5 & Diamond

Note: This is a review under chef David Santos, who left the restaurant in August 2010.

*

What do Tribeca, the East Village, and the Lower East Side have in common? They’re all neighborhoods that, not so long ago, were considered absurd locations for destination dining. Today, no one thinks twice about it.

Is it Harlem’s turn? That’s the bet Marcus Samuelsson is making, as he prepares to open the Red Rooster at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. And that’s the bet the owners of 5 & Diamond have made at 112th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

The geographical barrier is more psychological than real. 5 & Diamond is just a few blocks from subway stations at 110th Street on the B, C, 2, and 3 lines. From many midtown locations, you can actually get there faster than you can get to the East Village or the Lower East Side. It just seems far away.

Without the benefit of a celebrity name like Samuelsson, the owners of 5 & Diamond decided to rent a name. Serial job-hopper Ryan Skeen was brought in to open the place, and promptly made a mess of things, as only he can. It wasn’t long before Skeen had a foot out the door. By the time the Village Voice filed its rave review, critic Sarah DiGregorio was giving Skeen credit for dishes he no longer had anything to do with.

The permanent chef is David Santos, who doesn’t bring Skeen’s press clippings, but has an impressive resume and plans to stick around. With the review cycle basically over, 5 & Diamond will need to win destination diners via word-of-mouth.

The restaurant occupies a pretty storefront; the build-out is handsome, and would fit in without apology anywhere downtown. For a place still fighting for attention, it could use a sign, and frankly a website.

Santos’s eclectic American menu is sensibly edited, with just seven appetizers ($10–16) and seven entrées ($22–32). There’s a quintet of desserts ($5). A five-course tasting menu is only $50, and as three standard courses will set you back at least $40, this is the way to go.

Our tasting menu showed great promise, but there were also some missteps. One of these was a raw Long Island Fluke with pickled rhubarb, sea beans, and chili oil. The first three ingredients were too delicate to withstand the fourth. The taste of chili oil overwhelmed the dish. (In the photo, you can see a pool of it, underneath the fish.)

But we loved seared scallops with apricot gazpacho, spring onions, and lovage (above left), as well as the grilled Portuguese Sepia with piquillo pepper puree, sherry shallots, and olives (above right). In both of these dishes, the ingredients were in the right balance.

The chef sent out an extra item not on the tasting menu, a Keepsake Farms Hen Egg (above left) with chorizo, roasted garlic, and potato foam. Like all such egg dishes, you puncture the yolk, and then have a gooey delight as all of the ingredients mix together. This was the highlight of the evening—and curiously, the least expensive savory course on the regular menu, at $10. If you order à la carte, this is perfect for sharing, as it is a very rich dish.

According to Santos, Idaho Brook Trout (above right) is one of the few Ryan Skeen contributions still on the menu. It was conceptually simpler than most of the other items we were served, but beautifully cooked.

We weren’t at all fond of the “Philly Cheese Steak” (above left). The quotes signal that it’s a deconstructed dish, with clothbound cheddar, crisp shallots, and red pepper foam on a bed of bruschetta. In our view, when you are serving 14-day aged sirloin, there shouldn’t be so many side-kicks on the plate. In addition, the bruschetta became soggy, and the fried shallots left a bitter after-taste.

We had no complaint at all with warm Brioche Doughnuts (above right). Along with the tomato rosemary focaccia served at the beginning of the meal, they showed off a kitchen with strong baking skills.

We eschewed the offered wine pairing ($35pp) in favor of a 2006 Château du Cèdre Cahors ($48). In general, the wine list struck us as slightly too expensive for the area.

While we were there, we saw at least eight people outside look at the menu posted in the window, and keep on walking. Santos needs to find ways to get them in the door, given that the restaurant was only half full on a Saturday evening.

A $5 menu offered weeknights from 5:30–7:00 is a start. We suspect that the neighborhood needs a few approachable dishes to balance the foams and the high-end French technique.

A burger ($13) is buried under a list of side dishes. We asked Santos why it wasn’t more prominent. He said that he doesn’t want people to think of 5 & Diamond as a “burger place.” But with three-star restaurants serving $26 burgers nowadays, we don’t think there’s much danger of that.

Service was very good, for the most part—certainly in line with the quality of the food Santos aspires to serve. As we know him from a food board, we are not going to rate the restaurant with “stars.” We’ll only say that it shows every promise of becoming the destination restaurant that Harlem should have.

5 & Diamond (2072 Frederick Douglass Blvd. at 112th Street, Harlem)

First Look: Il Matto

Note: Il Matto closed in April 2011, less than one year old. It re-opened in June 2011 as White & Church with a new menu and décor, which also failed. The space is now Bouley Botanical, an indoor farm and private event space from David Bouley.

*

Il Matto opened last week in the old Arqua space (whose owners still have Petrarca Cucina e Vino, across the street).

The chef is Matteo Boglione, who worked briefly at Falai and the lesser known Gradisca. “Reknowned mixologist Christina Bini, who has come straight from Italy,” heads up the cocktail program.

The name of the restaurant means “the mad man,” and that is appropriate. There’s nothing about this place that I liked.

The website touts the décor as “chic and esoteric.” I call it sterile. At the bar, where I sat, they have managed to find the world’s most uncomfortable stools, with seats too shallow and backs too short.

The bizarre menu is so busy with amateur artwork that it’s hard to find the food. Its offerings are overthought and overwrought. Examples include “peanut roasted chicken over celery root purée and garlic chips,” and “Tuna tartare, black olive tapenade, cannelini beans, avocado, and fried leeks.” For a place that invested so heavily in its bar, strangely there are no bar snacks.

The cocktails (all $12–15) are in three groups: martini, salt, and sweet. Your heart sinks when the supposedly reknowned mixologist doesn’t know the meaning of the word “martini.”

Except for the presence of vermouth and the shape of the glass, the Maltese ($14; left) wasn’t any kind of martini, with its mix of vodka, ginger, spicy peperoncino, and a bell pepper garnish. It was bland and weak.

Better was the Buffalo 66 ($13) in the “salt” category, resembling a bloody mary with beet juice replacing tomato juice.

It was not crowded, but drinks were slow to come out. I paid up and headed out to dinner elsewhere. I am not tempted to return.

Il Matto (281 Church Street at White Street, Tribeca)

R.I.P. Knife + Fork

Update: Knife + Fork re-opened as Percy’s Tavern Knife + Fork in September 2010, three months after it closed. They are now located at 210 Avenue A (13th Street).

*

Knife + Fork in the East Village closed after service on Saturday evening.

After both of my visits (here, here), I was impressed with the quality and ambition of the food at a modest price-point. But it’s telling that after four years in business, the tasting menu was still just $45. The chef, Damien Bressel, would surely have raised it if he could.

The last time I was there, nine months ago, the dining room was nearly empty on a Wednesday evening, and Bressel was doubling as server and host (in addition to chef), as his only waiter had called in sick.

It seemed a bit sad even then, but somehow he hung on before finally throwing in the towel. We look forward to his next project.

The Breslin

Note: Click here for a later review of The Breslin.

Time was, the cuisine of the British Isles didn’t travel well. No one went to England for the food, and no one opened serious English restaurants anywhere else.

April Bloomfield may be the chef who, more than any other, has proven that the food of her native country can be exported. It began at the Spotted Pig, a West Village hit six years ago that remains impossibly busy at practically all times (and does not take reservations).

Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, stumbled at the John Dory, a seafood restaurant in Far West Chelsea that won good reviews, but couldn’t stay in business. Friedman attributed the failure to the lack of lunch traffic in that neighborhood, and inefficient use of the space due to the decision to accept reservations, which he says he regrets.

The Breslin, a gastropub like the Pig, opened last fall. The neighborhood presented a bit of a risk, as West 29th Street is neither a nightlife hotspot nor a residential district. It’s in the unnamed gray space on the Manhattan map, north of Chelsea but south of Midtown. Restaurants too numerous to name have failed here. Nevertheless, they vowed not to take reservations.

By opening in the boutique Ace Hotel, Bloomfield and Friedman at least hedged their bets. Hotel restaurants are usually subsidized, since most establishments feel they must offer their guests a place to eat. A failure would mean leaving the space vacant for a prolonged period, which an upscale hotel would likely consider intolerable. The built-in captive audience gives the restaurant a cushion to rest on.

Not that the Breslin shows any sign of failing: it was arguably the hottest of the fall openings. It was less than half full on a recent Saturday evening, but I hesitate to draw conclusions during a summer weekend. But if this persists I suspect the no-reservation policy will get a second look.

Whether you like the Breslin or not, you have to take off your hat to Ms. Bloomfield, to this extent: She isn’t serving a Scotch Egg or a Beef & Stilton Pie because the market demanded them. No menu consultant gave her the list of obligatory standards that every place in town is serving. When you dine at Bloomfield’s restaurants, you’re getting her cuisine, and nobody else’s.

In a somewhat unflattering one-star review, Sam Sifton complained that too much of the menu sings in the same key: it’s heavy on salt and fat, and as he indelicately put it, tough on the digestive tract. It’s somewhat unfair to penalize the restaurant because he needed to fart, but it is a heavy menu. There is no denying that.

The menu is divided into snacks ($4–8), appetizers ($12–18), entrées ($17–32), and sides ($7–8). Terrine boards are $25 or $42, and you cannot order their contents individually. Even crazier is a ribeye for two at $139; no steak for one person is offered.

I visited the Breslin alone, and tried too little of the menu to form a definite impression. Boiled Peanuts Fried in Pork Fat ($6; above left) is a crazy dish that no one else serves. Whether due to boiling or saturation in fat, the shells are edible, and just as good as the nuts inside.

The Lamb Burger with Feta ($17; above right) is rich and flavorful, but I like the Spotted Pig’s beef burger with roquefort even better. It comes with addictive chips that, in keeping with the theme, are thrice fried.

The service is top-notch, at least by pub standards, as I have found at every one of Ken Friedman’s places. For a former record industry honcho, he seems to understand how to recruit and train a staff. They all dress casually, and indeed, you might have trouble telling them apart from the customers.

Friedman has done his usual bang-up job on the décor, assuming you don’t mind a Disneyfied version of what a real English pub looks like. The space is quite a bit more comfortable than the Spotted Pig, with the advantage of being built from scratch, and not having to fit into a landmarked neighborhood.

The Breslin is, alas, too far out of my way to be on the regular rotation. But there is much more of the menu that I am eager to try, if only to find out if the rest of the food tastes as good as it reads.

The Breslin (16 W. 29th Street between Broadway & Fifth Avenue, West Midtown)

Josh Ozersky Still Doesn’t Get It

Last week, Josh Ozersky published an article on Time.com, Great Wedding Food: Tips from a Newly Married Critic.

The premise of the article is that, in lieu of traditional catering—which he says is almost always terrible—you should arrange for local chefs to each bring one dish:

That was my thought, and I put it into action with immense success. I cherry-picked my favorite dishes from half a dozen restaurants. . . .

Everybody got to do their best work, nobody was forced to carry the whole load, and since all the contributing chefs were invited to the wedding, they got to feel a well-earned pride at seeing their peers ravenously tear apart the dishes they (or in most cases, their underlings) had so carefully constructed. Out of so much destruction, my bride and I created the happiest possible memory, and all the guests got to eat their fill at the greatest wedding banquet ever thrown.

So here’s my advice to anyone who is starting to plan a wedding: Forget the caterer! Plug directly into the source of your hometown’s culinary delights, and happiness, enduring and radiant, will immediately follow.

The article went largely unnoticed until Village Voice restaurant critic wrote a blistering indictment, criticizing Ozersky for failing to disclose whether he paid fair market value for all that food.

Nobody who knows Ozersky would have any doubt. Of course he didn’t pay. In fact, unbeknownst to Sietsema, Ozersky didn’t pay for the space, either. The rooftop at the Empire Hotel came gratis, courtesy of restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow.

After The New York Times called attention to it, Ozersky posted a clarification to the original article. Time.com released a statement, in which it said that Ozersky should have disclosed the circumstances.

Ozersky says that the chefs cooked his wedding banquet in lieu of gifts, but concedes that it was “dumb of me not to be more explicit about the fact that I did not pay for any of their delicious contributions, and I was wrong not to make this clear to my editor beforehand.”

The apology is fine, as far as it goes, but in many ways, it seems Ozersky still doesn’t get it.

In the first place, the article is couched as “advice” on how to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional catered wedding. Once you know that both the food and the space were free, the entire premise falls to pieces. Practically nobody could get what Ozersky got without paying for it. The fair market price would put it out of the range of all but the wealthiest buyers. I’m not even sure that these chefs at any reasonable price would bring just one dish to a wedding where Josh wasn’t the groom: Heather Bertinetti isn’t in the wedding cake business.

In the second place, the article misses the real reason why most catered food is bad: money. If you’re willing to pay enough, you too can have a feast fit for a king. Sietsema said that the average wedding costs $82 per person. The Times estimated that Ozersky’s wedding, if he’d paid for it, would have cost anywhere from $200 to $500 per person. Pay that much, and the quality of the food goes way up.

Parts of Ozersky’s explanation are flat-out disingenuous. He says he “cherry-picked my favorite dishes from half a dozen restaurants.” But one of those restaurants, as Sietsema noted, was Red Farm, a Jeffrey Chodorow restaurant that hasn’t even opened yet. It utterly eludes me how this could be one of his favorites.

His explanation of how the event came about doesn’t hold water:

Some of my closest friends are chefs, and when they asked me what I wanted for a wedding present, instead of a crystal decanter that I would never look at, I told them to just cook some lasagna or bake a few loaves of bread that I could share with other friends.

Now, wedding dates are usually chosen based on when the venue is available—especially in spring, the most popular season for weddings. Then, you book the hall, pay a deposit, and send out invitations about eight to twelve weeks in advance. Only then do friends start asking what you’d like for a gift, and you point them to the shops where you’ve registered.

So we’re to believe that, coincidentally, before any date was even announced, all of these chefs—eight of them are mentioned—asked him what kind of crystal decanter he’d like as a gift? Oh, and what about the conversation with Jeffrey Chodorow, when in lieu of a conventional gift, Josh asked if he could have the roof of the Empire Hotel? How did that happen?

Ozersky says that the idea for the article struck him only after the wedding took place, and that there was no quid pro quo with the chefs. This is awfully naive, assuming he even believes it. It may well be true that the chefs didn’t expect Ozersky to write about this event. But there’s no question that, in a general way, they benefit from his coverage of their restaurants on his website, ozersky.tv, and expect to do so in the future.

I’ve developed, over time, considerable respect for Ozersky’s work as a roving reporter of culinary trends. His work is nearly always entertaining, and in a few areas he is genuinely an expert. He may funnel a disproportionate share of coverage to the chefs and restaurateurs whom he likes, but there is no overt conflict of interest, because everyone knows he isn’t paying.

In this case, he wrote an article for a national magazine, which will be read by many people who are not familiar with the background. And the problem goes much deeper than a mere lack of disclosure. Once you realize that the whole wedding was free, the very premise of the article is completely demolished.

Review Recap: Annisa

Today, Sam Sifton of the Times awards two stars to Annisa:

Annisa reopened in April, scrubbed and clean and new. And the food Ms. Lo is cooking there is as good as any she has made in her career…

The ambitions of the kitchen are as quiet as they were a decade ago, but no smaller for the time elapsed since Ms. Lo first introduced us to them. There are the requisite Asian influences, as well as African ones, none of them overwhelming in taste or technique. Ms. Lo is not by any means a flashy chef. She does not stalk the dining room in gleaming whites, glad-handing patrons and accepting praise. She simply stays in the kitchen and works…

That’s not a bad description of Chef Lo, who nevertheless is probably a bit glum, as I’m sure she was aiming at something more than just the same two stars William Grimes gave her a decade ago. We gave Annisa 2½ stars, but if I didn’t have half-stars, I would round down, arriving at the same deuce that Sifton did.

Sifton seems to be obsessed with the civility of a dinner at Annisa, having apparently forgotten that what he calls “novel” used to be the norm:

Ms. Scism champions a service culture that is rare and noteworthy. It dictates that restaurants are about much more than eating, or ought to be. They serve a social purpose, as well.

And so here is something novel in New York City in 2010: You can hear every word of conversation at your table at Annisa, without hearing every word of the one going on at the table across the way. People act like grown-ups in the restaurant. They are polite….

Annisa…remains a destination for grown-up and serious restaurant-goers, both for its cooking and the experience of eating it.

A restaurant for adults! Who’d have believed it? How “rare and noteworthy” is that?

This was one of Sifton’s better-written reviews. Aside from the obscure reference to “Puget Sound novelist David Guterson,” you could actually tell what he was talking about. There was only a bit of Sifton’s tortured and lazy prose:

• A beautifully cooked piece of chicken breast, crisp on its exterior and stuffed with chanterelles and bits of pig’s trotter, was a marvelous second act…
• …fluke with caviar and beets brought the same happy laughter you hear drifting out of car windows at beach-town sunsets…
• …a marvelous dish of barbecued squid with Thai basil and fresh peanuts…
• …a creamy, perfectly cooked fist of halibut…

Not a single “terrific”!

Torrisi Italian Specialties

Note: Torrisi Italian Specialties closed at the end of 2014. It is expected to be re-vamped as a fine dining restaurant, and to re-open with a new name in 2015.

The review below was written when Torrisi was still serving a downscale Italian comfort-food menu that many people loved, but I found overrated. It was later remodeled and upgraded, and also started taking reservations. By the time it closed, the restaurant was probably better than the one star I gave it, but I never made it back for another look.

*

At 7:25 p.m. the other night, a man walked into Torrisi Italian Specialties, and asked, “How long for a table?”

“Ten fifteen,” replied the hostess.

“Ten or fifteen minutes! That’s great!!” the man exclaimed.

“That’s 10:15 at night,” the hostess corrected him.

The crestfallen man departed without leaving his name. He was unwilling to make the hours-long commitment required for the privilege of a prime-time table at this twenty-seat restaurant, which does not accept reservations.

I suspect that Torrisi Italian Specialties has raised the fortunes of every bar in the neighborhood, where diners cool their heels waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the hostess to call when their table is ready. This has been the story for the last few months, ever since Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite awarded the improbable restaurant five underground stars in New York, and Sam Sifton awarded two stars in the Times.

Torrisi Italian Specialities occupies an old-school Little Italy storefront. (The neighborhood is called NoLIta today, but it was squarely in Little Italy a century ago.) By day it’s a sandwich shop; by night, a prix fixe restaurant—fifty bucks for eight courses, which change daily. Your only choice is meat or fish for the entrée.

The restaurant plays from a script we’ve seen before: chefs who cut their teeth at three-star restaurants (Del Posto and Café Boulud), now working in the humblest of surroundings, where all the trappings of fine dining are stripped away. They’ve got a smash hit—the equivalent of a Broadway show sold out months in advance.

If you want to dine here, your best option is to show up at around 5:30 p.m. Your margin for error is slim. On a Friday evening, there were already about a dozen people in line at that hour. A few minutes more, and I would have been too late for the first seating.

The hostess, whose watch is synchronized to an atomic clock, emerges at exactly 5:45 to take names. At 6:00 on the dot, she starts escorting diners, one party at a time, into the tiny sandwich shop. They keep the lights low, perhaps to confer a bit of romanticism in such humble surroundings. (The ploy works!)

*

The hardest review to write is of a restaurant that is good—yet, not as good as it’s cracked up to be. I don’t want to give the impression I’m panning the place, because I’m not. Dinner at Torrisi Italian Specialties is enjoyable—once you get in—and you won’t go home hungry. Nobody in town is serving an eight-course Italian feast, especially this good, for just $50.

But objectively speaking, the kitchen is not as accomplished as at nearby Peasant or Locanda Verde, both of which have nailed the rustic Italian genre into which Torrisi fits. And both offer much broader menus, without locking you into an eight-course format. You’ll pay a bit more, but the food will be better, and you can eat at reasonable times without waiting for hours.

And let’s be honest: the chefs, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, drastically limit their degree of difficulty, by limiting your options to a choice between two entrées. To make up for that, they really need to ace every dish, and they don’t.

Every meal has the same format: five antipasti, a pasta, an entrée, and a plate of dessert pastries. Among the antipasti, I counted two winners, two that were merely average, and one dud.

The first antipasto is the only that does not change every day (above left): garlic bread with tomato powder, and warm mozzarella with DaVero olive oil, milk thistle cream, and I believe a dash of sea salt. If you’re accustomed to mozzarella served cold, this is a revelation.

The second was the only dud: calamari marinara (above right). Served cold, it was goopy and bland.

The next two were of no particular distinction; you could probably make them at home: a Broccoli Rabe alla Panama (above left) and a Pickle Salad New Yorkese (above right). The suffixes “alla Panama” and “New Yorkese” weren’t explained.

The antipasti finished with another winner: Fresh Ham drizzled with melted Cheddar (above left).

The pasta course was Sheep’s Milk Ricotta Gnocchi (above right). My reaction was that if you add enough garlic and butter, you can’t go too far wrong. Once again, a good Italian cook could make this at home.

Barbecue Lamb Shoulder (above left) with corona beans and collards had such a haunting smoky flavor that I wondered if the chefs had an unlicensed smoker in the back yard. The server said that it was just a dry rub, left to marinate overnight. (The fish entrée, for the record, was a black bass in Fulton chowder.)

There was a tiny scoop of homemade ice, served in a paper cup, followed by a generous selection of Italian pastries (above right).

The wine list fits on the back of a laminated card, and if you order by the glass—as I did—there is just one each of bubbly, white, rosé, or red, served in a water glass. Service is friendly and efficient, but silverware is not replaced until after the pasta course. By that time, there’s a coating of ooze on the table, where your knife and fork have repeatedly been put down after each plate was cleared.

I can understand the critics’ rapture for a restaurant serving such an enormous amount of food, most of it pretty good, at such a low price. (The prix fixe was just $45 when New York reviewed it.) But Torrisi Italian Specialties is not a two-star restaurant, and the Times does the real two-star restaurants a disservice by saying so. Quite apart from the many amenities it lacks, far too much of the food is rather simplistic.

The menu changes daily and is posted every morning on the restaurant’s website, the cheekily named piginahat.com, so you can decide if it’s worth standing in line for. I’d love to try a few more of the entrées, but to do so, I’d need to sign up for the whole $50 production all over again. I’m not sure if I’m up for that.

Torrisi Italian Specialties (250 Mulberry Street at Prince Street, NoLIta)

Food: ★
Service: ★
Ambiance: ★
Overall: ★

Frankies 457 Spuntino

I keep thinking that restaurant phenomena cannot get any stranger, and then I find another one. Submitted for your consideration, Frankies 457 Spuntino.

Just to unpack that mouthful of a name takes some work. Frankies are the chefs–owners, Frankie Castronovo and Frankie Falcinelli, and 457 is their address on Court Street, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Spuntino is an Italian word referring to an informal meal or snack. Like many a celebrity chef these days, the Frankies worked for culinary superstars like David Bouley and Charlie Palmer, then decided they wanted to make it small.

The two Franks opened this casual place to rave reviews in 2004, and then a sequel, Frankies 17 Spuntino in 2006, on Clinton Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Then came Prime Meats late last year, and all hell broke loose. Two doors down from the original Frankies, it received two stars from Sam Sifton in the Times. The two Franks now have a cookbook—you can see it in the window, in the photo at the top of this post.

The strange phenomenon is not that the two Franks built a miniature restaurant empire from humble beginnings—many have done that—but that the rapturous raves for the original restaurant vastly outstrip its merits. Don’t get me wrong: Frankies is a cute place, well worth a diverting little meal, if you happen to find yourself in Carroll Gardens.

But the big feature spreads in Food & Wine, New York, GQ, Travel & Leisure, and so forth? I don’t get it.

Frankies was where I dined on my way to something else: Prime Meats. Reservations aren’t taken, and I knew we’d need to arrive early to have any shot at dining there. After a transit delay, we arrived at 6:30 p.m. On a Saturday evening, that wasn’t going to cut it: we were quoted a two-hour wait. We put our name in, but I was fairly certain my son and I would find something else.

Down the block, at Frankies, we were quoted 45 to 60 minutes. We wandered outside to ponder that, but moments later the host ran after us: “Don’t go too far. I am almost ready to seat you.” Forty-five minutes had turned into six.

The narrow space is a former blacksmith’s shop, rough and ready, with bare wooden tables and a pressed tin ceiling. The two Franks have made as much of it as they can, but you need to be limber to manoever through the cramped space. There’s a garden in the back that they rent for wedding parties at $90 a head. I wouldn’t choose Frankies for that, but someone did: we saw a large party with men in suits and tuxes, and women in strapless summer gowns, traipse through the über-casual dining room.

The menu is simple, which it needs to be, as the kitchen is apparently quite small. It’s dominated by cheeses, cured meats, salads, soups, sandwiches, crostini, and antipasti. There are eight or so entrées, mostly pastas, and mostly under $15.

There was nothing revelatory about a chef’s choice antipasto plate (above; $15), but there was nothing wrong with it either. You’d be happy to have it in your neighborhood.

Our entrées were a clear cut above the average pasta parlor, though I wouldn’t tell you to travel to Carroll Gardens for them. My son had the House-Made Cavatelli with Hot Sausage and Brown Sage Butter ($15; above left), I the Sweet Sausage, Roasted Red Peppers & Onions over Pine Nut Polenta ($14; above right). There was real skill in both dishes. Of all things, I was especially impressed with the polenta, smooth and creamy. It takes some guts to serve that in lieu of pasta.

About an hour in, as our meal was winding down, the host from Prime Meats called: they were ready to seat us. That’s only half of what we were quoted, but still a remarkably long wait for an early dinner on a Saturday. Obviously, we said no, thank you. Prime Meats will have to wait.

Service was fine, but you could tell the staff wants tables to turn. So do the many standees who line the edge of the room, ready to pounce as soon as the next party leaves. Even if this were the kind of restaurant that encouraged lingering, you’d feel a bit guilty about doing it.

Credit cards aren’t accepted, but dinner doesn’t break the bank. Even after a lemonade for my son, a cocktail, and a half-liter of wine, the bill was only $90 including tax and tip. At that price, I didn’t regret the meal at all, but I don’t quite get all the media attention lavished on what is, after all, just a very useful neighborhood place.

Frankies 457 Spuntino (457 Court St. between Luquer St. & 4th Pl., Carroll Gardens)

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

Review Recap: Takashi

Today, Sam Sifton pens quite possibly the most ecstatic one-star review ever, which he bestows upon Takashi. It’s a West Village Japanese barbecue restaurant that celebrates the unmentionable cow parts that many people would shudder to eat:

Raw tripe with a spicy miso sauce follows, salt and fire set against the spongy flesh, and a dish of flash-boiled shredded Achilles tendon, the tendrils fantastic in texture and taste. These might be dried tofu or cooked pasta, long mushrooms or pieces of ear: a magic, nervous-making dish.

Cubed raw liver comes to the table as well, a chilled, lumpy stew dressed with salt and sesame oil. It tastes of lightning storms on the high plains, of fear and magnificence combined. It is faintly metallic, rich with blood.

Why only one star? He concedes the restaurant is “modest,” the food “simple,” the wine list merely “adequate.” Dessert is limited to soft-serve vanilla ice cream. And you might find the food a bit off-putting, but…

Takashi is probably not for everyone: too do-it-yourself and odd. But its eccentricity is honest, its atmosphere winning and its food quite good. So there is large intestine on the menu. You are not in New York to play on the junior varsity, are you?

As always, we conclude with our selection of Sifton’s lazy and exaggerated prose, of which there is more than usual this week:

• Cubed raw liver…tastes of lightning storms on the high plains, of fear and magnificence combined.
• In the thrall of its consumption, the whole dining room seems to pulse with life.
• A raw baby carrot taken after a bite of the marinated grilled tongue…is a terrific combination
• …a soft, fragrant ginger shoot after a piece of simply dressed rib-eye…may haunt your memory for days

Anfora

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

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Anfora is a new wine bar from Gabe Thompson and Joey Campanale, the smart fellows behind dell’anima and L’Artusi. I’ve visited about six times in the month they’ve been open. That’s a lot for me, but I like the place, and it’s on my way home.

The layout is clever, with a long bar on the right side of the narrow space, and several large, cushy, semi-circular banquettes on the left, which can accommodate larger parties. The space feels warm and comforting, but it can get loud when full.

According to the pre-opening press, Anfora emphasizes sustainable, organic, and biodynamic wines. Strangely, this is nowhere stated on the wine list itself, so most customers will not be aware of it. I’m not sold on “green” wines as an organizing concept for a restaurant or bar. The terminology is so baroque that most servers cannot even explain it.

Perhaps it is because too much time as been spent on the “green” angle, that the wine list seems unfocused, and lacks the more offbeat selections found at the same team’s dell’Anima, just two doors away. After all, one of the compelling reasons to visit a wine bar is to try funky things you’d never dream of ordering by the bottle. For the most part, Anfora doesn’t have them.

Apparently, the original idea was that Anfora would double as the pre-dinner drinks room for dell’Anima, which is perpetually packed. The staff discovered that many customers were coming in after dinner, so they’ve added a strong list of dessert wines: sherries, ports, and such. It’s the best part of the list. Anfora is one of the few wine bars I know with a hard liquor license, and they’ll mix a cocktail for you too, though that isn’t the reason to visit.

Anfora is located in a former real-estate office, and therein lies some of its limitations. There isn’t a proper kitchen, so the hot menu is limited to what can be prepared in a toaster oven and a panini press. The cook works in a cramped corner behind the bar, and he sometimes falls behind. I loved a simple order of Curry Egg Salad on Sesame Toast ($6), an excellent snack dish, but I was amazed at how long it took to prepare. The menu has been simplified over the last several weeks, as the owners get more realistic about what can be done in such a small space.

Understandably, most of the menu does not require cooking. The cheeses I’ve tried have been great; there are also salumi and salads. But this is not a wine bar that doubles as a full-service restaurant, as some do.

The staff are efficient, and have adapted well to the limitations of the space. Since the food here can never be the equal of dell’Anima, with its full kitchen, I hope that the owners will let Anfora shine with its wine list. The dessert wines that have been added lately are an excellent start.

Anfora (34 Eighth Avenue at Jane Street, West Village)