wasn’t pre-arranged with the management, but Mr. DuToit recognized me. He sent out eleven(!) different cocktails, all at no charge, and four comped dishes, in addition to the four we ordered and paid for.

We sampled a wide swath of the cocktail menu. There is a tendency to sweetness; I best liked the ones with offsetting bitter or spicy flavors. Among the punches, try the Last Night in Paris (Claro rum, spiced rum, absinthe, fresh mint reduction, pink grapefruit juice, house blended spices, whisky bitters).

Among the house cocktails (left), I preferred Oliver’s Cilantro (infused gin, Lillet Blanc, house made sour, and cucumber) and the Slightly Green Martini (vodka, green pepper reduction, dill elixir, house made sour mix). I did wince at the idea of calling something a martini that isn’t.

I especially liked the old standards, even if by then I was too, er, Oliver to finish them. The Negroni and the Manhattan, while both recognizable as the classics they are, both had an extra tang of spice that I don’t recall in other versions of them.

Over now to the food, the Chicken Liver & Foie Gras Pâté ($8; above left) was luscious and creamy, though there is not enough toast for it. The staff offered to send more, but I declined, knowing how much was coming.

There are several pizza-like dishes, which they call “flats.” The Spaniard ($12; above right) with chorizo, manchego, and piquillo peppers, was especially good.

There’s a section of the menu called “Stacks” (all $16) and though I’ve no complaints with these items, perhaps they’re comparatively skippable. Duck Spring Rolls (above left) made for a tasty snack food. Kobe Beef Sliders and Bittermilk Chicken Sliders (below left) were just fine, although you’ve had others just as good elsewhere.

Swiss Chard and Ricotta Ravioli ($14; above right) probably violated the legal limit on the amount of butter and cream allowed in one dish, but, oh my! They were absolutely fantastic.

There’s also an excellent rendition of braised short ribs ($18; above right), served here with celery root purée, braised leeks, and apple gastrique.

I would describe the Sticky Toffee Pudding ($8; right) as my dessert of the year, but it was New Year’s Day, so that isn’t saying much. I don’t remember a more enjoyable dessert last year either. Other desserts shown on the menu (a pecan bourbon pie, an apple–huckleberry crisp) sound equally appealing.

If I have a concern about Slightly Oliver, it’s the over-reliance on consultants. Jason Hicks of Jones Wood Foundry helps out in the kitchen (Mr. DuToit says he is there twice a week). Pre-opening publicity also included cocktail whiz Albert Trummer. You’d prefer to see a restaurant grow organically, rather than leaning on people whose main focus is elsewhere.

But in these early days the cocktails are mostly quite good, and if the menu is somewhat predictable by downtown standards, at least the kitchen is acing it. The location at Amsterdam & 85th doesn’t attract a destination crowd, so if Slightly Oliver is going to work, neighborhood folk will have to embrace it, which they should.

Slightly Oliver (511 Amsterdam Ave. between 84th/85th Streets, Upper West Side)

Top Ten New Restaurants of 2011

Yesterday, I posted my top ten restaurant disappointments of 2011. Today, here are my ten best.

It was not a great year. Most of my choices come with hedges and caveats. There was no consensus #1, and among my top ten there are very few that I am confident will still be open, and still be good, a year or two from now.

As usual, the list includes restaurants I reviewed in 2011 that opened this year or late last year. (Most critics who make such lists seem to operate the same way, given that the standard reviewing cycle for a new restaurant is anywhere from two to four months after the opening date.)

Let me first mention a few places that didn’t make the cut. The Dutch and Tertulia are on the top-ten lists of every critic in town (Sifton, Platt, Sutton). I consider them disappointments, rather than hits, for the reasons I gave yesterday. Multiple critics mentioned Ciano and Kin Shop, and deservedly so, but I reviewed them late last year, so they were on my 2010 list.

Empellón was on all three critics’ lists. I didn’t enjoy my visit, partly due to the punishing sound level. I understand it has improved, but I was disappointed. The Red Rooster is on two out of the three critics’ lists. I found it not bad at all, but I have no particular desire to return.

I considered including the first-class revamp of the Monkey Bar. But it’s not a new restaurant, just a new staff, so it’s not on my list. Finally, there are some possibly excellent places that I simply didn’t get to: Danji, Romera, and Isa.

Now, to the list:

10. Gastroarte. This place had a rough start, after the chef was forced to change the original name (Graffit) in a trademark dispute. On an earlier visit, the kitchen was inconsistent, and the critics weren’t kind. By October, I found it much improved. Though not to all tastes, chef Jesús Núñez is serving some of the cleverest, most original food in the city.

9. Hospoda. This “beer hall” dedicated to Czech cuisine, also got very little critic love, and it took them a while to figure out the right price point. (A $76 prix fixe was wisely abandoned early on.) As I wrote in my original review: “There’s always a place in my heart for restaurants that come out of nowhere—that neither set nor follow any discernable trend; that exist, for no other reason than someone believes in an idea.”

8. Rouge et Blanc. This much-overlooked Vietnamese restaurant with an excellent wine list is on none of the major critics’ lists, simply because none of them reviewed it. Eric Asimov finally did so a month ago, giving it two stars.

7. Boulud Sud. For his second Lincoln Center restaurant, Daniel Boulud swam against the tide, and opened a relatively formal place (by modern standards), tablecloths and all. He was rewarded with mostly rapturous reviews for his best new restaurant in years, and a place on all three critics’ best-of-2011 lists. My only visit was relatively early, and the menu structure has changed since then. I wonder if Boulud can maintain the early high standard, now that the review cycle is over and his attentions are fixed elsewhere.

6. Fatty ’Cue (West Village). Zak Pelaccio promised that the second outpost of Fatty ’Cue would be more “grown up,” and he delivered. No one would call any Pelaccio restaurant formal, but this is the most polished and the most enjoyable of the four “Fatties” to date.

5. Crown. I waited and waited to visit Crown, worried that it was just another of chef John DeLucie’s over-priced pseudo-clubs. It turns out Crown is wonderful, an hommage to old-fashioned formality that even downtown folk are flocking to. DeLucie himself is not a great talent, but he put Crown in the hands of good people, and they delivered.

4. Junoon and Tulsi (tie). This was the year for haute Indian cuisine, with Junoon and Tulsi both winning Michelin stars. I visited Junoon twice (it has the better room and superior wine service), though the food at Tulsi might be better. I’m calling it a tie. [Yes, I know that gives me eleven restaurants on the list, rather than ten.]

3. Ai Fiori. As chef Michael White syndicates his empire globally, you start to wonder if he’s just going through the motions, but my meal there was superb, and his butter-poached lobster was probably the single best dish I had all year. The restaurant has since lost its chef de cuisine (Sifton knocked Ai Fiori off his list for this reason), but I’m paying tribute to what was achieved at the time, not for what the future holds.

2. Brushstroke. David Bouley has screwed up so many restaurants that it was almost a surprise when he got one right. Japanese Kaiseki cuisine is a tough sell in New York (there are very few places that offer it), and Bouley isn’t making it any easier on himself with the world’s worst restaurant website. As of September there were month-long waits for reservations, but the happy hour menu recently announced could be a sign of trouble.

1. Jungsik. This was my last review of the year, and the best new restaurant of the year. Alas, the city’s critics have little patience for upscale prix fixe Korean cuisine. I worry they’ll be forced to dumb down the menu (prices have already been reduced), but for now it’s excellent.

Top Ten Restaurant Disappointments of 2011

It’s time once again for the annual wrap-up. I’ll talk about disappointments here, and favorites in a subsequent post.

Just a few ground rules: I only write about restaurants I visited. Does the “neurogastronomy” restaurant Romera belong in the top ten or the bottom ten? So far, I’ve not been tempted to drop $125 a head to find out.

Except for the bottom section below (“Sad Goodbyes”), every restaurant on the list opened in 2011 or late in 2010, and was first reviewed here in 2011.

My standards for this type of list are a bit different than other people’s. I didn’t have many actively bad meals in 2011, though I didn’t have many great ones either. It was a mediocre year for restaurants in New York. Unlike professional critics, I don’t visit places I know (or strongly believe) are bad, out of journalistic obligation to review them. Once I’ve had a bad meal, I seldom pay the second or third visit a professional critic would, before passing judgment.

So, the list below is not a list of ten bad restaurants, though there are a few of those. Instead, it’s a list of places that, in my judgment, missed an opportunity to be better, or are not as good as they ought to be. I’ve even included a couple of critical darlings that, as I see it, are resting on shaky laurels.

As a point of comparison, Lincoln was #1 on last year’s most-disappointing list. I did not dislike Lincoln: I had given it 2 stars and have gone back frequently. But in relation to what it could and should be, Lincoln was the most disappointing restaurant of 2010. (For the record, Lincoln is improving, though it’s not yet the three-star restaurant it aspires to be.)

On with the list:

Missed Opportunities:

10. Marble Lane. This was my worst meal of the year. With career mediocrity Manuel Treviño as chef in a clubby Meatpacking District hotel, why on earth did I go there? But it’s not merely my bad judgment that got Marble Lane on this list. I found the place empty, so apparently everyone else in town had figured out what I had not.

9. Left Bank. This was my second-worst meal of the year. It wasn’t really all that bad, and the problems are fixable, but other restaurants have failed in this location; most of the pro critics ignored it; and they chose a meaningless name that is too easily confused with other establishments.

8. Casa Nonna. Jimmy Haber broke up with Laurent Tourondel, so that he could do this? Why doesn’t he just open an Applebees?

7. WallE. We actually liked WallE, the unbuttoned spinoff of Chinese standard Chin Chin. But despite great opening press, it got very few reviews (Steve Cuozzo of The Post panned it), and the quasi-lounge ambiance is a real downer. These guys should have left the lounge business to those who know how to do it.

6. Duo. The folks from Duvet (the restaurant/lounge where guests dined on beds) opened Duo, a strangly posh restaurant with illuminated menus, footmen, and purse stools. We wouldn’t mind those things in the right place, but here it seemed silly. The opening chef was pretty good, but he was fired after two months, and there are no professional reviews to date.

5. Tenpenny. A lot of folks loved Tenpenny, a place that proved hotel restaurants don’t have to be bad. But just six months in, managing partner Jeff Tascarella left the restaurant to open the new Daniel Humm/Will Guidara place in the NoMad hotel. Chef Chris Cippollone followed him out the door two months later.

Not As Good As They Should Be

4. Fedora. Like most of Gabe Stulman’s growing clutch of West Village restaurants, Fedora is a solid neighborhood place. But with an alum of the sainted Montreal restaurant Au Pied de Cochon in the kitchen, some of us expected the fireworks generated by the short-lived M. Wells in Long Island City. What we got, instead, was forgettable and ordinary. Fedora isn’t struggling. Not one bit. If he actually cares, this is Stulman’s chance to do something better.

3. Tertulia. I was so surprised by the critical hype for Tertulia that I did something I rarely do: visited three times, to see if my first and second impressions were mistaken. Though not bad, the dishes I tried were hits and misses in equal measure. Having made it on just about every critic’s top-ten list, I realize that chef Seamus Mullen isn’t going to change a thing. Why should he?

2. The Dutch. Much like Fedora and Tertulia, The Dutch isn’t bad, but I think it is coasting, and the claims of some critics that it made Minetta Tavern “irrelevant” are just plain daft. Sam Sifton named The Dutch Restaurant of the Year, yet another absurd judgment from him that makes me happy he is no longer writing reviews.

Sad Goodbyes

1c. What Happens When. Dovetail chef John Fraser had a terrific, crazy idea: a restaurant that would change everything (menu, décor, cuisine) every month—but only for nine months, and then close for good. I’d hoped to go more often, but only made it there once. In the end, a stupid dispute over a liquor license forced him to close after just five months. Had it been a permanent restaurant, I likely would have given it 2½ stars.

1b. Daniel Angerer’s Empire. This chef had a pretty good thing going, with Klee Brasserie, Brats and the Little Cheese Pub in the heart of Chelsea. Within a matter of months, he closed Brats, announced plans to turn Klee into a wine bar, and then sold both remaining places outright. Angerer now runs the kitchens for the Dig Inn Seasonal Market chain.

1a. Alto and Convivio. If anyone had an annus horribilis in the NYC restaurant industry, it’s Chris Cannon. In January, he officially announced his break-up with the chef Michael White. In February, he announced new chefs at the two restaurants he retained, Alto and Convivio. And then, most mysteriously, Alto and Convivio closed a month later. On the same day. The simultaneous closure remains unexplained: neither restaurant was believed to be struggling. There are rumors, which I will not repeat; Cannon himself has been mum. In one day, two of the city’s best Italian restaurants, with nine Michelin and New York Times stars between them, were gone.

Jungsik

Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Or maybe it wasn’t Twain—the statement has been attributed to more than one writer.

Today, I find myself making the opposite excuse. This review is shorter than it ought to be. Jungsik, the new Korean restaurant that opened three months ago in the old Chanterelle space, is excellent. It will probably be #1 on my “Best of 2011” list. But I don’t have time to write a long review, so I’ll make do with general impressions. Here is the most important one:

Go!

Jungsik is the kind of restaurant that should have a detailed and adoring review, because it will get precious few of these. Adam Platt has already given it just one star, even though he thought the cooking deserved three. That’s Platt for you. Sam Sifton was so offended that he slammed the place in his last “Hey, Mr. Critic” column.

To be sure, Jungsik faces a headwind. It’s a clone of a Seoul restaurant, and the city’s critics almost always deduct a star for imported concepts. We loved the quiet, austere space, with its white tablecloths and elegant service. But most of the city’s current crop of critics, having declared fine dining dead, cannot bear to see a restaurant that swims against the tide. (Sam Sifton compared it to an airport lounge, which makes me wonder where he’s been flying.)

Diners are not accustomed to an expensive prix fixe for Korean food, or indeed, for any Asian cuisine except Japanese. There have been adjustments. Jungsik opened with a $125 five-course prix fixe, as much as Eleven Madison Park. It’s good, but it isn’t that good. The current price is $115 for five courses, with a three-course option at $80. That’s a big step in the right direction.

The five-course meal includes a salad, a rice or noodle dish, a fish course, a meat course, and dessert, with three or four choices for each. The three-course option, which we had, includes the first two and one meat or fish course. But it comes with three flights of amuses and petits fours, making it more like a five-course meal anyway. Indeed, I was unable to finish my entrée, which was a pity, as it was the best pork belly I have had all year.

Above and below left: three flights of amuses bouches.

Above right: bread service.

Above left: Bibim with tomato and arugula sorbet.
Above right: Four Seasons with parsley, zucchini, and quail egg.

(The kitchen seems to prefer eccentric platings with all of the food at one edge of the plate. You’ll see that over and over again in these photos.)

Above left: Sea Urchin with Korean seaweed rice and crispy quinoa
Above right: Champs-Elysées with Foie gras and kimchi

Above left: Black Cod
Above right: Five Senses Pork Belly
Below left: Petits fours

Though I’ve not described the dishes in much detail, there wasn’t a dud among them. And for that much food, suddenly $80 doesn’t seem so extravagant.

The drawback is that you can’t dip into the menu selectively. I’d love to go back and order just the pork belly, but I cannot. Platt deducted a whole star for that. But you can’t order à la carte at any of the top ten restaurants in the Platt 101, nor at any restaurant that currently has four stars from The Times.

The question is whether Jungsik will be able to get away with charging as if it’s a four-star (or high three-star) restaurant. It was about 3/4ths full by 9:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, but December is always a good month for restaurants. The acid test is to survive the winter.

It’s not for me to predict the future, only to say what Jungsik is now: a three-star restaurant.

Jungsik (2 Harrison Street at Hudson Street)

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

The Three Hens

The Three Hens, which opened in September, did not set my pulse racing. The proffer of “American comfort food with a twist” is a story we’ve heard before. A lot. But I occasionally have evening events in that part of Murray Hill, so it went on the list, waiting for an opportunity to visit, and last Friday night we finally got around to it.

The neighborhood is often called Curry Hill, for its many Indian restaurants. The Three Hens feels a little out of place, but the owner, Shiva Natarajan of nearby Dhaba (and Chola in midtown), knows the area, and probably wanted to keep an eye on it.

There’s no hint of Indian cuisine here at all. The chef, Colin Cruzik, cooked in a similar idiom at Jo’s, which we rather liked, but he and the owners parted ways over disagreements about the direction of the restaurant. (I got the sense that Cruzik, a Bouley and Nobu alum, was trying to take it in a more upscale direction than the owners were comfortable with.)

The menu, as promised, is upscale comfort food, and not terribly expensive, with appetizers $10–17, soups & salads $7–14, burgers $12–14, pastas and entrées $13–24, and side dishes $5–9. There’s the now de rigeur footnote that ingredients are sourced locally, organically, and “responsibly.”

It makes the review less interesting when we both order the same thing—but that’s what we wanted, so it’ll have to suffice: the lamb burger ($16). The meat had a strong, rich taste, although the bun was a bit too big for the patty. The fries were superb, perhaps the best we’ve had all year, with the exterior crunch exactly right.

We didn’t have wine, but the bar makes a good rendition of an Aviation.

The dining room has wooden tables and metal chairs, but there are broad picture-windows facing onto 23rd Street, and there will be an outdoor café in good weather. The walls are painted a slate gray except for one alcove that sports a leafy green pattern. There are several indoor trees, with bare-bulb chandeliers overhead.

We were about 20 minutes late for our reservation, and I wondered if they’d hold our table. You never know how it is with new restaurants. I needn’t have worried. It was empty at 6:20 p.m. A few parties wandered in before we left an hour later, but it was nowhere close to full. On a Friday night, that’s worrisome.

Lacking either a name chef or the sort of menu that attracts critics, The Three Hens will have to build a reputation the old-fashioned way: slowly, and by word of mouth. They’ve certainly earned a repeat visit from me.

The Three Hens (115 Lexington Avenue at 28th Street, Murray Hill)

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

La Mar Cebicheria Peruana

La M.C.P. closed in August 2013 after two years in business. I am not surprised: as discussed in the review below, there were many reasons to be skeptical.

*

On either the website or the printed menu at La Mar Cebicheria Peruana, the first thing you see is the list of cities where the restaurant is franchised: eight of them to date. In all, chef Gastón Acurio has thirty-three restaurants on three continents, most of them duplicates trading under a handful of names, like Astrid and Gastón, Tanta, and La Mar. He makes Jean-Georges Vongerichten look like a small-time operator.

I guess Chef Acurio never got the memo: New Yorkers don’t take kindly to imported franchises and chefs. He would have been far wiser to open under a new name, giving at least the impression that he was creating something unique. It could have been a complete sham, but who would know?

Then, there’s the location, the former home to Tabla. Even Danny Meyer didn’t survive here. It’s a large space on two levels, in a high-rent building. Only a well-capitalized operator who was very sure of both himself and his concept would have considered it. But restaurants need to fit the personality of their neighborhoods, and La Mar (named for the sea) feels like a cruise ship past its prime. Does that work at Madison Square Park? Only time will tell.

Wikipedia proclaims Chef Acurio “a true culinary visionary who has put all his effort into rediscovering Peruvian cuisine.” (Apparently the Wiki Police have not yet gotten around to censoring this clearly biased article.) Besides nearly three dozen restaurants, he hosts a television show in Perú and is author of various cookbooks and magazines. That’s a lot to live up to.

The menu is in six categories, a layout that blurs the line between appetizers and entrées, and seems calculated to provoke over-ordering. The traditional appetizers are $11–18, the main courses $26–42, which makes La Mar a rather expensive restaurant, especially if you accept the tacit invitation to order from each group.

We did the opposite, eschewing the so-called appetizers and entrées entirely. In the meantime, it’s easy to fill up on fried plantain chips (above left) with their appealing hot dipping sauce.

The Cebiches ($15–28), the so-called national dish of Perú, lead off the menu. There’s much more variety here than the Mexican ceviches commonly seen on New York menus. The “Tigre Tasting” ($15; above left) offered three drinkable shot-glasses: fish, shrimp, and octopus, all fairly spicy. But I liked the “Popular” ($18; above right) better, with salmon, shrimp, ocotpus, and crisp calamari in a tart green sauce.

Tiraditos (raw fish) are Perú’s answer to sashimi, though to me Italian crudi seemed like a more apt analogy. Three kinds are offered (all $18), of which we tried two (above left), the Nikei (Toro tuna with chile pepper, tamarind, and sesame oil) and the Chaifa (wild salmon belly and cilantro in passion fruit).

Carapulcra is a Peruvian dish akin to a potato stew. It was offered as a recited special, with pork belly as a decidedly non-traditional extra ingredient. The dish as presented ($26; above right) didn’t resemble a stew at all. Was it meant to be an appetizer or an entrée? After multiple failed attempts to get an explanation, we decided to take our chances. It was pretty good, but it’s difficult to ruin pork belly.

The wine list features an ample selection of Argentinean, Brazilian, and Chilean wines, along with more familiar fare from Spain and California. The price range is in line with the food, with decent options below $50, though they were out of my first choice.

The space has a bright new design from starchitect Stephanie Goto (Corton, Aldea). I don’t think it’s her best work, but maybe this tired look is what the client wanted. The layout is the same as Tabla, with a bar and lounge on the ground floor and the main dining room up a flight of steps. It was about half full on a Saturday evening; still, we had trouble hearing our server’s recitation of the daily specials.

The food was all at least pleasant and inoffensive, but it is nothing I am dying to have again. Add two glasses of sangria at the bar ($13 each), and a bottle of Malbec at the table ($52), and we were well above $100 a head, and that’s without ordering traditional entrées. Absent more excitement on the plate, I am somewhat skeptical that the restaurant can build a long-term following at these prices, and in such a sterile space.

La Mar Cebicheria Peruana (11 Madison Ave. at 25th St., Gramercy/Flatiron District)

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