Can Someone Please Explain Todd English To Me?

Today’s Times announces next week’s opening of Ça Va, a French brasserie in the Times Square Intercontinental Hotel. Todd English is the nominal chef, but after the photo-op he’ll hand over the reins to his “longtime lieutenant,” Victor LaPlaca.

I really struggle to comprehend the Todd English phenomenon. He attaches his name to one mediocrity after another, but people with money put his name on restaurants all over the place. Why? He is not the only chef who widely syndicates and over-extends his personal brand, but I can’t think of anyone who has done it so often, with so little actual excellence.

I mean, there is a very real possibility that a Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Mario Batali restaurant will disappoint, but you can at least point to multiple things they’ve done that are superb. What has English done that comes anywhere close to that, especially in New York?

English’s page on chefdb.com lists thirty-four restaurants that he has opened since the success that launched his empire, Olives in Boston, which opened in 1989. That includes five New York properties, not one of which attracted any significant acclaim.

Whatever value English adds, it certainly can’t be in the kitchen. No one who opens nearly two restaurants a year could be doing anything more than fly by, drop a bit of pixie dust, and move on to the next one. It’s hard to see the value in that, when even his best work is so unimpressive.

So, if you’re looking to open a restaurant in New York, why would you hand your money to Todd English?

Rabbit in the Moon

Note: Rabbit in the Moon was sold in March 2011, and is now called The State Room.

*

Rabbit in the Moon is the latest gastropub that hopes to fetishize British food, traditionally the least admired European cuisine.

Like most British pubs, the name of the place is superficially meaningless. It’s supposedly dervied from “an old Chinese fable in which only those who are truly in love can see a rabbit in the moon.”

If we’ve got Rusty Knots and Spotted Pigs, then why not a Rabbit in the Moon?

The chef, Brian Bieler, has worked all over town, at places like Compass, Cafe Luxembourg, Bouley Upstairs, and The Mott. The owners come from STK and the Pink Elephant. They’re not exactly culinary royalty.

Despite that, they are apparently trying to cultivate airs of faux exclusivity. The townhouse it occupies is bedecked in fake ivy, naturally with no sign that would give away any useful information, like the name.

The bi-level space is cozy like an English country inn, with dark wood tables, plush easy chairs, a fireplace, and bars on two levels.

The owners have adopted a much-maligned “no shorts” rule, an odd marketing strategy for 90-degree days in Greenwich Village. A server confirmed the policy’s existence, but couldn’t explain why. The restaurant is not formal in any sense. Jeans and t-shirts are welcome; just not shorts.

Business was brisk, but not full, on a Friday evening. Perhaps the owners should drop their pretended exclusivity, and concentrate on attracting customers.

Ironically, service was over-the-top friendly—practically Danny Meyer-esque. It was if they were eager to demonstrate that, no matter what you read on Eater.com, We Are Nice People Here.

The staff gave me my choice of table; I picked a quiet two-top in a secluded nook at the front of the restaurant, with a window looking out on West 8th Street. Sit here if you can.

The menu is mostly Continental bistro classics, and not terribly expensive, for what you get. Appetizers are $8–18, entrées $17–30. Sides are $7, but unnecessary, as every entrée comes with a vegetable.

 

I asked the server for recommendations, and he suggested mostly the less expensive items. So I started with the Smoked Spanish Mackerel & Trout Salad ($12; above left). A crispy deep-fried hen-egg was on top: puncture it, and you’ve got instant salad dressing.

The name of the entrée, Fish & Chips ($17; above right), might well have come in quotes, as the “fish” consisted of tempura cod, baby squid, shrimp & octopus, with house-made tartar sauce and excellent fries.

There’s nothing revelatory here, or anything close to that, but it’s perfectly enjoyable pub food. If the owners would stop worrying about people in shorts, they just might build a following.

Rabbit in the Moon (47 W. 8th St. between 5th & 6th Avenues, Greenwich Village)

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

Why April Bloomfield Rocks

  

The other day, I was browsing the online menus of several West Village restaurants, trying decide which one to visit for dinner. Their unrelenting sameness depressed me. It’s not that I’ve tired of the classics, only that I doubted they’d be done really well.

Then I decided on The Spotted Pig, and I remembered why the chef, April Bloomfield, really rocks. Her menu—particularly the list of daily specials—is packed with dishes that don’t resemble anyone else’s. She isn’t serving kidneys on toast because there is great demand for them, but because this is her food.

I started with an order of Shito Peppers ($5), lightly fried and dusted with sea salt, each one packing a different heat intensity, depending on how many seeds remained inside. It was just a five-dollar bar snack, but full of flavor, and not duplicated in any other pub I know of.

Then I had a Butter Cup Squash Salad ($15; right) with golden chard and sorrel—a simple, impeccably prepared salad. Who else is serving one with these ingredients?

That’s why April Bloomfield Rocks.

The service here was excellent, as always, bearing in mind that it’s basically a gussied-up pub. But there are a lot of staff here—surely enough for a two-star restaurant, despite the superficially casual box they’re squeezed into.

One minor complaint: I was seated against the back wall, with the daily specials—there are always more than a half-dozen of them—written on the mirror behind me. Given that the menu is reprinted daily, why must it omit so many items, especially as there are so many seats, like the one I was in, where the mirror can’t easily be seen?

The Pig was the least crowded I’ve ever seen it. Don’t cry for April and her business partner, Ken Friedman: the place was full by 6:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening. But it was the first time I’ve been there that it actually took a full hour to seat every table.

The Spotted Pig (314 W. 11 Street at Greenwich Street, West Village)

Review Recap: Má Pêche

Today, Sam Sifton drops the expected two-spot on David Chang’s midtown transplant, Má Pêche:

Má Pêche is the first Momofuku restaurant truly suitable for dining with those the Internet calls the olds. (Though like some of its forebears, it takes no reservations.) Eating there is a little like visiting your formerly bohemian artist friend, whom you haven’t seen since he signed with Deitch and bought a double loft in TriBeCa.

The restaurant opened slowly over the course of this spring, not serving dinner for months, gaining its footing, figuring itself out. Now there is even a pre-theater menu. . . .

The food is not quite as precise and magical as it often is in the downtown restaurants, but it is recognizably Changish and strong: big flavors tied together with herbs and acids.

This is a good recovery for a restaurant that stumbled out of the gate, and picked up some decidedly un-Changian mixed reviews. The staff at Eater.com HQ, who are more plugged into the Momoverse than the chef’s own mother, reported that over the last month or so, “Chang has personally been in the kitchen almost constantly with executive chef Tien Ho and that the little tweaks made to the menu have paid off.”

I wonder if Sifton was duped:

Service at the restaurant is of an extremely high standard masked by a casual mien, as is the norm in Mr. Chang’s shops. Cory Lane, who runs the service program for all of them, and Colin Alevras, the antic beverage director, who came to the restaurant from DBGB, patrol Má Pêche with grace and good humor, seeing around corners, anticipating needs. (What, you didn’t realize you wanted to drink some coriander-ish Leipziger beer with your steak and sausage?) Their staff members follow their leads.

Eater says that Sifton was recognized at least five times (I told you they’re plugged in). Maybe, just maybe, the average customer doesn’t get that level of service. I certainly didn’t. The chef who claims his service is more “democratic,” in fact separates his customers into the “somebodies” and the “nobodies,” just like everyone else in this business.

Sifton tweaks Chang’s nose for not serving dessert—a decision that, like the no-reservation policy, I believe is destined to be reversed. It made sense at the perpetually-packed Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where Chang wants to cycle people in and out of their bar stools as quickly as possible—service be damned. If the restaurant is seldom full (as seems to be the case here), they might as well allow guests to linger, and make a bit more revenue per check.

Sifton wonders whether Chang “was aiming for a place at the highest level of the mainstream,” rather than what Má Pêche is now: “a very good restaurant for a Midtown business lunch, a celebratory steak dinner or a drink and some snacks after work.” We’ll find out.

In our view, the main reason for Má Pêche’s faults is that David Chang is stubborn.

Taureau

One-dish restaurants are all the rage, so why not all-fondue, all-the-time? As of three months ago, you can have it at Taureau in the East Village.

When we say “all-fondue,” we’re not kidding. To paraphrase W. S. Gilbert: fondue for starter, fondue for entrée, fondue for dessert—to have it supposed that you care for nothing but fondue, and that you would consider yourself insulted if anything but fondue were offered to you—how would you like that?

Well, you might expect fondue’s charms to wane over the course of a meal, but chef Didier Pawlicki mines enough from the theme to keep it exciting—at least for one visit. I cannot imagine it becoming anyone’s neighborhood go-to place, but for occasions ranging from romantic twosomes to large parties, it is already a hit. There’s nothing like cooking raw meat in a shared pot of boiling oil to bring people closer.

Like the same chef’s La Sirène, it’s the barest slip of a space, seating only 38. Each table has a built-in convection burner, leaving very little room to spare.

It is also BYOB, and at least for now, cash-only. If you don’t know the policy or forget the wine at home (as I did), the liquor store and Citibank are only a few blocks away.

The most straightforward ordering strategy is to choose one of two prix fixes, at either $37 or $57 per person, with a minimum of two. (Practically everything served here requires at least two people.) Either way, you get cheese fondue to start, meat fondue as the main course, and chocolate fondue for dessert. There’s still a dizzying array of choices (more offered at the higher price)—which cheese? what kind of oil? what chocolate? You could certainly eat here half-a-dozen times without exhausting the menu.

All of this (and a lot more) is available à la carte, although if you order three courses it will cost you considerably more than the prix fixe. We ordered the $57 menu, which comes with enough food to sate almost anyone.

We started with Perigord Cheese & Truffle Mushroom fondue, which comes with a choice of four “sides” for dipping. We chose the white asparagus, hot chorizo, slab bacon, and fingerling potatoes. It also includes a forgettable green salad and croutons, also for dipping. (The lower-priced prix fixe offers only the salad and croutons.)

The melted cheese itself was rich and luscious. The bacon was the best side dish, and the potatoes also worked well. The asparagus didn’t really pair with the cheese, while the chorizo (cold and clammy) simply wasn’t that good.

For the main course, there’s a choice of oils—we chose peanut—plus four house-made dipping sauces. Our prix fixe came with two meats: we chose pork tenderloin and filet mignon. You can probably guess the drill: dip the meat into the oil, where it cooks in about twenty seconds. Dip in sauce, and repeat. Simple pleasures.

The main course comes once again with the same forgettable green salad, which the chef might want to consider omitting. We didn’t touch it the second time.

Dessert is similar: your choice of chocolate, with a tray of fruits for dipping, and on the side, bowls of shredded coconut, almonds, and walnuts. It’s a can’t-miss dish, but we especially liked the frozen bananas (above, foreground).

The service team consists of the chef himself and two very busy servers, who manage to keep things moving briskly. It helps that the kitchen has very little actual cooking to do. The whole production takes around two hours, though you might spend the first twenty minutes of that just puzzling over the unfamiliar menu.

Pawlicki’s mission here may not be complicated, but he does it very well, and in New York he has the idea all to himself. It’s not food you can eat every day—it’s too rich and too monotonic for that—but it’s loads of fun and thoroughly worthwhile.

Taureau (127 E. Seventh St., West of Avenue A, East Village)

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

L’Artusi

Note: Founding chef Gabe Thompson left L’Artusi (and the group’s other restaurants) in October 2015.

*

Gabe Thompson and Joe Campanale are on a roll, with a string of West Village hits that began with dell’anima in 2007, L’Artusi in 2008, and Anfora in 2010.

The restaurants (Anfora is technically a wine bar) have distinctive personalities, but Thompson’s solid rustic Italian cuisine and Campanale’s compelling wine lists knit the three projects together.

Two of them are on the same block, and the third is just five minutes away, but somehow they haven’t over-saturated the market: dell’anima, the most established of the three, is perpetually packed, and Anfora is quickly getting there. L’Artusi moved a bit more slowly out of the gate (an unfavorable one-spot from Frank Bruni cannot have helped), but by 9:00 p.m. last Friday night it was full.

Like dell’anima, L’Artusi has plenty of seats for bar dining, but the space is more than twice the size, and not quite as charming. As it filled up, we found the noise increasingly unpleasant, as sound ricocheted off of the room’s hard surfaces. By the time we left, a normal conversation was almost impossible.

At all three Thompson/Campanale places, there is not a hint of attitude, as could easily be the case for a clutch of restaurants this successful. The host offered to seat me alone. I chose to wait at the bar, and later the tab was transferred to the table without my asking. Our server, however, tried to upsell an unwanted side dish, and was a bit inattentive as the evening went on.

The menu is in six categories: crudi, vegetable starters, pastas, fish, meats, and side dishes. Pastas dominate, with nine choices. There are half-a-dozen or fewer entries under the other headings. Most starters are under $15, pastas under $20, and entrées generally under $25.

Campanale’s wine list is remarkable for its length and variety. He’s not the first to put each region of Italy on its own page, and with its own map, but he may be the first to include separate maps showing the location of each producer. Presented in a thick red leather volume, it is one of the prettiest wine lists in town.

As he does at his other places, Campanale offers wines all over the price spectrum, including bottles with age on them that don’t cost half a paycheck, such as the 1995 Cerbaiona Rosso ($58; above right) that we had.

Escolar ($14; above left) from the crudo menu was draped with avocado, basil, and chilies. There is always a danger that such assertive ingredients will overwhelm the fish, but that didn’t happen here. The flavors were bright, crisp, and in balance. We followed that with octopus ($15; above right) that was perhaps as tender as we have ever encountered.

By the way, we had that octopus as an appetizer, but it is listed on the fish section of the menu, where most of the items are entrées. The server sent everything out in the right order, but I have to think some diners have been led astray.

I don’t know how the house-made tagliatelle bolognese bianco ($18; above left) was prepared, but the richly-flavored, flat noodles were in double layers—green one one side, white on the other: a wonderful dish. I wouldn’t call the Dayboat Halibut ($28; above right) a dud, but I found the tomato sauce a shade too assertive, especially for so delicate a fish.

Messrs. Thompson and Campanale have found their niche in a series of casual places, where the food and wine lists are superior to the surroundings. Part of me wants to see them ply their craft on a grander stage. Perhaps that’s not what they aspire to—never mind whether this is the right economic climate in which to try. The restaurants they’ve built are so welcoming, the food and libations so well thought out, that I tolerate their occasional discomforts.

L’Artusi (228 W. 10th Street between Bleecker & Hudson Streets, West Village)

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

Not About the Food?

I’d like to deconstruct and debunk a sentence from Sam Sifton’s blog post about this week’s restaurant review, Kenmare. It’s a small point, but that’s why we’re here, so be forewarned.

Here is what Sifton said, with the offending sentence in bold.

I don’t like it much as a restaurant, but that may hardly matter. Places like Kenmare aren’t really about the food. They’re about who’s there and whether they know you. It’s a big city. That works for some people.

“Not about the food” is a lazy meme often trotted out by foodies, food writers, and food-boardists. The restaurants tagged with that epithet are usually those: A) Where the food isn’t very good; and B) That attract a “scene” (models, celebrities, nightclubbers), consisting of people that are somehow determined not to care what they’re eating.

I’d like to challenge that.

In the first place, I think there are very few places that actually set out to serve “inconsequential” food (Sifton’s word). Joey Campanaro, the named chef at Kenmare, has seven New York Times stars to his credit, including a couple of deuces at places where he is still on duty, the justly acclaimed Little Owl and Market Table. I doubt that they would have hired him if they didn’t want a bit of his pixie dust, and I doubt that he would have signed on if knew the food was doomed to be panned—as it has been.

If Kenmare is serving bad food, it’s not by design. Cooking, like books, plays, albums, paintings, and every other kind of creative endeavour, fails sometimes. But rarely is it because the creators never actually cared whether they succeeded.

A commenter to Sifton’s blog post put Pulino’s in the same category, i.e., “not about the food.” But the same owner’s Minetta Tavern has three Times stars and a Michelin star. It throbs with celebrities and pretty young things. Did Keith McNally intend for Pulino’s to be bad (assuming that’s true)? Of course not!

Now, you might argue that regardless of the owner’s intentions, restaurants can be characterized by what their customers intend. But how, exactly, do you put all of Kenmare’s customers into the same bucket? Surely it has (or had) patrons like me, who had enjoyed Joey Campanaro’s work at other restaurants, and wanted to see if he could perform the same magic in another setting.

Visit Sifton’s review, and at the top of it you’ll find a photo of six young, attractive women sitting at a table with drinks, and no food. The caption says, “Kenmare’s owners say it is not a nightclub, but not everyone is going there to eat.”

The women, no doubt, have less experience than Sifton—in the food department, I mean. But who’s to say that, because they are young and attractive, they do not care if they’re served terrible food. (I am assuming the photographer caught them before the food arrived, not that they didn’t order any.) The Times has no idea whether these women ever returned to Kenmare. It just assumes that because of what they look like, they couldn’t possibly tell a good restaurant from a terrible one.

Am I the only one offended by the suggestion?

A couple of Sifton’s other examples—Carmine’s, which has just closed after 107 years at the South Street Seaport; and Nello’s, which received a New York Times goose egg several months ago—seem to me entirely different kinds of places than Kenmare. These are old established restaurants that, for good or ill, have a clientele built up over years or decades that likes what they’re doing, and doesn’t see any need for change.

But Kenmare, a brand spanking new place with a well known chef, has no regulars to fall back on, and the so-called “scene”—those who visit places simply because someone told them to—have a predictable habit of moving on after a few months, or a year at the most. No sensible operator would open such a place intending to serve bad food. That it happens is simply because restaurants fail sometimes.

Review Recap: Kenmare

Today, Sam Sifton lays a goose-egg (“FAIR”) on Kenmare, the restaurant chef Joey Campanaro probably wishes he could forget:

Joey Campanaro, the man behind a vest-pocket Greenwich Village gem called the Little Owl, and a partner in that neighborhood’s well-received Market Table as well, wrote Kenmare’s menu. He is acclaimed in press reports as Kenmare’s chef. Here’s hoping he is well paid for that. Mr. Campanaro is a serious and excellent cook. Kenmare is unlikely to enhance his reputation…

Entrees continued the trend of mediocrity, time after time. A Milanese-style veal cutlet, essentially a breaded and fried laptop case, was served with lemon, arugula, ricotta salata and a garish, oily salsa verde. (Credit where it’s due: It came this way twice, a month apart.)

Campanaro already had two deservedly successful places, The Little Owl and Market Table. He didn’t need Kenmare. Soon, he will probably be rid of it.

One thing this piece demonstrates is that pans are much easier to write: you just tee up the jokes and hit ’em out of the park. Perhaps this is why Kenmare is one of Sifton’s most entertaining and well-written reviews, despite the relative unimportance of the restaurant.

The fact that our own review arrived at the identical rating (“FAIR”) has nothing to do with it. Promise.

Plein Sud

Note: Plein Sud closed in August 2013. This is a review under chef Ed Cotton, who left the restaurant in October 2011. Reviews were mostly unfavorable, but Cotton lasted for quite a while afterward, so there may have been other reasons for the split.

*

Hotel Restaurants have rules all their own. Practically all hotels must have a restaurant, so they bring in an established operator, who can be guaranteed—at least, as much as anything in this business can be—to run a reliable operation.

The operator gets a subsidy, which limits his downside risk. In exchange, he must offer room service and serve three meals a day. The menu can’t be anything so terribly challenging that guests will find it off-putting. Of course, what works in the Four Seasons would fail in the Holiday Inn, but the principle remains the same.

The Thompson Hotels, a boutique chain with five New York City properties, offer an eclectic mix of restaurants: Kittichai at 60 Thompson, Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill at 6 Columbus Circle, The Libertine at Gild Hall, Shang at the Thompson LES, and now Plein Sud at the Smythe. I suspect that at least two of the five (Shang and The Libertine) would be doomed as stand-alone restaurants.

Plein Sud adheres to the pattern of the other Thompson hotels, in that it has an operator with established credentials: Frederick Lesort of the now-shuttered Frederick’s Madison; along with a chef, Ed Cotton, who worked at (and was fired from) three-star Veritas.

The South-of-France cuisine seems calculated to meet the hotel’s requirements, with safe choices that won’t offend any guest. Even those who didn’t take French in high school will guess the contents of Le Burger Royale au Fromage, Coq au Vin, and Pasta Printemps. The menu does not stray far beyond these brasserie standards.

Over the course of half-a-dozen visits (the first chronicled here) I’ve found the cooking always at least competent, though singularly lacking in ambition. One wants to think that Cotton, who has worked at much better places (and is a current contestent on Top Chef), is not content to stop at this.

There’s a range of appetizers in various categories to satisfy bar grazers. On another visit, I tried the Tart Flambé, an oven-baked flatbread with smoked bacon, onion, and cheese. It’s a perfect snack, though better for sharing, as it wears out its welcome. (Gael Greene has a photo on her blog.)

We tried the large charcuterie board ($21; left), which allows you to choose five of the six meats on the menu. They were all just fine, though served with not enough bread. Dozens of places in town offer the same.

We wondered: if all you have are six selections, why not just give slightly less of each, and serve all six? Figuring out which one to leave out—we chose the air-dryed Wagyu beef—seemed odd. (There is also a small charcuterie board that offers three of six for $15.)

Steak au Poivre ($32; above left) was clearly better than the average non-steakhouse New York Strip, though well short of Minetta Tavern level. The fries were perfect. Pasta ($21; above right) with Merguez sausage and goat cheese was another solid effort.

Over the course of my visits, I’ve found a mixture of considerate and clueless service—never offensive, just sometimes aimless. Having now seen the AvroKO décor from every angle, I am inclined to be less charitable than before. Like everything else at Plein Sud, it won’t offend anyone, but it seems to be a retread of ideas the firm has used before, with filament bulbs hauled in from the company store room.

What we have here is a solid and reasonably priced neighborhood restaurant that seldom disappoints but never wows. I freely admit to a bias in favor of this type of cuisine. Most of the New York City critics will be bored by such a place. Do the owner and the chef aspire to anything more? Or are they happy to serve hotel guests and curiosity-seekers who happen to just wander by? That’s an open question.

Plein Sud (89 West Broadway at Chambers Street, TriBeCa)

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

Bouley Upstairs to Close

Update: The Tribeca Citizen now reports that Bouley Upstairs will turn into a catering and private event space, with guest chefs cooking on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. We’ll have to see how that turns out.

Update 2: After multiple rounds of clarifications, the Times reports that the space will be called Bouley Studio, and that the special dinners ($75 prix fixe) will feature Japanese chefs and will be served only on Thursdays. Perhaps this is a tryout for the Japanese concept that will become (or was to have become) Brushstroke.

Today, Tribeca Citizen has the surprising news that Bouley Upstairs will close this Saturday.

Nobody saw this coming. In tough economic times, usually it’s the high-end restaurants that are most vulnerable. Instead, the eponymous Bouley, the chef’s three-star extravaganza, will now be his only restaurant.

Earlier this year, Eater.com reported that Bouley’s $2.5 million condo (in the same building as his restaurant) was in foreclosure.

With the closure of Bouley Upstairs, Bouley now controls three restaurant spaces that are empty, including Bouley Bakery, which closed in April, and the former Danube and Secession space, which closed a year ago.

At one point, Bouley planned to open a Japanese restaurant, Brushstroke, in the former Delphi space. But that was three years ago. He later said that it would open in the failed Secession space, but with all of his financial troubles, it is hard to see how that could happen.

As for Bouley Upstairs, we found it slightly over-rated, and certainly not worth the two stars Frank Bruni gave it. But in the current restaurant economy, you would not expect such a place to fail, if management were the least bit intelligent.

But it is perhaps notable that Bouley Upstairs had entirely disappeared from the culinary conversation. On a more recent visit, when I sampled the burger, it seemed like Bouley had turned it into a diner, with the cuisines of many genres and nations represented. That might not have been the wisest strategy.