Contra

Economists have their own ways of measuring the end of a recession. I have my own: how long does it take to get into a hit restaurant in New York?

Contra opened on the Lower East Side in October 2013, and it took till March 2015 for me to get a reservation. Now, I’ll admit: I didn’t work at it desperately. With dogged persistence, I surely could’ve gone sooner. But at the pace I was willing to work—something less than desperation—it took almost eighteen months for a reservation to appear, at a time I was willing to go.

The concept was daring for late 2013: a $55 five-course set menu from two chefs most people (then) had never heard of. Apparently they never got the memo: that’s not The Way We Eat Now. Diners want sharable small plates, to order either a short snack or a multi-course degustation at their whim. Or, do they? Contra was willing to bet the opposite.

Of course, the fixed-price menu is what every kitchen would love to serve: planning is so much easier when every cover will be the same. But most places don’t open with that format; they adopt it later (if at all), after their reputation is secure. For an unproven restaurant, the fixed cost of entry is supposed to be off-putting—even where, as here, it isn’t really that high.

Contra did it anyway, the rave reviews rolled in, and the rest is history. Last week, the restaurant finally got around to raising its prices. Thursdays through Saturdays, the price will be $67 for 6–8 courses. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the original five-course menu will be a hair less expensive than before, at $53. (You can order à la carte at the bar.)

The chefs here are Jeremiah Stone, who worked at Rino in Paris and Isa in Brooklyn; and Fabian von Hauske, whose CV includes the obligatory fifteen-minute stint at Noma, plus Faviken in Sweden and the pastry department at Jean-Georges. Stone looks after the savory courses, von Hauske the bread and desserts.

According to the staff, the menu changes every few days, if not more often, depending on the available ingredients and the chefs’ whims. Theeir style is very loosely “New Nordic,” although the website (not very helpfully) describes it as “Contemporary New York cuisne.”

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King Bee

In recent years, Southern cooking has made only a slight dent on the New York restaurant scene. Marcus Samuelsson’s The Red Rooster is probably the most conspicuous major success. I struggle to name many others.

I can’t really pinpoint a reason for that. Most restaurants, of course, are imitative—all of those nearly-identical farm-to-table restaurants, for example. Perhaps all that’s needed is a break-out hit that others will then strive to replicate. (I suspect Samuelsson’s place is seen as a product of his celebrity, and doesn’t lend itself to copying.)

Welcome to King Bee, which features the Southern cuisine known as Acadian, which traces its roots to the 17th century, when French Canadians settled in what is now Louisiana, and France controlled the midsection of North America from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Mississippi Delta. (The Canadian Maritime provinces and portions of northern Maine were once called Acadia.)

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Knickerbocker Bar & Grill

Knickerbocker Bar & Grill is one of those restaurants you walk by, year after year, and think, “I really ought to try that sometime.” You would have had plenty of chances to say that: the Knick has been on the same Greenwich Village street corner since 1977, remarkable longevity in a town where five years is a long run for a restaurant.

Knickerbocker has an old-skool look (Hirschfeld caricatures, vintage advertising posters) that would seem kitschy if it debuted today, but after almost forty years, they’re entitled. It’s alleged to be a celebrity haunt, though we didn’t spot any.

It’s a very good second-tier steakhouse. You won’t see it on any top-10 lists, as they serve U.S.D.A. choice beef, not prime—priced accordingly. Their signature dish is the t-bone, served like a Luger porterhouse, pre-sliced in portions for one, two, or four guests.

There’s also a 48-ounce long-bone ribeye ($85), along with humbler cuts (filet, shell steak, skirt steak), and a full menu of non-steak dishes. Every non-steak entrée is below $30, appetizers generally in the mid-teens.

There’s live jazz on Friday and Saturday evenings, starting at 9:45pm, for which there’s a whopping $3.50 cover charge. I think you can afford that. They must take it seriously, as the website lists the featured acts (different each weekend) for the next two months.

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Cafe Clover

 

One website called it a “farm-to-nutritionist-to-table restaurant.” That nutritionist, according to the pre-opening press, is Mike Roussell, Ph.D. His name isn’t on the website, but his presence looms large at Cafe Clover, which opened recently in the West Village.

The chef here is David Standridge, formerly of Market Table and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon. You’d think, with that pedigree, his menu wouldn’t need an editor. And yet:

“Unlike a health food restaurant that starts with a healthy perspective, I start from a delicious food perspective and then try to eliminate unnecessary calories and also try to make things more healthy,” Standridge, says, of the Café Clover concept.

To do that, he creates the menu and then gets a full nutritional analysis from Dr. Roussell, who will report on things like if a dish has too many calories or carbs, and then send Standridge back to the kitchen to tweak it.

The result is as joyless as it sounds: a cuisine that is clinically executed and hopelessly dull. Do we really want a restaurant where every dish tastes like a nutrition lecture?

Restaurants have struggled on this West Village street corner, most recently home to 10 Downing and La Villette. But there’s nothing wrong with the neighborhood, as El Toro Blanco is still packing them in, on the same block. If Cafe Clover fails, I’d blame the concept, not the space.

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Bara

 

David Chang’s Momofuku empire now spans a dozen restaurants in three countries. But how many restaurants outside of that empire are run by chefs boasting “Momofuku vet” on their bios? I’ve lost count.

One thing’s for sure: it’s a brand that chefs want on their resume these days, and it’s the calling card at Bara, which opened in the East Village in December, boasting two Momofuku alumni. Chef Ian Alvarez worked at Noodle Bar, and later at French Louie in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. GM Kyle Storm worked at Má Pêche, and later ran the bar at French Louie.

The website notes coyly that “the word bara has many meanings,” without stating any of them. Apparently, it literally means “rose” in Japanese, but it is also short for Barazoku, a Japanese gay men’s magazine that shut down in 2004; or more generally, Japanese slang for a genre of homoerotic media. There are a few other meanings: bara means “bread” in Welsh, “coffin” in Italian, “puddle” in Serbo-Croatian, and “mainland” in Swahili. But if you Google the term, the gay context dominates the search results, so this must be the the one that was meant, for reasons that aren’t at all clear. I was unaware of this until I looked it up.

The restaurant claims to be a mash-up of the Japanese izakaya (a drinking establishment that serves food) and the Parisian wine bar. Frankly, it doesn’t remind me of either. It’s just a casual local restaurant that fuses the two cultures, starting with the place setting: silverware and chopsticks, a combo we’ve seen before. Very little of the food really requires chopsticks, so their presence is mainly to set a mood.

The compact (and inexpensive) menu, which changes daily, features about a half-dozen apiece of “1st” ($6–12) and “2nd” ($18–22) courses, with four sides ($2–9). Many of the dishes could easily be imagined at a Momofuku restaurant, with their eclectic mix of local and Asian ingredients, and predominantly Western cooking techniques.

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Tuome

If it wasn’t for critics and restaurant guides, who’d ever find a place like this? Nestled mid-block on a dark East Village side street between Avenue A and Avenue B, it’s hardly a spot that attracts much random foot traffic. A popular ramen shop is next door, but who’d know about that either?

But here we find one of the best new restaurants of the year, and better yet, not from any of the recycled names and restaurant empires that command most of the media ink in New York. The chef here is Thomas Chen, an ex-pat of Eleven Madison Park and Commerce. “Tommy” was his childhood name, which morphed into Tuome (“tow-me”).

I don’t want to jinx the guy, but if the early reviews are any guide, Chen in ten years could have himself a hot little empire like David Chang, Mario Carbone, or Andrew Carmellini. Just you wait. Or maybe he’ll stay behind the stove at his namesake spot, and turn it into a Michelin star restaurant. Who knows? Those are heady expectations to put on a chef from whom we’ve had one meal, but I’ll go out on a limb, and say the potential is there. What Chen does with it is up to him.

Chen does this in an unassuming double-storefront, decorated not very originally, with exposed brick, old knick-nacks hanging on the walls, and somewhat uncomfortable wooden chairs facing tables that are a bit too close together. But it’s charming in an East Village-y kind of way.

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Birds & Bubbles

It’s not exactly an obvious combination, is it? Fried chicken and champagne?

Obvious or not, that’s the value proposition at Birds & Bubbles, the peculiar and yet oddly compelling restaurant from the home cook turned chef, Sarah Simmons.

The restaurant is on an uncharming Lower East Side street, in a narrow subterranean space that was previously an appropriately named restaurant called Grotto. The hours suit the clubby neighborhood nearby, with a 2am closing time Thursdays through Saturdays.

The backstory in brief: Simmons was a retail strategist who started a supper club in her apartment, cooking the soul food she’d grown up with in South Carolina. After winning Food & Wine’s Home Cook Superstar award in 2010, she started City Grit, a so-called “culinary salon,” where guests buy tickets to dinner. Originally an extension of Simmons’ in-home supper club, nowadays she cooks there only occasionally: visiting chefs prepare most of the meals.

Simmons knows her stuff. I liked the food at Birds & Bubbles a lot. It’s Southern comfort cuisine, and does not blaze any culinary trails. But the chicken’s really enjoyable, the bread and side dishes well above anything you get at the average poultry joint.

Unfortunately, the wine menu looks like it parachuted in from another planet, or at least another restaurant. It consists mostly of champagnes over $100 a bottle, with only a few sparkling wines in the $45–65 range and a handful of cheap, uninteresting still wines you probably don’t want.

If you order cocktails or bubbly by the glass, as we did, the costs quickly mount up: dinner for three was over $200, including tax and tip. That’s an awful lot for a meal whose centerpiece is fried chicken served in a stainless steel bucket. The food menu is inexpensive, with salads, appetizers and soups $5–13, mains $17–24, and side dishes $9.

For a group, the Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner ($55), which we ordered, offers a good cross-section of the menu: a whole chicken, a bread basket ($12 if purchased à la carte), and your choice of three side dishes. You don’t have to eat chicken: there’s a crawfish étouffée, shrimp & grits, a steak, and so forth. But you don’t order the salmon at Peter Luger, do you?

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The Clam

 

When Gabe Stulman and Joey Campanaro opened The Little Owl in 2006, they surely never imagined the multitude of restaurants such an unassuming little place would beget.

Anywhere in the Village, you’re never more than about five minutes away from one or another of their properties, all somewhat resembling each other in their commitment to straightforward, rustic, gut-busting cuisine, served in casual, comfortable dining rooms that appeal to a neighborhood crowd.

They’re actually not partners anymore. The pair split up in 2008, with Stulman starting up his “Little Wisco” empire, Campanaro retaining The Little Owl and their second restaurant together, Market Table. But you’d hardly know they ever disagreed, given the similarity of the restaurants they now operate separately.

Stulman is up to six restaurants. Campanaro has been slower to expand, opening The Clam, his third, earlier this year with his Market Table partner, chef Mikey Price. You’ll get no prizes for guessing the concept: it’s a seafooder, with the menu relying heavily on a certain bivalve mollusc.

They’ve got a terrific location, a spacious corner lot with broad, picture windows and the de rigeur exposed brick that no downtown restaurant can do without. Yet, there are white tablecloths, previously thought to be the kiss of death at a neighborhood spot, and—shock!—no one seems to mind. The restaurant has been solidly booked at prime times. It took me almost eleven months to get a reservation.

No matter what, you’re probably going to be eating seafood here. A couple of the entrées are sops to landlubbers (a half Bell & Evans chicken; a braised shortrib), but to choose these is to miss the entire point of the restaurant. Whatever you order, you’ll start with one of the terrific warm parkerhouse rolls (above right).

The menu is in five confusing sections: “iced delicacies” (what most people call a raw bar), appetizers ($13–19), entrées ($25–31), side dishes (“eight dollars each”), and then the perplexing part: “house specialties” ($13–24), not clearly delineated as starters or mains, linked only by the fact that they’re all made with clams.

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By The Hudson

Restaurant names often tell you very little. What do you know, really, about The Simone, Charlie Bird, or Cherche Midi, from their names alone? In contrast, By The Hudson (BTH) makes its value proposition abundantly clear: it’s a room with a view.

Actually, that sells it short. Chef Lusianie Otero’s “Amer-ibbean” cuisine surpassed my expectations, but when a restaurant is named for its location, it’s the location that they’re selling, so let’s discuss that for a moment.

BTH is located at the far western tip of 125th Street, underneath the Riverside Drive viaduct. Tall picture windows on two sides offer gorgeous views of the Hudson. Two other restaurants share the block, but don’t have the scenery: Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and Harlem’s Floridita. The famed Cotton Club is a block away; Fairway Market is just up the street. Another restaurant with a view, Hudson River Cafe, is four blocks north.

Still, the walk from the subway feels a bit bleak, especially after dark. That’ll change, eventually. Columbia University plans to build seventeen buildings over the next quarter-century on the superblock bounded by 125th Street, 133th Street, Broadway, and Twelfth Avenue. Several are already under construction. You can’t help feeling that in five or ten years, this area will be barely recognizable.

With all of the ongling construction in the area, BTH’s timing seems to be pretty good. But the space facing the water (formerly a diner) had been vacant for seven years before BTH opened in September, so I guess it wasn’t an easy sell. The neighborhood clearly has bright prospects, provided the restaurant survives the long winter.

The restaurant is evidently still deciding how best to market the cuisine. Florence Fabricant’s Off the Menu teezer described it as “American, with hints of Italian,” but the chef hails from Puerto Rico, and our server called it “Amer-ibbean.” Osso Buco is the only dish that immediately screams Italian, and there’s a heavy dose of the safe, recognizable standards that many places serve: Shrimp Cocktail, Caesar Salad; Steak & Fries, and so forth. But where the chef does insert her personality, the dishes have a recognizably Caribbean tint.

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White Street

Can someone find the right restaurant for Floyd Cardoz? Perhaps White Street is the one, but I am not so sure.

Cardoz first came to widespread acclaim with Tabla, the modern Indian restaurant he opened with Danny Meyer in 1998. It got three stars from Ruch Reichl right out of the gate. We thought it was still in top form the first time we tried it, in 2006.

But by then, Tabla had fallen off the city’s culinary radar. Meyer and Cardoz must have recognized that: by 2009, the formal dining room menu was discontinued, which only put off the inevitable. Tabla closed in late 2010.

Just over a year later, Cardoz re-appeared in another Meyer place, North End Grill in Battery Park City. We liked it, and so did most critics, but it built up a reputation as an expensive cafeteria for Goldman Sachs next door. Once again, the chef was doing respectable work, totally off the culinary radar.

Cardoz left North End Grill in April 2014, saying that he wanted to open another Indian restaurant in New York. By July he’d changed his mind, or perhaps had it changed for him by investors who couldn’t make the numbers work. So White Street was announced, promising “American [cuisine] with global touches.” Those investors include Dan Abrams and Dave Zinczenko, backers of John DeLucie’s The Lion, a precedent that hardly inspires much confidence.

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