Rôtisserie Georgette

Who’d have thought that a French restaurant that serves meats on a rôtisserie would be one of the breakout hits of 2014?

Georgette Farkas thought so. After 17 years as Daniel Boulud’s head of in-house PR, she left last year to open Rôtisserie Georgette on the Upper East Side, steps away from Central Park South and the posh Fifth and Madison Avenue shopping districts.

It might strike you as an obvious move, but according to the Post’s Steve Cuozzo (who awarded three stars), there hasn’t been a French rôtisserie restaurant in New York since D’Artagnan in 2001—and that one didn’t last long. But Farkas’ instincts were spot-on: Rôtisserie Georgette is consistently full, and I had a tougher time booking it than almost any restaurant I’ve visited in the last year.

Click to read more ...

Skál

Note: This is a review under the opening chef, Ben Spiegel. James Kim replaced him in June 2014. The Village Voice filed a favorable review later that year, but the restaurant closed in March 2015.

*

First you have to figure out how to get there, a streetcorner on the edge of the city, where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side. It took me to the last subway station below Central Park that I’d never been to (East Broadway), then a couple of disorienting wrong turns till I found it.

Finally, there it is: Skál, with its box-shaped dining room giving off a warm glow, in an area where most of the storefronts are barricaded shut during the evening. Look a bit closer, and there’s a trendy bar or two, and on the street, plenty of revelers with a purpose, heading to their next watering stop. The busier part of the Lower East Side is four blocks to the north.

You can see faint glimmers of what the New Yorker meant in 2003, when it reviewed Les Enfants Terribles, the last restaurant to occupy this space: “It’s nice that the Manhattan tradition of opening a restaurant in an impossibly lonely, graffiti-bombed corner of town is still in effect.”

A decade later, as it prepared to close, the website Bowery Boogie lamented that, “The Ludlow corridor has become that temple of doom situation, whereby the heart and soul of the neighborhood is being categorically stripped by the hand of gentrification.”

No, it’s not grandma’s Lower East Side any more.

Nowadays, one in ten chefs cooks at Noma for 15 minutes, then opens a New Nordic restaurant. Skál means “Cheers!” in Icelandic, and the here the cuisine hails (nominally) from that Scandinavian nation. But the Canadian chef Ben Spiegel’s tightly-edited bistro menu could be found anywhere, with its Long Island duck wings, Elysian Fields lamb rib, Berkshire pork chop, and Angus hangar steak.

Root vegetables, grasses, and seaweed dart in and out of the menu, but I saw very little of the New Nordic ethos on the plate, nor even some of the edgier ingredients promised on the website (puffed pig skin, powdered malt vinegar, whipped cod roe).

None of which is to deny that Skál is a most welcoming place. The food is very good, and by current standards inexpensive, with starters and vegetables $5–15, and more substantial plates $14–28. (It does appear that some items in the latter category are not full entrées, such as the $14 duck wings, but I was not entirely sure about that.)

The house cocktails ($13) merit further exploration. I was pleased with the Gurka (Nolet’s Gin, Cucumber Juice, Lime Juice & Pepper), but the Same Same But Different (Makers Mark, Lemon Juice & Blackberry Juice) was too fruity for my taste.

The bread service came with the obligatory Nordic schmear of soft butter, but no knife to spread it with.

If they serve broccoli on Mount Olympus, then Skál’s version, roasted with bread crumbs and duck egg emulsion, is the broccoli of the gods ($11; above).

It’s hard to tell there’s a whole roasted fluke ($26; above) in the photo, but you might just see the head poking out from under an avalanche of accompaniments. Getting to the fish took a bit of work, but once there it was worth the effort.

The dining room is small. It was full at 10:00pm on a Saturday evening, and the music was a bit loud for my preference. Reservations are accepted on the website, which in my case (dining alone) meant a seat at the bar, which was just fine, and I was well taken care of.

For me, Skál is a bit too far away to enter my regular rotation, but if you’re nearby it’s worth a visit.

Skál (37 Canal Street at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side)

Food: Nominally icelandic; bistro cuisine that would work anywhere
Service: Very good for a casual spot
Ambiance: A small, informal, and sometimes loud, but charmingly small room

Rating: ★

Seeing Stars: Eater Blinks and So Do I

The stars are back.

Two years ago, the Los Angeles Times announced it was dropping the “star system” for rating restaurants. To my knowledge, no other publication followed the LAT’s lead.

In New York City, the Times, New York magazine, the Post, the Daily News, Time Out New York, the Observer, and GQ, all give stars. Among print publications that regularly review restaurants in New York, to my knowledge only the New Yorker and the Village Voice have yet to use stars (and they never did).

Last week, Eater.com (which had long eschewed reviews of any kind) began two new series of reviews, with critics Ryan Sutton (formerly of Bloomberg) and Robert Sietsema (formerly of the Village Voice), who will use separate non-overlapping four-star systems. (New York is the only other publication with separate star systems for low- and high-end restaurants.)

After the LAT announced its decision, the Times’ Pete Wells filed a blog post explaining why his reviews would continue to have stars:

No two critics are going to have the same reaction to a restaurant, and no two critics are going to come up with identical interpretations of the precedent. The whole process of critiquing restaurants is inherently subjective. Readers are free to disagree with the critic. Go ahead and throw the newspaper across the room if you like. That’s part of the fun. . . .

Whether you think that renders the stars meaningless depends entirely on what you expect them to do. If you hope they are going to organize the entire New York City restaurant scene into an objective and verifiable hierarchy of good, better and best, you’re going to find that the reviews are a weekly exercise in frustration. (A corollary: If you read the reviews believing that all restaurants with a given number of stars are meant to be equally good, you’re going to lose your mind.)

On the other hand, if you understand that the stars accompany a review of at least 1,000 words, I hope you’ll believe that they do have meaning. The reviews have to cover a lot of ground. They tell you what kind of restaurant is being reviewed, how it looks and feels, how customers are treated, how some of the dishes taste and often whether it’s worth the price. A star ranking from zero to four can’t do any of those things in any meaningful way, but it can try to serve as shorthand for how strongly the reviewer is recommending the restaurant.

After the LAT announcement, I introduced my own system, which not-coincidentally was a five-step scale, just as the stars had been (four to zero), but—as I then saw it—without the stars’ historical baggage. From highest to lowest, my ratings were:

• Extraordinary
• Category Killer
• Critic’s Pick
• Neighborhood Spot
• Not Recommended

These categories had always approximated my general sense of what the stars ought to mean, although not all critics used them that way. I found in practice that my new system was no more liberating than the stars. In fact, it was less discriminating, because I had used half-stars in the past, but I had allowed myself no way to designate a restaurant as, for example, “Neighborhood Plus.”

Other problems I saw with the star system seem less serious to me now. I do not fundamentally take issue with a restaurant like Roberta’s receiving three stars, as it did from Sutton last week, assuming you agree with his assessment. Restaurants are rated against the ideal versions of themselves, not against others in completely different genres. You could agree with Sutton’s rating, while concluding at the same time that Roberta’s isn’t for you. (That, in fact, is precisely my view of Roberta’s.)

There is nothing to be done about the fact that, on crowdsourced review sites like Yelp, a three-star review is terrible, while to most professional critics it is terrific. In my system, a one-star restaurant is “good,” which ought to be a compliment. I cannot do anything about the fact that some people will read my reviews, see one star, and think, “It must be awful.” The readers who say that haven’t read the review.

There remain considerable differences in the ways critics use the star system. Some publications go up to five stars, although most use four. Some go down to zero, but others stop at one. Some use half-stars; others don’t. Because of this, stars are generally not comparable across publications. For a given publication and critic, the stars, as Wells put it, “serve as shorthand for how strongly the reviewer is recommending the restaurant.”

But the system, in whatever fashion it is used, remains the lingua franca of restaurant reviews.

A few years ago, the Post’s Steve Cuozzo dropped the stars (in fact, he dropped traditional “reviews” entirely), but after a while concluded that he might as well re-instate them. I’ve now come to the same conclusion.

Gato

Gato, Bobby Flay’s latest restaurant, asks us to ponder whether a TV chef best known for throwdowns and gimmicks, for a line of spice rubs and a middle-brow empire of tourist traps, can still cook food that matters.

For now, the answer is emphatically yes. Gato is so good, in fact, that it invites you to forget his multiply cloned restaurants at various casinos, his half-dozen TV shows (that’s only the active ones—there have been many others), his cookbooks, and his burger palaces in eleven states.

Flay is omni-present on TV, but he was once a serious restaurant chef. With the critically admired Mesa Grill in 1991 and Bolo in 1993, he was on the way to the kind of restaurant empire that chefs like David Chang and the Torrisi gang have built in New York today.

He chose a different path, proliferating his brand outside New York, and augmenting it with a lineup of cookbooks, spice rubs, and especially TV shows, where his good looks and winning smile made him a natural. He never entirely took his eye off his kitchens: he was already a minor industry in 2003 when William Grimes upgraded Bolo to three stars.

But the New York restaurants gradually faded. Frank Bruni demoted Mesa Grill to one star in 2008. Bolo closed in 2008 to make way for condos, Mesa Grill in 2013 after losing its lease. His remaining New York City restaurant, Bar Americain, was well off the radar.

The loss of Bolo stuck in his craw, and there were persistent rumors he would re-open it. He was certainly patient: he told Eater.com that he looked at “hundreds and hundreds of spaces” over “five or six years.” After securing a liquor license under that name, Flay changed his mind and called it Gato, after a stray cat that walked by while he and his partners were scoping the storefront they eventually chose.

Click to read more ...

The Chori Burger at Jeepney

I don’t often chase food porn: there’s far too much of it, and I have far too little time. I made an exception for the Chori Burger at Jeepney, featured last week in The Times by foodcurated’s Liza de Guia.

Jeepney claims to be the world’s only Filipino gastropub. Exactly what passes for a gastropub these days is anyone’s guess, but it’s Filipino, beyond a doubt, a casual place that looks like a dive bar with a serious kitchen. You can feast on fertilized duck eggs, pig snouts, beef blood, and head-on prawns, along with less adventurous fare, like pork shoulder, lamb shank, and roasted chicken.

But it was the burger ($17) that brought me here:

The chef, Miguel Trinidad, creates a patty with beef and longanisa, a cured pork sausage. He tops it with banana ketchup (a condiment that finds its way into many dishes here). Both sides of the challah bun are drizzled with a kewpie aioli (soy sauce, garlic, and other spices).

In the Times video, the chef explains that the burger is not traditional in the Philippines, but Americans imported it during the occupation, and it’s now found in many places there, though usually with a White Castle-sized patty. In this interpretation, the burger has the heft that New Yorkers expect.

The server leaves you with three napkins, and you’ll need them, but it’s well worth it for this spicy, messy masterpiece. Finish it off with satisfying fries made from kamote, the Filipino equivalent of the sweet potato.

I assume the burger is fairly new, as Pete Wells did not mention it in an improbable two-star review a year ago. I don’t know when or if I’ll make it back to try more of the menu. For burger hounds, that alone is enough to make Jeepney a destination.

Jeepney (201 First Avenue between 12th & 13th Streets, East Village)

Nerai

In what other age could one of the best high-end Greek restaurants in New York, open and go almost totally unnoticed?

That is the perplexing question at Nerai, which opened in May 2013 in the old Oceana space, and has attracted no professional reviews that I can find, except from John Mariani in Huffington Post, who posted a rave three months ago.

The opening certainly was publicized, although perhaps not as well as it could be. Did it begin so poorly that the first critics to visit found it not worth writing about? Or did they just assume that a white tablecloth restaurant on East 54th Street is unimportant by default? I fear it could be the latter.

I am not going to pronounce Nerai the best modern Greek restaurant in New York. That judgment would require more visits and deeper exploration than my time and money will allow. But after one visit I can certainly pronounce it a candidate.

Admittedly, there’s not a lot of competition since Michael Psilakis’s Anthos bit the dust. Molyvos is reliable, but not the standout it once was, although it has the city’s best Greek wine list. Milos could be better, but I’ve never been (GQ’s Alan Richman posted a rave in 2010). Thalassa is an old favorite of mine, but it gets very little critical attention; it is still very good, but below its peak.

Which brings us back to Nerai, which feels immediately cozy and elegant. A series of rooms in the bi-level space is decked out in soothing, vaguely nautical themes. In the room we were in, on the ground floor, the walls are lined with white muslin gauzes, pleated to resemble sails.

You won’t get out cheaply. Starters and salads range from $15–27, composed entrées $26–56 (just one dish under $30), sides $10. There’s also whole fish and seafood, $33–60 per pound, a notoriously tricky format, as you don’t quite know what you’re paying until the bill arrives.

Click to read more ...

Ristorante Morini

How much Michael White is too much Michael White? At Ristorante Morini, his seventh New York restaurant in as many years, the chef is betting that we still don’t have enough.

There’ve been some stumbles along the way. Nicoletta, his pizzeria, is limping along after horrible reviews. How do you screw up pizza? Somehow, he did. The Butterfly, his take on a 1950s Wisconsin supper club, quickly fell off the radar after a much publicized opening. A recent re-visit to Costata, his Italian steakhouse in Soho, was disappointing. But at modern haute Italian fine dining, his judgment has never failed him. That’s the genre he tackles once again at Ristorante Morini.

White may be repeating himself, but have you tried to book a table at Marea lately? After five years in business, it is still solidly booked at prime times. Opening Ai Fiori, a second restaurant in the same mold, did nothing to tamp down demand, so why not build a third?

He chose the right location, the Upper East Side, the city’s only remaining residential neighborhood where guests aren’t offended by white tablecloths and don’t require a special occasion for fine dining. The Met is a block away, and if you’d rather avoid museum food, there is now a far better option.

I’m not sure why he chose the name Morini, which this new restaurant shares with Osteria Morini in Soho, where you find haute trattoria fare served on wooden tables with orange paper placemats. This Morini is nothing like that Morini, but I’m sure some tourists will show up at the wrong one.

To run the kitchen, White has installed Gordon Finn, who worked for him at Alto when it had two Michelin stars. Finn executes the White playbook flawlessly. Close your eyes, and you could be at Marea or Ai Fiori.

The prices are punishingly high. You are paying for luxury, or at least the perception of it. Crudi and antipasti are $19–26, pastas $22–29 (not counting gnocchi with black truffles, $42), entrées mostly $36–52 (but Dover Sole will set you back $69).

There is also a four-course option for $84, which allows you to select almost any starter, pasta, entrée and dessert (some items carry supplements). The tariff will probably go up over time, as Ai Fiori’s prix fixe is $94, Marea’s $99, and the restaurants are quite similar. Indeed, when the chef came to our table to say hello, he did not disagree when I described it as “Marea with a meat option.”

Click to read more ...

Montmartre

Note: This review is under chef Michael Toscano, who left the restaurant in November 2014 for an opportunity in Charleston, South Carolina. Montmartre closed in March 2016. The owner Gabe Stulman, changed the concept over and over again, but couldn’t find a formula that worked.

*

If Montmartre were an operating system, what version would it be? Best I can tell, we’re on Montmartre v3.0.

The restaurant opened 13 months ago with ex-Momofuku chef Tien Ho serving classic French bistro cuisine. After just five weeks, Tien and owner Gabe Stulman tossed the menu in lieu of the Asian-inflected Vietnamese cooking that the chef was known for. This was a remarkable turn of events: the restaurant was busy, and none of the pro critics had reviewed it yet. But Stulman apparently smelled a rat before the critics told him what was wrong. When Pete Wells awarded two stars in June 2013, he found v2.0 much improved over version he had beta tested.

It is less clear what went wrong after that, but Tien left the restaurant in October 2013, and Michael Toscano (Stulman’s partner at Perla) was appointed executive chef and co-owner. Strangely enough, v3.0 reverted back to the plan of v1.0, with a classic French bistro menu. It’s a bit like the failure of New Coke: Coke Classic was better, after all.

The new menu is not quite full-on French. Under a heading like Coquillages, you’ve got an offering like Shrimp Cocktail ($15), which basically could be served anywhere. Likewise, under Salades, a choice of Winter Greens ($11) with blood orange vinaigrette. But there’s also escargots ($15) and cassoulet de cochon ($29.50), so there’s enough French for those who want it, along with classic bail-out dishes like a dry-aged burger ($19) and a straight-up roast chicken ($28).

Appetizers and salads are $11–17, entrées $19 (the burger) up to the oddly priced steak frittes ($35.25). There are a lot of prices ending in .25 or .95, which I have to think is a joke, as it is not consistent, and none of Stulman’s other restaurants—all with a similar vibe and price range—are priced like that.

Despite the humble, and for the most part inexpensive, bistro cuisine, Stulman price-gouges on the wine list, as he always does. There are hardly any reds below $60, and the bottom end is mostly over-priced vins de pays. He really ought to be ashamed of himself. The 2012 Gravilas we ordered was fine, for what it was; it just shouldn’t be $52 (it’s about $17 retail).

 

We began with country bread, served with soft butter. The amuse bouche (above left) was a butternut squash velouté with hazelnuts. We made the boring but enjoyable choice for our appetizer, a dozen oysters (Wellfleet, Beau Soleil, and Malpeque).

The menu’s obligatory large-format dish is a hulking braised Short Rib Bourgogne pour deux ($60), served with carrots, onions, lardons, and fingerling potatoes. It’s fabulous, and three could easily share it.

 

Desserts were first rate, a chocolate fondant ($12; above left) and a pineapple clafoutis ($12; above right).

 

The meal ends with cookies served in an old Camel cigarette case.

The space is resolutely casual, like all of Stulman’s restaurants. The dining rooms on two levels are packed with tables, to what I assume is the legal limit: there was barely room for the food, and we might as well have been in our neighbors’ laps.

Montmartre takes reservations (only by phone), which may indicate some weakness, as historically Stulman has preferred strictly walk-ins. We did exactly that at 7:15pm on a Saturday evening and were seated immediately: they were doing decent business but were not full.

I wish we could have tried more, but the fraction of the menu we were able to sample was excellent. If accompanied by a sensibly-priced wine list, Montmartre might be one of our better French bistros.

Montmartre (158 Eighth Avenue between 17th & 18th Streets, Chelsea)

Food: Excellent Americanized French bistro classics; an over-priced wine list
Service: Good
Ambiance: A charming, if over-crowded, Francophilic dining room on two levels

Rating: ★½

Telepan Local

Note: Telepan Local closed in November 2014 after tepid reviews and multiple attempts to change the concept.

*

Today, chefs with even modest success barely wait fifteen minutes before opening a second restaurant, and then a third. Michael White will probably open another half-dozen before you’ve finished reading this post.

Hats off to Bill Telepan, who waited almost nine years after the eponymous Telepan on the Upper West Side, to open his second place, Telepan Local, in Tribeca in the old Industria Argentina space. I have no window into the chef’s thinking, but the original restaurant didn’t arrive fully-formed, and that could be why he was in no hurry to open another: my first visit (in 2006) was so disappointing that I waited five years to try it again, this time with far better results. In the most recent Michelin Guide, Telepan received a star for the first time.

Telepan Local is Telepan’s dressed-down little brother. The design by the Brooklyn studio firm Home isn’t the most original idea, a barn-like structure with exposed wood and subway tile. It’s not a quiet place. Servers wear checked shirts that might’ve been imported from the wilds of Bushwick.

The chef refers to the concept as “American tapas,” a phrase that doesn’t fill me with delight, but I can hardly blame him for copying a format that has been so wildly successful all over town. The menu, which will change frequently, consists of around 25 small plates ($7–17 each), a format that often promotes over-ordering. Sure enough, the server recommended “3–4 dishes per person.” We ordered six for the two of us, and couldn’t finish the sixth.

But it’s possible to dine quite inexpensively here. The two-page wine list offers many bottles under $60. A 2008 Rioja was $54, and with six small plates the bill came to $118 before tax and tip. There aren’t enough good restaurants where you can do that any more.

Telepan’s press interviews promise “seasonal and local” cuisine, which would sound like a broken record, except he was doing it before everyone did it, and he is better at it than most.

 

Foie Gras Jammers ($12; above left) are a cross between a cookie and a slider. The dough is warm, but the foie seemed a bit over-chilled. Arancini ($7; above right) are lovely, made with bone marrow and parmigiano aioli.

 

Pigs in a Blanket ($7; above left) rest in a honey mustard dip; the luscious franks (in soft dough) are many grades better than Hebrew National. I couldn’t at all grasp the point of Mushrooms in Parchment ($12; above right), which came across as mushrooms on soggy bread.

 

I could dine all day on fatty, pink Corned Tongue ($12; above left) with grilled cabbage and russian dressing. Pork Shoulder ($14; above right) with wilted greens and white beans was terrific, and portioned generously (I snapped the photo after we’d already taken more than half of it).

The service model is clearly intended not to feel too dressed up: coats aren’t checked, and there is no bread service, but there are higher-end grace notes: reservations are accepted (I wouldn’t have come otherwise); wine is served at the right temperature, in the right glassware, and a choice of flat or sparkling water is offered without charge.

Plates were delivered and cleared quickly, and although we never had the sense of being pushed out the door, that was the effect whether intended or not, as we were finished in well under 90 minutes. The restaurant was full on a Wednesday evening, and the staff seemed on top of their game.

I’m not a huge fan of the tapas format, but Bill Telepan makes it compelling. The location isn’t convenient for me to be a frequent guest, but if I lived or worked nearby, I’d be in all the time.

Telepan Local (329 Greenwich Street between Duane and Jay Streets, Tribeca)

Food: A seasonal and locally-sourced menu of American tapas
Service: Perhaps too rushed, but certainly better than it has to be
Ambiance: That barnyard look you’ve seen before

Rating: ★

The Peacock

The Peacock strutted into town in late 2013, aiming to prove that British pub food is fit for fine dining.

The British invasion is hardly big news any more: The Spotted Pig opened in 2003, and there have been many that followed, including Jones Wood Foundry on the Upper East Side, whose owners are also behind this new venture.

But these older places are fundamentally casual, reflecting the cuisine’s humble origins. The Peacock asks diners to contemplate $26 fish and chips in sumptuous rooms, alongside three-figure Bordeaux served by suited sommeliers.

We liked it, but I’m not sure it will last.

The two adjacent townhouses on a Murray Hill side street were formerly the Williams Club, one of many establishments that catered to affluent alumni of Northeast liberal arts colleges. It was a place where locals congregated with their fellow grads, where those not based in New York could find a place to stay. As the Wall Street Journal explained:

The demise of the university clubs comes not from economic recession or a dwindling population of grads but a change in leisure interests. Younger generations of men and women, for good or ill, seem to prefer boutique hotels to the gilded clubhouse. They perhaps don’t see as much prestige in drinking and dining in swanky clubs with their alma mater’s name, when they can just as easily stay in touch with college friends on Facebook.

(There are still a few of these around: the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton clubs are in no danger of disappearing.)

The Williams site was acquired by restaurateur Yves Jadot, who converted it into a boutique extended-stay hotel (30 days minimum) called The William. There are two restaurants, The Peacock and a casual pub called The Shakespeare. Jadot’s other properties supplied the culinary talent, chef Jason Hicks of Jones Wood Foundry (who is listed as a co-owner), and Meghan Dorman of the speakeasy-style cocktail bar, Raines Law Room. Robert Aikens, formerly of Stephen Starr’s The Dandelion in Philadelphia, is executive chef.

There are two lounges with wing-back chairs and plush sofas, where you can kick back on Dorman’s painterly cocktails. They’re over-priced at $16–18, and the pours are not generous, but you are paying for atmosphere. For dinner, you move onto one of two comfortable, dimly-lit dining rooms, where tables are generously spaced and you will not struggle to hear your companion. (See Eater’s photo essay for a look at the décor.)

There are no tablecloths, but everything else about the place screams fine dining, and I don’t take issue with that. I just wonder about the viability of Gammon steak and bangers & mash in this setting. The quality of the cooking is better than most pubs, but it still feels like eating a pub menu at Per Se. Prices are not out of line, considering the elegance of the room and the skill of the cooking, with starters $11–18, mains $21–33, and sides $9.

The wine list (available online) runs to five pages, with a good range of selections below $60. A 2005 Château Ramafort was fairly priced at $55.

Click to read more ...