Review Preview: Oceana

Tomorrow, Sam Sifton reviews midtown seafooder Oceana. The Eater Oddsmakers have set the action as follows: Sift Happens: 10-1; Two Stars: 3-1; Three Stars: 4-1.

Time is short, so we’ll make this brief. We think that Oceana is still a three-star restaurant—the rating it has had since…forever. However, we cannot deny that most critics have been less than rapturous since it moved into a more corporate-looking midtown location.

Our predictions since Sifton began have not been very good—we’ve been right only one out of four times, so take this with a grain of salt. We think Sam Sifton will award two stars to Oceana.

Kajitsu

Among the many surprises in the latest Michelin Guide was a star given to Kajitsu, a tiny East Village Japanese restaurant that the mainstream critics practically ignored. Among major publications, four out of five stars from TONY was the only full review. The Times relegated it to Dining Briefs.

Some complain that the Michelin Guide fails to conform to “Received Wisdom” about what is good in New York, but I find it refreshing to find out about places the other critics overlooked. So we paid Kajitsu a visit on Saturday evening.

Without a strong recommendation, this is not a restaurant I would have visited. It’s what Americans would call vegan. There are no animal products on the menu at all.

In Japanese, it’s called Shojin, a Zen Buddhist practice based on respect for living things. Plates are artistically composed in the Kaiseki style, with an equal emphasis on taste and beauty.

As a confirmed carnivore, I must admit that I would not choose a steady diet of this kind of food. I was willing to try it once.

The only choices are the four-course menu for $50 or the eight-course menu for $70. (Click on the image to the right for a full-size copy.) Both change monthly. It seems silly not to spend $20 more for double the number of courses, and it appeared to us that most patrons felt the same.

The chef, Masato Mishihara, works quietly behind a blonde wood counter. He seems to do all of the cooking himself. There are several servers, all female, who tend to eight seats at the counter and eighteen more at the tables. The space was not full, and reservations had been timed to ensure that the chef could keep up without ever having to hurry.

The first course (above) was a slow braised Japanese turnip with black truffle and a bit of gold leaf. We were impressed by the sweet flavor of a vegetable not often served on its own. Like most of the courses, it came in a bowl that was as artistic as the food itself.

A Carrot and Shimeji Mushroom Soup (above left), with little flecks of mushroom tempura, was much better than I ever thought carrot soup could be.

The next course (below) included Fresh Diced Persimmon, Fig and Jicama with Creamy Sesame Sauce (basically a fruit salad) inside of a hollowed-out gourd. Alongside that was a hot House-made Tofu with Matcha Soy Glaze.

Just as impressive was the feat of hollowing out the gourds, which cannot have been easy.

Next came a House-made Soba Dumpling (above left) with a daub of wasabi. I appreciated the technical skill involved, but the taste was too monotonous for me.

The largest item (above right), which the servers described “the main course,” included a pumpkin wheat gluten called “fu” in a cranberry sauce, tempura vegetables, and salad greens. Like several other dishes, it illustrated the chef’s skill at combining local produce with Japanese technique.

The savory part of the menu ended with Matsutake Mushroom Rice and House-Made Pickled Vegetables (above left). We loved the vegetables, but the rice was merely adequate.

Dessert, described as a Chestnut “Yokan” Pastry (above right), was distinctly unpleasant. Just as perplexing was crumble of peanuts, resembling the leftovers of a snack served in coach.

Rakagun Candies (above left) weren’t impressive, even if they were imported from Kyoto, but I loved the intense fluffy green tea, mixed by hand with a whisk.

I respect and admire the chef’s skill. All of the courses were very good and beautifully presented, except for the desserts. But I am not eager to repeat the experience, especially at $70 per person before alcohol, tax, and tip. By the end, I was starting to pine for some animal fat. That shouldn’t necessarily dissuade you: remember, I am a carnivore.

You could easily miss the place. It’s on a non-descript block in the far East Village, not far from Tompkins Square Park, in the cellar of what appears to be a tenemant building. The rooms are the perfect picture of Buddhist austerity.

The servers are every bit as polished as the cuisine. There is a short list of sakes, wines, and beers, priced for any budget.

Kajitsu (414 E. 9th St. between First Ave. & Avenue A, East Village)

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

Review Recap: Aureole

Today, Sam Sifton dumps a single star on Aureole. Make no mistake about it: this is a pan, even though there are many dishes he likes—especially in the more casual front room:

Mr. Palmer is a big-business restaurateur, a best seller, the Dean Koontz of the sauté and oven set. It wasn’t always so. In 1988, he was just a brash young chef who had cooked at the River Café, who struck out on his own to open a creamy, luxurious town house restaurant, Aureole, on the Upper East Side. The food was American, audacious, often excellent and expensive despite a sour economy. It was New York to its core…

Times change. In 2007, Mr. Palmer announced plans to move the restaurant south, into bigger digs. The result is a Las Vegas event restaurant airlifted into Manhattan, a corporate cafeteria with a soundtrack of smooth jazz in the George Benson style. The food can be quite good. It can also be the opposite.

Aureole, as the New York expression goes, is meh.

Sifton confuses matters by assigning one rating to both the upfront bar–café and the $84 prix fixe dining room. For the former, one star is a compliment; for the latter, it’s a curse.

There was no Review Preview yesterday, as Sifton didn’t tweet in advance what he would be reviewing. It is just as well, as we would have been wrong again. We would have predicted two stars for Aureole. It will be interesting to see what happens next to Chef Chris Lee. He was turning out acclaimed food at Gilt. Now he is “meh.”

Convivio

Note: Convivio closed in March 2011, along with its sister restaurant Alto on the same day, due to unspecified “business circumstances.”

*

Michael White is obviously not the only chef in this town with multiple restaurants. But the three he has are probably the most similar.

Alto, Convivio, and Marea are all upscale Italian New York Times three-star restaurants. There are slight differences in focus—northern Italian, southern Italian, and seafood respectively—but the menus share a strong stylistic similarity.

There is nothing like, for instance, the huge difference between Daniel and Café Boulud, or between Jean Georges and Perry St.

On the bill, however, there is a huge difference, with four-course prix fixes of $89, $79, and $59 at Marea, Alto, and Convivio respectively. Location has something to do with it—Central Park South for Marea, midtown for Alto, Tudor City for Convivio. The expensive seafood ingredients imported for Marea are clearly a factor.

But after four visits to Marea, I am not yet quite persuaded that you get your money’s worth for $89. It is clearly a very good restaurant, or I wouldn’t have returned. But for $40 less per person, we had a terrific meal at Convivio last week that was better than any one of my meals at Marea. The only drawback is that you have to traipse to Tudor City, which is a moderate inconvenience.

Convivio is in the space that had been L’Impero. Eric Asimov awarded three stars (when Scott Conant was the chef), but Frank Bruni demoted it to two, finding the food inconsistent, and complaining about “lugubrious” décor “evoking the upholstered interior of a very large coffin.” Ouch!

White and owner Chris Cannon took the critique to heart. If ever there were a makeover tailor-made to Bruni’s specifications, this was it. They brightened up the space, lowered the cost of the prix fixe, and added inexpensive tapas-like starters called sfizi.

Voila! Convivio was a three-star restaurant.

Convivio was never very high on our to-do list, mainly because we no longer trusted Bruni to evaulate Italian restaurants correctly. This time, perhaps he got it right.

You can order à la carte here, as at all of the Cannon–White restaurants. The sfizi are $4–7, antipasti $10–16, primi $23–25, secondi $26–35, desserts $11–15. But at $59 the prix fixe is a much better deal. There is only one dish that carries a supplement: the steak, which at $35 is the most expensive entrée. On the prix fixe, you’re basically getting the antipasto at half price and the dessert for free.

What can I say? We loved almost everything. Testa (above left), a deep-fried pork terrine, was complemented beautifully by a fried egg. Polipo (above right), or grilled octopus, was tender and smoky.

Garganelli (above left) came with a seppia & shrimp sausage, zucchini leeks, and peccorino; Gramigna (above right) with duck sausage, broccoli rabe, sage, and marsala.

Maiale (above left), or a pork chop, was large enough to feed all of Tudor City. As good as it was, I had no intention of sharing.

Grilled lamb chops (above right) were delightful, but they were undermined by salsa verde, escarole, tomato and beans, which were far too overbearing and unsubtle.

Heather Bertinetti, the young pastry chef at all three of the Cannon–White restaurants, is a real find. She hasn’t disappointed me yet. Crostata di Mela (above left) was an irresistible crumble of spiced apples, walnuts, and caramel gelato. Brasato d’Ananas (above right) made a hit out of vanilla braised pineapple, coconut custard, and mango sorbet.

Service was polished and professional. I especially appreciated the sommelier, who, when I asked for a recommendation at $60 or less, went all the way down to $45. It was a terrific choice too (the 2001 Majara), and on top of that he decanted it and offered us a copy of the label.

The restaurant wasn’t quite full, but business was certainly brisk. (When I called to confirm, a recording warned that our table would be forfeit if we were more than fifteen minutes late: ugh!) We may have lucked into one of the better tables, a two-top on the restaurant’s upper level, with no one nearby. Some of the tables are a bit more cramped than that.

No one doubts that Michael White is an elite chef. I’ve had my ups and downs at Marea, but I will likely return there somewhat regularly, as it is much more conveniently located, and I still have a lot of confidence in Chef White. But if you can get to Tudor City, Convivio may be the best way to experience his cuisine.

Convivio (45 Tudor City Place at 42nd Street, Tudor City)

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

The Burger at Lure Fishbar

Lure Fishbar is best known as a seafood restaurant (click here for our review), but chef Josh Capon cooks a surprisingly good burger. His entry won the People’s Choice award at the recent Rachel Ray Burger Bash, part of the New York Food & Wine Festival.

The burger he serves at Lure regularly appears on various “best burger” lists, so I was eager to give it a try. It sells for $15, which seems to be the going rate for burgers at upscale restaurants (not counting the crazy Black Label Burger $26 at Minetta Tavern).

Sure enough, he nails it. It’s not a match for the Minetta Burger (the $16 cheap option at the Tavern), but still plenty good—and unlike Minetta, you have a shot at getting a bar stool here at meal times. Capon doesn’t complicate matters. He just serves a simple burger, with enough heft that you can ask for medium rare and see red. It comes with a blizzard of condiments, but I didn’t need any.

Lure Fishbar (142 Mercer Street at Prince Street, SoHo)

Le Relais de Venise

Le Relais de Venise “L’Entrecôte” garnered a bit of press—only a little—when it opened last summer in East Midtown— oddly enough, on the same block as the Four Seasons. The few reviews it got told of a “meh” steak in a “meh” sauce, and that was that.

Then Sam Sifton shocked us all by choosing the place for his fourth review, pronouncing it “terrific,” and awarding one star.

The concept at L’Entrecôte is simple enough. There is only one order: salad and steak frites for $24. Across the street, at the Four Seasons, you can’t even get an appetizer for that.

Desserts are extra, but not exorbitant, at around $5–7 each. A glass of the house Bordeaux is just $5.75. None of that is expensive by Manhattan standards, where at most top steakhouses the steak alone is around $40—more at some places.

Still, even if you skip dessert (as I did) and drink just one glass of the wine, you’ll approach $40 with tax and tip. There are plenty of cheap eats at that price, and when only one item is served, it ought to be great. It is not.

What’s served here is better called “nourishment” than cuisine. As Sifton noted, you could be out in twenty minutes, and there is no reason to linger any longer. The space is cavernous, and neither warm nor especially inviting. I wonder how often they’ll fill it?

Despite all that space, there is no coat check.

The menu announces, “Today, trimmed Entrecôte Steak [i.e. rib steak] ‘Porte Maillo’ with its famous sauce, French fries and Green salad with walnuts.” I love that word Today, as if you could get something different tomorrow. You can’t.

A waitress dressed in a French maid’s uniform asks if you’ll have your steak blue, rare, medium, or well. I choose rare, and she writes a big “R” in magic marker on the white mat that covers the table. With so little to keep track of, do they really need an aide memoire?

That house wine arrives. It is certainly not over-priced, at $5.75. But one glass of it will be enough.

The salad (below left) comes within minutes— fast enough to make me suspect a bunch of them are made up in advance. After a few bites of the soggy lettuce, my fears are confirmed.

In contrast, the steak seems to be prepared to order. The waitress serves about half of it onto your plate, and ladles on the sauce. The other half is left on a warming tray at a serving station nearby. When you’ve finished your first helping, she’ll bring over the tray and serve the rest. It’s a gimmick, as the portion is not so large that it would get cold if it were all served at once.

The meat, as you’d expect, is not the best, but it is certainly edible, and cooked correctly to the rare I had asked for. The fries are decent. The sauce is a secret, but the consensus is that it includes chicken livers, mustard, and pepper. I thought I tasted mushrooms, too. It is good enough to conceal the fact that the beef is nothing special.

The servers are plenty attentive. You could argue that the place is over-staffed, given how little is expected of them. The restaurant fulfills its modest aims acceptably, but I’m sure you can find more interesting ways to spend $40.

Le Relais de Venise (590 Lexington Avenue at 52nd Street, East Midtown)

Food: Acceptable
Service: Decent
Ambiance: Acceptable
Overall: Satisfactory

When a Cru Becomes a Vin de Pays

Update: Sure enough, and as we suspected, Cru’s strategy for re-making itself failed. We take no pleasure in this; it was just so obviously desperate. Cru closed in the summer of 2010. Its replacement is Lotus of Siam.

*

Cru, one of the few unabashedly old-school restaurants to have opened within the last five years, has finally decided how to replace Chef Shea Gallante, who left in June.

The Times reports that Todd Macdonald is the new chef. He had been with the restaurant in 2004, when it opened, but left two years ago to join a catering firm. Robert Bohr, one of the owners, said, “We wanted food that was easier, simpler, faster, cheaper and definitely tastier, which is what we think Todd will do.”

He added that they’ll consider remodeling after the new year, “to make the place less fancy.” In the meantime, prices on what is probably the city’s best wine list have been slashed by 30 percent across the board.

When we visited in last year, we noted that Cru was one of the few restaurants that actually got fancier. Servers’ all-black uniforms were replaced with suits; an à la carte menu was replaced with an $84 prix fixe, and the tasting menu nearly doubled in price, from $65 to $125.

This is by no means a crazy strategy. Eleven Madison Park did the same, and its reward was four stars from Frank Bruni. Just try getting a last-minute reservation these days. But at Cru, for whatever reason, that strategy did not survive the recession.

We understand why Cru has decided to go downscale. The reasons are obvious enough to not require explanation.

At the same time, we have our doubts. Even with a 30 percent discount, Cru’s wine list has hundreds of bottles with three and four-digit prices. Most people willing to spend that kind of money want food of a certain quality.

If you can afford a $400 Bordeaux, do you really care if the entrées are five bucks cheaper?

Review Recap: Le Relais de Venise

Sam Sifton has been the New York Times restaurant critic for just four weeks, and already he is full of surprises. We have correctly predicted his rating just once—and that was for the rather obvious Marea.

We did not believe that this restaurant would get one star, based on the “meh” reviews we’ve read elsewhere. But we are glad that when Sifton gives a star, the restaurant is actually good—a contrast from the Frank Bruni era.

LE RELAIS DE VENISE L’ENTRECÔTE is a mouthful of a restaurant that opened a few months ago in a canyon at Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, convenient mostly to hotel guests and hamsters on the Midtown professional wheel. It has no real menu to speak of. There is only salad and steak frites. Some wine to drink and a dessert after. Women in French maid outfits serve the stuff as if they were characters in an early Preston Sturges film. And you know what? It’s terrific.

We still don’t quite understand why a restaurant that serves only one salad and one entrée required a review to itself.

Record to date: 71–28 (71%)

The Burger at Bar Blanc Bistro

Note: Bar Blanc Bistro has closed. The space is now the Southern-themed restaurant Lowcountry.

*

When we last visited Bar Blanc, we found a washed-out all-blanc space helmed by a former Bouley chef, with a $75 tasting menu and a $32 suckling pig entrée. At those prices, Bar Blanc needed to be more than just a neighborhood place.

Frank Bruni drank the kool-aid, awarding two stars in early 2008. We found it uneven (that pig was stringy and bitter) and over-priced, awarding just one. It seems the customers agreed with us.

Bar Blanc wisely re-tooled. The severe all-blanc space was toned down and made more welcoming. The original chef departed, and was replaced by Sebastiaan Zijp (ironically also a former Bouley employee), who dialed down the menu to a level the West Village could support. To signal the revised ambitions, the space was renamed Bar Blanc Bistro.

Except for a strip steak, all of the entrées are now under $30. Pork appears in several dishes; the chef breaks down whole animals himself. You can order the full menu at the bar, though there is a separate menu of bar snacks, including the obligatory signature burger for $15. On Mondays, you can get a dinner of moules frites with beer for just $18. On Sundays, there’s a $35 prix fixe. Wines are half-price during happy hour.

In other words, there’s a sincere attempt to make this a neighborhood go-to place, but the cuisine is thoughtful enough, and the space welcoming enough, for a low-key date or a business dinner.

Josh Ozersky’s final act as editor of the Feedbag (other than navel-gazing) was a visit to Bar Blanc Bistro, where he sampled the whole menu, liking all of it except the beef. Ozersky has it out for the Piedmontese Beef the restaurant features: “as I expected, the hamburger is awful.”

Being the perverse soul I am, I thought I’d try the one thing Ozersky hated—that burger. No, it is not awful—you knew that, right?

Piedmontese Beef has a luscious taste, remarkable given that it doesn’t rely on high fat content. But I suppose when you’re eating a burger doused in melted Vermont cheddar and bone marrow–bordelaise mayo, who cares how fatty the beef is?

A more serious complaint is the height–width ratio. If this baby were any taller, it would be a meatball. At these proportions, it was difficult to handle. When I was finished, half the bun was still in my hand.

I wouldn’t order that burger again, but I came away much more inclined to return to the restaurant than when Bar Blanc was serving $30 entrées. There’s still much more fun to be had here.

Bar Blanc Bistro (142 W. 10th St. between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Village)

Review Preview: Le Relais de Venise

Tomorrow, Sam Sifton reviews the utterly irrelevant Le Relais de Venise. The utterly disgusted Eater oddsmakers have declined to establish a betting line.

Nevertheless, we forecast zero stars, because: A) No one yet has said this place is especially good. B) If you give one star to a place that actually has some decent food (i.e., Imperial Palace), where else is there to go, but down?