Má Pêche

Note: This is a review under founding chef Tien Ho, who has since left the restaurant. The new chef, Paul Carmichael, is introducing an American menu.

David Chang is the unquestioned King of the East Village, with four insanely-popular Momofuku restaurants to his name, holding six New York Times stars and two Michelin stars between them.

Does Chang’s hipster ethos work in a midtown luxury boutique hotel? That was the question when he took over the former Town space in the Chambers Hotel on West 56th Street.

Town had long ceased to be culinarily relevant when it closed in April 2009, but at least it offered the high-end, French-inflected fine dining experience that guests at the Chambers would expect. Chang’s new landlord probably wanted nothing to do with a name like “Momofuku,” which to the unanointed reads like Mother-Fuck-You.

So Chang settled on Má Pêche (Momofuku means “peach”), which gives the surface impression of bourgeois respectability. What he built, however, is “Momofuku for Tourists,” a restaurant that resembles his East Village empire the way Disney’s Epcot resembles France or Italy.

The only trouble is, so far the tourists haven’t shown up. On a Friday evening at 8:00 p.m., Má Pêche was two-thirds empty. During our meal, we saw four separate parties enter the dining room, take one look, and then leave.

What could have turned them off? Perhaps it’s the huge, X-shaped communal table that dominates the room, a feature of many New York restaurants, but probably unfamiliar to the businessmen from Chicago or the honeymooners from Des Moines.

Má Pêche, unlike the other Momofukus, does have detached tables and chairs with backs, but the communal table is the first thing you see. If Chang knows what’s good for him, he will get rid of it.

Like all of Chang’s downtown places (except Momofuku Ko), Má Pêche doesn’t take reservations. That policy works when you’re getting enough foot traffic to remain constantly full. And what about the nonsense of serving dessert only at the adjoining “Milk Bar”? It works in the East Village. At a midtown luxury hotel, it’s a recipe for failure.

Chang apparently realized that a midtown crowd will expect better service than at his East Village places. A memo to staff was leaked to Eater.com, describing the service rules in detail. Our server was clearly struggling, practically reciting them to us as he served the wine, to ensure he hadn’t left anything out. But if they’re so persnickity, why are there still paper napkins, when dinner for two will easily run up to $150 or more, especially if you order from the over-priced, unimpressive wine list?

The chef de cuisine is Tien Ho, who used to run the kitchen at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The menu is written in a French–Vietnamese pidgin that I suspect many customers will find utterly baffling. The food seemed to us no more Vietnamese than Chang’s East Village restaurants are Korean.

None of this would matter if the food at Má Pêche were anywhere near as good as it is downtown. The four dishes we tried were shockingly insipid, unadventurous: bland. There is very little to tempt the original Momofuku clientele to make the trip uptown, while those who never bought into Chang’s act (or never heard of it) will be wondering, “Where’s the beef?”

Actually, beef is the one distinctive offering: a traditional Vietnamese “Beef 7 Ways” dinner for 6–10 people that runs $85 a head, and is currently the only option for which reservations are taken. But this certainly won’t attract tourists and business travelers, who won’t know all the tricks of visiting the Momofuku website, poised to click on the green check mark at exactly 10:00 a.m., a week in advance.

Mang tây gribiche ($18; above left) is typical of the menu’s timidity. Asparagus salad, crab, and egg yolk sounded promising, but the egg tasted like the egg salad that comes out of a buffet line, and I didn’t taste much crab at all.

Chou-fleur chiên ($12; above right) was the dish I ordered and enjoyed on my last visit, but this time the fried cauliflower was a flat, soggy mess, and the curry was so weak as to be almost non-existent.

Aloyau de porc ($36; above left) is the most expensive of the entrées. You get plenty for your money, as it’s a twenty-ounce pork porterhouse that two can easily share. But it was curiously flavorless and was sliced too thin, causing it to slightly dry out in the process. However, we liked the fingerling potatoes and English peas that accompanied it.

Bun du riz ($18; above right), or rice noodles with spicy pork, had great potential if only the pork were spicy. Instead, it almost completely failed to register.

Má Pêche today is like a mirror-image SD26, the former uptown luxury Italian restaurant that is now trying (and failing) to appeal to the downtown crowd. We suspect that David Chang is more adaptable than SD26’s Tony May.

Adapt he must. If he wants to bring in the tourists and businessmen, he needs to ditch the communal table and paper napkins, take reservations, and serve a menu they’ll understand. If he wants to attract New Yorkers, he needs to take some culinary risks. If he wants to do both…well, that just might be impossible.

Má Pêche (15 W. 56th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, West Midtown)

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

Review Recap: Mia Dona

Did you ever meet someone at a football game, who shouted, “Even I could coach this football team?”

It happens with restaurants too. Donatella Arpaia was in partnership with two very talented chefs, David Burke and Michael Psilakis. She split up with both, so that she could do the cooking herself, despite having no training as a professional chef.

Turns out, it’s not so easy. So says Sam Sifton in a withering zero-star review of Mia Dona:

And so here is the new, chef-less iteration of Mia Dona: exactly the sort of decent, middlebrow, red-sauce Italian restaurant you’d relish if you found it in a town near the town where you grew up in the suburbs of New York. Within the five boroughs of New York City, we call that sort of restaurant satisfactory.

“Satisfactory” is Times-speak for mediocre:

The main dishes, however, go off the rails. That eggplant parmigiana is almost totally free of taste or character, a sandwich interior taken from a deli in Anywhereville. The roasted baby chicken with peppers and sweet-and-sour cipollini onions, meanwhile, has a corporate tang, a hint of mild depression: a charity-dinner entree made for 200 people.

There is competently prepared branzino, boring as protein out of a can marked “farmed white fish,” and unremarkable mussels in a sauce made of white wine, with tomato and pancetta. You’ve had that before.

And for those who have only experienced tripe-ish excellence at restaurants like Casa Mono or Momofuku Ssam Bar, Mia Dona’s version of tomato-braised beef tripe with garlic toast can serve as a complete explanation why some consider tripe to be spongy and horrid. It is both.

This was technically a demotion, as Frank Bruni had awarded two stars to Mia Dona when Michael Psilakis was in the kitchen. But after Psilakis’s departure Mia Dona became, in essence, a brand new restaurant. And according to Sifton, no longer a very good one.

We gave one star to Mia Dona, but truth be told, it was at the lower end of one star. We have no argument with Sifton’s decision to give zero.

The Meatball Shop

A quarter-century ago, an apprentice cook at Le Bernardin would hope someday to open his own classic French restaurant. Daniel Holtzman has opened The Meatball Shop.

No new restaurant captures The Moment, the now, better than The Meatball Shop. In a hundred years, restaurant archaeologists might pick this place as the apogee of dining in the Great Recession. If there’s a time capsule, The Meatball Shop has to be in it.

In a tiny package, The Meatball Shop touches all the bases, with its homespun menu founded on hearty recipes mamma would serve, a classically trained chef sourcing ingredients from artisanal farms, and everything made in house. Naturally, there are no reservations, and the room is dominated by a long communal table and food served at the bar.

And it’s a big hit, with manager Michael Chernow telling Eater.com that the wait on Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m. stretches to 2½ hours. For meatballs. I expected to get in easily at 6:30, but it was already full. Luckily, we arrived just in time to get a table after about five minutes. We heard 25 minutes, and later 45 minutes, quoted to several other parties that arrived after us.

For a restaurant that serves only meatballs, there are many options to consider. There are five kinds of balls (beef, pork, chicken, vegetable, and “special”) and four kinds of sauces (tomato, spicy meat, mushroom gravy, and parmesan cream). They’re offered four different ways: in a bowl, sliders, heroes, and a “meatball smash” (two balls on a toasted brioche bun).

It begins to sound like “Colonel Mustard in the Libary with the Lead Pipe.” To avoid confusion, you mark your choices with a dry-erase marker on the laminated menu, which the server carries back to the kitchen. After they’ve got your order, they wipe the menu clean and it goes to another table.

The weekly special was goat, which my son and I both tried. He had the meatball smash ($8; above left) with parmesan cream sauce and mozzarella cheese. I had four meatballs in a bowl ($7; above right) with the spicy meat sauce. The goat was much more tender than I expected, full of flavor and not at all gamey.

There are six sides and six salads available ($4 ea.), including what must surely be the city’s best four-dollar risotto (above left). My son loved the meatballs so much that he ordered a slider by itself ($3; above right).

The desserts are as simple as can be, but wonderful for what they are: ice cream sandwiched by two cookies ($4). I think I had the the caramel ice cream and walnut meringue cookies (above right); I’ve forgotten what flavors my son had.

For such a busy place, the service was friendly and reasonably attentive. You can see why this place is popular. Dinner for two, including lemonade and two glasses of sangria, was just $49 before tip.

The Meatball Shop (84 Stanton St. between Allen & Orchard Sts., Lower East Side)

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

Fatty ’Cue

Note: Fatty ’Cue (Williamsburg) has closed. The space will became “Fatty Lab,” a test kitchen and private events space. Fatty ’Cue (West Village) later closed, as well. In addition, Zak Pelaccio is no longer affiliated with the Fatty restaurant chain.

*

Four years ago, on the way to dinner at Dressler, we took a brief walk around South Williamsburg and suddenly found ourselves in no-man’s land. As I wrote at the time, “I’m not saying it is scary—only that it looks that way.”

The area still doesn’t look pretty, but with hipster bars and fancy salons dotting the landscape, it’s getting better all the time. In this formerly desolate area, chef Zak Pelaccio has installed the latest member of his fatty family, Fatty ’Cue. It’s the third member of the brood, after Fatty Crabs in the Meatpacking District and on the Upper West Side.

It wasn’t easy. Once announced for a Fall 2008 opening, Fatty ’Cue didn’t appear until March of this year. I don’t know the reasons, but getting the permits for a barbecue smoker is notoriously difficult, especially in an historic neighborhood full of buildings that pre-date modern construction codes.

The restaurant is a mash-up of the faux Malaysian cuisine offered at the other Fattys, and Texas barbecue supervised by former Hill Country pitmaster Robbie Richter. Sam Sifton, who awarded one star in the Times, wasn’t kidding when he said that, “No one else is cooking like this anywhere.”

The service and atmosphere very much resemble the other Fatty restaurants. Except for the barbecue smoker, so does the cuisine.

The menu is in two parts—snacks ($3–12) and specialties ($11–22)—but they all seem to be appetizers, more or less, delivered to the table as they’re ready, and designed for sharing. Most items are a mixture of proteins from the barbecue smoker and Asian-inflected condiments. For example: “Hand Pulled Lamb Shoulder, goat yogurt with Vietnamese mint, house pita.”

At plate-sharing places, it’s always difficult to gauge how much to order. I had two of the snacks and two of the specialities (again: these distinctions seem arbitrary), and it was a shade too much food for a solo diner. One fewer plate probably wouldn’t have been enough.

The server recommended a salad as a foil to the barbecue. Cucumbers ($6; above right) with smoked chili, brown rice vinegar, and toasted sesame seeds, fit the bill admirably, but they were nothing special on their own.

’Cue Coriander Bacon ($11; above left) is awkward to eat. You’re supposed to slather the steamed yellow curry custard on toast, then put the bacon on top of that. Perhaps you can guess from the photo that this didn’t quite work out. The bacon was just fine, but $11 is a lot to pay for five small pieces. An order of bacon at Peter Luger, down the street, is something like $2.95. You get more, and it is equally good.

Like the other Fatty restaurants, Fatty ’Cue serves dishes that obviously require a knife (in this case, for spreading the custard), but doesn’t supply one. I’m sure they have knives, but this isn’t exactly Le Bernardin, where you have but to flick an eyebrow, and a server appears instantly. So I used the fork as a spreader. When the server re-appeared to clear the plate, he picked up the fork and hesitated slightly before making the right decision to replace it.

Fazio Farm Red Curry Duck ($14; above left) was the dish of the evening, the best duck I have tasted this year—plump, tender, luscious, and yes, fatty. It came with a curry sauce on the side, but I quickly figured out that it was superfluous—as sauces invariably are with the best barbecue. In any case, those large pieces of duck didn’t readily fit in the dipping bowl.

Brandt Farm Beef Brisket ($18; above right) was the least successful dish, and like the others, ill-conceived. The meat lacked the deep marbling of the best brisket at Hill Country. There were a couple of moist pieces on top, but those below (not visible in the photo) were dry. You’re supposed to make sandwiches with the steamed buns, adding red onions and chili jam, but I ran out of buns before I ran out of brisket. Once again, a knife would have helped, as the remaining pieces of meat did not yield to a fork alone. Finally, I gave up.

There are some wonderful cocktails here, especially The ’Cue (Wrey & Nephew overproofed run, smoked pineapple, citrus, Tabasco, Pernod), featured in this week’s New York, and a bargain at $8. However, they were slow in coming. Every booze run to my table and others within earshot was prefaced with, “Sorry, but the bar is really backed up.”

Notwithstanding that, the servers and runners were helpful and knowledgeable about the food. Meal pacing is often a problem at small-plate restaurants, as indeed it was on our last visit to Fatty Crab. This time I lucked out, and everything came out (except the drinks) at exactly the pace I wanted. Based on other reviews I’ve seen, this will not happen to you, unless the stars are in alignment.

I wasn’t encouraged when I walked in at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday evening, to find a loud bar nearly at capacity. But the space is on three levels, and the higher you go, the more pleasant it gets. The hostess seated me a table on the quiet (relatively speaking) third level, which has only five tables. I suspect it gets much louder later on: they are open until 4:00 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays.

While no dish at Fatty ’Cue is expensive on its own, the costs mount in a hurry. I paid almost $90, including tax and tip, for four small plates and three cocktails. That might be more than most people would want to pay in a casual restaurant that is not conveniently located, for food that is certainly interesting but is also uneven.

Fatty ’Cue (91 S. 6th St. between Berry St. & Bedford Ave., Williamsburg)

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

Ed's Chowder House

I’ve written before about the shortage of good pre-concert dining in the Lincoln Center area. After Picholine and Bar Boulud, your options—at least the good ones—tail off considerably. This remains a mystery to me. There are 10,000 seats across the street, their occupants generally have sophisticated tastes, and they have to eat. Why aren’t there better restaurants catering to them?

Lately, Ed’s Chowder House has been my go-to pre-concert restaurant. Sam Sifton gave it zero stars in the Times, and that’s not right. Ed’s isn’t better than Picholine or Bar Boulud, but it’s good, and you can always walk in and get seated at the bar.

I wrote my last review after a visit on opening night. I won’t repeat the long history of the space: briefly, it’s a Jeffrey Chodorow restaurant, built (like most of his places) where a previous Chodorow restaurant failed. It looks like this one will last. Periodic checks on OpenTable suggest that it’s at least doing a solid pre-concert business.

The eponymous Ed Brown’s main restaurant, eighty one, has closed, so he is probably spending more time here (he is listed as the “Chef Collaborator”). That is a good thing: the man knows fish.

Blissfully, this doesn’t feel like a Chodorow place. The reasonably-priced menu doesn’t ramble, and for the most part it’s free of gimmicks. The servers don’t upsell. The host even seated me early, even though my party was incomplete, which has never happened before at a Chodorow restaurant.

I do think they should merge their bar and dining room menus. They aren’t all that much different, and as they’ll allow you to order from either one, in either room, there is little point in having two.

The bread service (above) remains terrific, as it has been each time I’ve visited.

The food I’ve tried is simple and well done, and doesn’t require much elaboration: a clam chowder ($11.50; above left), an asparagus salad ($14.00; above right). On another occasion, I had the lobster roll, which at $26 is a bit on the expensive side, but very good indeed.

The mains are either “composed” and “simple,” a slightly irritating trend that I cannot blame on Jeffrey Chodorow. But “simple” sea bass ($26; above left) was excellent, and so was a Pat La Freida burger ($17; above right) from the bar menu. The fries, however, had been seasoned with something awful, perhaps truffle oil, that basically ruined them.

The food was good, the service was good, the room is comfortable and unhurried, and they got us to our opera on time. What more could you ask from a Lincoln Center restaurant?

Ed’s Chowder House (44 W. 63rd St. btwn. Broadway & Columbus, Lincoln Center)

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

Review Recap: Fatty ’Cue

Today, Sam Sifton gives a onespot to the latest member of Zak Pelaccio’s fatty tribe, Fatty ’Cue:

The food is incredibly good. Fatty ’Cue is a restaurant worth traveling to visit. To expand on the playbook of awesome, Malaysian-ish cooking on display at the Fatty Crab restaurants in Manhattan, Mr. Pelaccio’s Fatty Crew — with Corwin Kave as executive chef and Andrew Pressler as chef de cuisine — has added to their roster Robbie Richter, the Queens-born pitmaster who helped start Hill Country in 2007. Fatty ’Cue offers smoked crabs and smoked lamb ribs, coriander-dusted bacon and pieces of pig.

Sifton nails the place, but I am starting to tire of his stereotypes:

…a biker bar for the kind of bikers who don’t ride Harleys in leathers and boots, but stripped-down Schwinns in boat shoes and skinny jeans.

…it sure would be funny to roll up to the place with a white-shoe lawyer, some actuarial accountant from Tucson or dramaturge from the Upper West Side…

…Fatty ’Cue might be uncomfortable for those who hear more music at Lincoln Center than at Southpaw.

And also his obscure “look how clever I am” references:

It recalls, almost perfectly, what the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa called the magic of the present moment.

But by the low standards that currently pass for New York Times criticism, this one passes muster.

Zengo

There is no good reason why the East Midtown restaurant space at 40th Street & Third Avenue ought to be cursed. But cursed it apparently is. Four Jeffrey Chodorow places failed there—most recently Wild Salmon—before the Chod finally gave up.

Zengo is the latest to give it a shot. The hyperactive chef Richard Sandoval is in charge, but with fifteen other restaurants in five U. S. cities and three countries, I suppose I should put that in scare quotes, as in, “in charge.” In case you’re wondering—admit it, you were!—this is the third Zengo, after Denver and D.C.

With Sandoval in demand everywhere from Mexico to Dubai, he needed a solid hand in the kitchen, and he had one in former Elettaria chef Akhtar Nawab. But less than a month into the venture, Nawab took a hike. The reasons remain unexplained, but are easy to guess. Zengo is a dumb idea, sloppily executed. Any self-respecting chef would be embarrassed to be associated with it.

Although Jeffrey Chodorow is not involved here, his uncanny propensity for error hovers over the space like a death stink. A Latin–Asian restaurant that serves sushi rolls, dim sum, and tapas? Only the Chod would suggest something so obviously ill-conceived, so gimmicky, so pandering, so offensive to common sense. The menu is like something you’d find at an airport food court, offering a bit of everything without any sense of purpose. The cooking is better than at an airport, but the service isn’t.

From a meandering list of small plates in multiple categories, we started with the Peking Duck-Daikon Tacos ($12; above left), which was the best thing we tried. Thin daikon wafers passed for pancakes, which held slices of duck confit, curried apple, and an orange-coriander sauce. However, we ran out of daikon before we ran out of duck.

Braised Pork Belly ($13; above right) was swimming in a lentil sea. It is hard to overwhelm pork belly, but this plate managed it. You could barely taste the pork.

We ordered a bowl of fried rice ($8; below left) as a side dish, but the kitchen delivered it as a mid-course. At first, we thought this was intentional, but the server disabused us of that: “Your main courses will come out as and when they’re ready.”

Sure enough, “as and when” is the mantra here, often to the customers’ dismay. At two different tables, we saw plates sent back because diners had only just received their first group of appetizers. At one table, the server got into an argument, instead of just admitting the screw-up. Although the restaurant was not full, plates were shot out of the kitchen at machine-gun pace, as if the staff wanted to empty the room as quickly as possible.

We didn’t send anything back, but this was not a relaxing meal.

Neither of the entrées looked especially attractive on the plate: Grilled Colorado Lamb Loin ($27; above center), Braised Short Ribs ($24; above right). The lamb was wonderful, but we didn’t much care for the lazily-plated assortment of vegetables underneath it. The short ribs were slightly on the dry side.

Real thought went into the beverage program here. There is a wide selection of both reds and whites. At $42, the 2008 Cline Cashmere Meritage was a very good choice at the lower end of the list. There are over 400 tequilas and mezcals, and a separate downstairs lounge (La Biblioteca) in which to enjoy them.

The folks at AvroKO did their usual bang-up job with the décor, although the cavernous three-story space is bound to feel like a airplane hangar, practically no matter what you do with it. And it’s hard to imagine it will ever be full.

The opera singer Plácido Domingo is a partner here. One’s immediate reaction is that he ought to stick to music.

Zengo (622 Third Avenue at 40th Street, East Midtown)

Food: Satisfactory
Service: Fair
Ambiance: Satisfactory
Overall: Satisfactory

Selling Tickets to Dinner: Will it Work in NYC?

The term “paradigm shift” is much abused, but Chicago chef Grant Achatz has an idea that just might qualify. As the Times reported this week, at Achatz’s next restaurant, he’s actually going to sell tickets to dinner.

He’ll charge more money for popular times, just as airlines and theaters do. Each ticket will include everything—food, beverage pairings, service, and tax—meaning that you arrive at the restaurant with your evening entirely pre-paid, as it would be at a show or a concert. “When you’re done, you just get up and leave,” he told the Times.

You can certainly see how this benefits Achatz. He gets the use of your money when you reserve, which could be months in advance. It’s what bankers call “float.” With tickets sold on the Internet, he no longer needs to pay reservationists, no need to have cash on the premises, no need to worry about no-shows.

He also gets complete control of the tip pool. As the Times noted, by law tips can be pooled only among employees who actually serve customers. But a service charge embedded in the price can be distributed however management chooses—to cooks, for instance.

In New York, only Per Se includes service in the price, and only Momofuku Ko takes all its reservations over the Internet, but both restaurants settle the bill in the traditional way, at the end of the meal.

Achatz isn’t the first to have thought of this idea. A couple of years ago, a prominent New York manager asked me how I thought it would go over, if he charged more money for a 7:30 p.m. reservation than at other times. He noted that a 7:30 reservation basically locks up a table for the entire evening: it’s too early to squeeze in another booking ahead of it, but too late to get one in afterwards. A 6:00 reservation, on the other hand, is less in demand, and the restaurant can get a second turn at the same table, say at 9:00 or 9:30. The manager hasn’t implemented the idea, so apparently he wasn’t sure it would work—and that’s for a hit restaurant that is practically always full.

So why does Grant Achatz think he can do this? It’s because his first restaurant is the perpetually packed Alinea, ranked #7 on S. Pellegrino’s 2010 top-fifty list. He can safely figure that the next one (coincidentally called “Next Restaurant”) will be in demand, just as David Chang could when he set up Momofuku Ko’s baroque Internet reservation system.

Of course, Achatz tries to put a “value” spin on it: by stripping away “hidden costs”—reservationists, for instance—he says he can give customers a better deal. But he is also asking customers to cede control they are accustomed to, such as the ability to cancel without penalty. And he is asking them to decide, potentially months in advance, how much alcohol they’ll want to drink.

I suspect that, on the whole, the restaurant gets the better end of the deal, and that there are only a handful of places in the country that could get away with it. Next Restaurant is probably one of them. I’ll bet Momofuku Ko could too. Any others?

Marc Forgione

I visited Marc Forgione this week with colleagues from Chicago, who invited me to dinner, and—as is often the case—asked me to pick the restaurant. They were buying, which made the choice a bit awkward: deciding how someone else’s money would be spent. It needed to be a solid choice, without seeming to take advantage.

Marc Forgione had been in the back of my mind ever since it won a star in the 2010 Michelin Guide. With its rustic chic decor and seasonal cooking, it’s the kind of New York place that out-of-town visitors would like. Prices don’t break the bank, with entrées in the high $20s and low $30s.

I visited Marc Forgione two years ago, when it was called Forge. The cuisine struck me as solid neighborhood bistro food. Nothing wrong with that, but not Michelin territory. Frank Bruni apparently felt the same, denying it a full review in lieu of the Dining Briefs treatment.

My colleagues loved it, but I still don’t get the Michelin star. A Caesar salad was pedestrian. The dressing had been applied in the kitchen, leaving the lettuce slightly soggy by the time it reached the table. It was a basic salad that anyone could do at home—probably even me.

Sea bass was more impressive, a tender rectangle of fish with a crisp crust. The menu, however, had described it as “whole crispy red snapper.” The server advised that the kitchen was substituting bass for snapper, but did nothing to alter the impression that it was a whole fish—which it was not.

Both dishes seemed a tad over-salted, as I recall from my previous visit. Unlike my previous visit, there is no amuse-bouche. The bread service remains first-rate, with pillowy-soft rolls straight out of the oven.

The restaurant may be holding its own, if exactly thriving: All-you-can-eat pork sliders are just $16 on Tuesday evenings, with all-you-can-drink Brooklyn Lager for $14. It was not crowded on a Wednesday evening either, and it is practically always available on OpenTable.

Marc Forgione (134 Reade Street between Greenwich & Hudson Streets, TriBeCa)

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

Flex Mussels

I don’t know if it was good planning or good luck, but when Flex Mussels arrived on the Upper East Side in late 2008, it was just in time to salve the wounds of a recession-scarred city.

With scarce exceptions, the neighborhood has never been known for culinary adventure. But the last eighteen months have been a particularly good time for focused restaurants that fill a narrowly defined, inexpensive niche. Hence, we’ve got places dedicated to sausages, mac ’n’ cheese, meatballs, and of course, pizza.

Flex Mussels does that admirably. No need to guess what to order, except for which variety of mussels you want—and in that regard, the restaurant is very, um, flexible. I know, bad joke. Couldn’t resist.

Anyhow, they come in nearly two dozen variations, such as the Maine (lobster, smoked bacon, corn, white chowder, parsley) and the Bisque (lobster, brandy, tomato, garlic cream), both of which we had.

Another, called “The Number 23” on the menu, varies daily. I believe it had sweet corn and ham when I tried it. Whichever version you choose, you get a stainless steel bowl full of plump, steamed mussels, and a deep, nearly inexhaustible broth that you’ll want to drink like soup or sop up with bread.

The mussel dishes are priced between $18.50 and $20.50. There’s a handful of other entrées priced from $21–29, and a steak for $32. If you’re tempted to order them, I’d have to ask why you came to a place called Flex Mussels.

The appetizers, all competently executed, are more routine. You can’t go too far wrong with a goat cheese salad ($13; above left) with yellow beets, candied walnuts, and apples. Nor with a very good chowder ($10; above center), made not with clams, but with mussels and bacon.

A dish called Burnt Fingers ($16; above right) offers fried calamari, shrimp, oysters, and shallot rings, with a spiced aioli dip. The point of serving it on a square of butcher paper somewhat eluded me.

The mussel dishes look mostly the same and are somewhat immune to photography—at least with my amateur equipment. The fries ($6) are wonderful.

The space is deceptively large, as the storefront is narrow, but it goes back a long way. You enter into a cramped bar area, with a separate dining counter lined with stools for walk-ins. If you sit there, you won’t have much elbow room. Then you go back, and you realize there is a lot more space. The decor isn’t fancy, but it suits the restaurant’s nautical theme. It works on the Upper East Side, and it would work on Martha’s Vinyard, or on Prince Edward Island, where the first Flex Mussels opened.

The wine list is wallet-friendly, with most of the whites less than $65 a bottle. An enjoyable 2005 white Burgundy, “Les Coeres,” was $52.

Frank Bruni gave Flex Mussels one star last year, generally agreeing with our assessment of the food, but complaining about several service issues. We experienced none of that; if anything, service was better than it had to be, especially on a lovely Saturday evening with the restaurant nearly packed to the gills.

Flex Mussels (124 E. 82nd Street between Third & Lexington Avenues, Upper East Side)

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