Luksus at Tørst

Luksus is the latest beachhead of the New Nordic invasion of New York, joining such standouts as Acme, Aska, Skál, and Atera. All are helmed by chefs who worked (even if only briefly) at the Danish restaurant Noma, No. 1 on the deeply flawed, but much watched, S. Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants list.

The 26-seat restaurant is in the back room of Tørst (pictured above), an upscale beer hall in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. While you wait for your table, you can order one of 21 beers on draft (hundreds by the bottle), which are drawn from taps lined up against a marble wall, with wooden handles stained from light to dark, matching the colors of the drinks that come out of them.

The owner, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, has a love affair with beer: he serves no other alcoholic beverage, and the size of his cellar would make many a sommelier flush with envy. The taps are powered by a device called the flux capacitor (named for Doc Brown’s fictional contraption in the Back to the Future series), which can adjust the nitrogen and carbon dioxide mix of each tap, and maintain the beers at any of four different temperatures.

The pint-sized dining room seats just 26, six at a bar facing an open kitchen, and twenty at tiny tables more suited to a cocktail lounge. Finding room for beer bottles, glassware, and a cavalcade of artful plates, is a Rubik’s Cube puzzle that the servers solve adeptly, all evening long.

Chef Daniel Burns serves a frequently-changing tasting menu with no choices, which was $75 last July, but has since risen to $95 after a series of overwhelmingly positive reviews, including three stars from Adam Platt in New York. Curiously, the Times has not yet weighed in.

Both the plating style and the ingredients are instantly recognizable as New Nordic, with combinations of flavors not normally found together, such as lamb sweetbreads with hay gribiche, or a dessert of beetroot and licorice. Root vegetables and flowers are in starring roles, with smoked this or pickled that, Many of these experiments work. Some fail miserably.

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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: ★

Aska

 

Note: Aska at Kinfolk Studios closed in early 2014. The restaurant re-opened in 2016 in a new location, still in Williamsburg. The new Aska has more space and more sensible hours, as it is no longer the subtenant of a gallery. The meal reviewed below was at the former location.

*

Earlier this year, the Modern Nordic restaurant sensation Frej (pronounced Fray) flew past New York like a comet. Open for just six months, it was a critical darling and food board sensation.

But what was it, exactly? A real restaurant, or just a pop-up? It served a $45 five-course tasting menu just three nights a week, Mondays through Wednesdays, in what seemed to be a makeshift space. (It was a noodle shop and a party space the other nights of the week, and a design studio by day.)

Reservations were taken only by email, a system as inefficient as it was disorganized. It took about a dozen messages, back and forth, over a month or more, for me to get a booking. Then Frej closed abruptly for a month of “renovations.” No one bothered to tell me my reservation wouldn’t be honored (though, fortunately, I was well aware of it anyway).

In New York, “closed for renovations” often means “closed for good,” and that was the case here. A month morphed into nearly four, before the space re-opened as Aska. The part-time ramen shop is gone. The tasting menu (now $65 for ten incredible courses) is now served five nights a week (Sunday to Thursday). The bar, with a short à la carte menu, is open seven days a week. It’s still in the Kinfolk Design Studio, doubling as a coffee shop by day. Reservations are taken online—a far more civilized way of handling it.

Fredrik Berselius, one of the two original Frej chefs, runs the kitchen. (The other, Richard Kuo, is now at Pearl & Ash on the Bowery.) Joining Berselius is GM and cocktail/wine guru Eamon Rockey, formerly of Eleven Madison Park, Compose, and Atera.

The deep, narrow space looks similar to the photos I’ve seen of Frej. Some of the artwork has been removed, making it feel even more austere than before. Housed in the back of a renovated garage, there are just seven tables, seating a mere 18 guests. There’s an partly-open kitchen, a bar, and in the front a cocktail lounge.

I don’t know if the heating system is unreliable, but when the hostess seated us, she offered blankets, should we need them. We did not come anywhere close to taking her up on it.

The staff paces the reservations book at leisurely intervals. Just our table was seated at 6:00 pm on a Sunday; then the second at 6:30, the third at 7:00, the fourth at 7:15, the fifth at 8:15, the sixth and seventh at 8:30. This is obviously a deliberate strategy, as when I reserved, only the 6:00 and 7:00 times were available.

Serious Eats had a preview of the cocktail program: “No one could ever accuse Eamon Rockey…of not being a patient man. Of the eight signature cocktails he’s created for the just-opened modern Scandinavian concept, not one is without an ingredient that requires some sort of time-consuming infusion, fermentation, or extraction process.”

I tried two excellent examples: the US Export (“whiskies of all sorts, pear, maple, angostura”) and the Next of Kin (“aquavit, pu-erh combucha, caraway”), both excellent, and at $12 well below the going rate. Full disclosure: Rockey recogonized me, and the cocktails were comped.

(There’s a photo of the cocktail and beer list near the top of this post; click on the image for a larger view.)

There’s an international wine list that runs to two pages, with separate sections dedicated to Riseling and Beaujolais, both of which Rockey feels pair particularly well with the food. We took his advice, ordering a 2005 Beaujolais.

The food is in the same austere, Modern Nordic style as the décor. The staff handed us a menu at the end of the meal, wrapped up as if it were a parchment scroll. (Click on the photo, above left.) However, that menu lists just seven courses. Counting various amuses, it was more like ten, or eleven if you count the bread.

Most dishes come with fairly elaborate descriptions from the server. If “pork chop, carrots, and mashed potatoes” is as much of an explanation as you want, Aska is not the place for you. Platings are elaborate, each its own modern art sculpture. Some of them are gone after just a bite or two. A hearty eater might still be hungry afterward—though we weren’t.

The chef can write a symphony with root vegetables. But at $65, some compromises are inevitable. You won’t find caviar, Wagyu beef, foie gras, lobster, white truffles, or other luxury ingredients. The protein courses are the menu’s weak spot. If Aska is a hit (and after less than a month in business, it’s well on its way), look for the price to go up, along with the quality of the ingredients.

The bread service (above right) consisted of warm, sweet caraway rolls and salty, crisp flatbread (like a thin pretzel), with a splash of soft butter hugging the upper left edge of the bowl.

 

The first amuse (above left) was a chip of crispy pike skin with sour cream, and a disc of shortbread with cheese and juniper. The second (above right) was an inner tube-shaped helping of pig skin with jam (6:00 position), a chip of dehydrated pig’s blood (2:00), and a buckthorn.

(Despite the “ick” factor, the pig’s blood chip did not taste like blood at all.)

 

We moved onto the first of the courses listed in the printed menu, smoked and dried shrimp (above left) with cucumber and rapeseed oil, which had a rich, salty flavor. A warm stalk of broccoli (above right) stood straight up, resting in a bath of mussel emulsion and seaweed dust. The note I took at the time, was: “Wow!”

 

A course described as “Potato” (above left) was something more elaborate, a stew of potato, onion, and mackerel, with a warm milk foam poured by the chef at tableside. To go with it, the owner poured a glass of potent milk punch made with aquavit.

Squid (above right) with purslane and turnips was our first dud: rubbery, bitter, and flavorless.

 

We adored the Salsify (above left), with celery root, wild greens, and lichens. “This is too good to be just vegetables,” my girlfriend said.

But Pork Shank (above right) with sunchokes was another dud, a one-note dish not rescued by a helping of apple cider poured tableside.

 

The palate cleanser (not listed on the printed menu) was a half-scoop of Whey Sorbet (above left) with oak chip and French sorrel. Dessert (above right) was an excellent cardamom ice cream with brown butter mousse and hazelnuts.

The service was as good as at any three-star restaurant. With four servers for seven tables, nothing went unnoticed. Clean plates and empty glasses were noticed almost instantly.

Aska is just three weeks old, so there are no professional reviews yet, but the basic idea is similar to Frej, which was a big hit. This is surely the best $65 meal in town, but I’ll bet it hits $95 within two years. If Fredrik Berselius can keep cooking like this, it’ll be well worth it.

Aska (90 Wythe Avenue at N. 11th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

Food: Austere Modern Nordic, most of it stunning and flavorful
Service: As attentive and helpful as at any three-star restaurant
Ambiance: A renovated garage, comfortable but as austere as the food

Rating: ★★★
Why? There is nothing else like this in New York. By all means go. 

Acme

Note: This review of Acme is under chef Mats Refslund, who left the restaurant at the end of 2015. Acme is now an Italian restaurant, under chef Brian Loiacono, who worked formerly at Daniel Boulud’s db Bistro Moderne. One desperately wants this incarnation of Acme to be as important as the last one was, while somehow doubting that it will happen.

*

In New York, restaurants open after years of planning, or they pop up seemingly out of nowhere.

The new Acme falls squarely in the latter category. When the venerable Acme Bar & Grill closed last March after a 25-year run, most people figured it was dunzo, notwithstanding the owner’s pledge to re-open “after a few months.” Renovations took longer than planned; don’t they always? A farm-to-table concept was considered. Yawn city.

After more like nine months, Acme re-opened with new partners (the guys behind clubby joints like Indochine and Kittichai) and chef Mats Refslund, a co-founder of the renowned Danish restaurant Noma, which is currently #1 on the S. Pellegrino list of the world’s best restaurants.

That came out of nowhere. By January 6, though still not even officially open, it was named (by one observer) The Most Exciting Restaurant in New York. (So how did Refslund wind up here anyway? The story is worth a read.)

The new owners are better known for “see and be seen” restaurants that attract art and fashion industry types. UrbanDaddy thought the new Acme was a dance club serving a bit of food. The owners forcefully denied it. The intersection of their world and the serious dining community is a shock to the system.

They are really taking the Nordic theme seriously. They owners gently suggested putting a burger on the menu. Chef Refslund refused (though he reluctantly agreed to offer french fries). The sign outside still reads, “Authentic Southern and Cajun Cooking.” But inside, it is nothing like the neighborhood dive that the old Acme apparently was.

Despite the connection to Noma, this is not a clone of that acclaimed restaurant, where dinner is 1,500 Danish kroner (about US$263) for a twenty-course tasting menu. Although the style is recognizably Nordic, Relfslund uses local ingredients. Prices are far more accessible, with appetizers $10–14, entrées $20–30, side dishes $8, desserts $10. A pre-dinner cocktail was just $12.

It is not a long menu, occupying about 2/3rds of a page, with about 14 of the dishes I’m calling “appetizers” in three categories (“Raw,” “Cooked,” and “Soil”), and seven entrées. Because the appetizers sounded so appealing, we ordered five of them to share, and didn’t get around to any of the entrées or dessert, which will have to wait for another time.

After the bread service (above left), we chose  two items from the “Raw” section. House-cured salmon ($12; above right), dressed with winter cabbage and buttermilk horseradish dressing, was an excellent way to start.

Sweet shrimp & bison ($13; below left) were paired with bitter lettuce and white walnuts (the photo does not do it justice).

From the “Cooked” section of the menu, Farmer’s Eggs ($10; above right) were hollowed out and filled with a luscious cauliflower and aged parmesan soup. You get only a few bites of this ambrosia (the hay surrounding the eggs is stritcly decorative), but one can’t complain at $5 per egg.

It’s most unlike me to finish a meal with two vegetables dishes, but to me the section marked “Soil” was the most intriguing. Hay roasted sunchokes ($12; above left) in New England gruyère and winter truffles were superb. Salt-baked beets ($12; above right) with red grapefruit and aged vinegar were somewhat forgettable.

There are two precedents for the service model at a place like Acme, and neither is very good. One is to go the Momofuku/Torrisi route, and serve excellent food, along with purportedly “democratic” service that sucks. The other is to go the high-end club route, with a bouncer at the door and a snooty host who quotes an hour wait for everyone who isn’t a celebrity.

They could have done that. Yet, they didn’t. Acme takes reservations and checks coats. You arrive before your girlfriend, and they offer to seat you immediately. Servers and hosts are nicely dressed. They circle back regularly to check on you. Plates and flatware are delivered and cleared when they should be. A fork drops on the floor, and within seconds someone notices. The wine list makes sense and is served at the right temperature, with proper glassware.

The place is built on the old Acme’s bones, so it is not the most comfortable or the most gorgeously appointed. It gets loud when full. But the service matches the food, whereas at Momofuku, or Torrisi, or the clubby places these owners are best known for, it does not.

They’ve adjusted quickly to the food-centric clientele. At the long bar, every place is set with silverware and napkins: they clearly expect that most diners are coming here for the food. At the tables, patrons were in a wide age range. I saw a few waifs that could be from the fashion or art world, but they were certainly not in the majority—as far as I can tell. That was at 6:30 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. I hear the atmosphere at 11:00 p.m. on Friday or Saturday is more like a club. You won’t find me at Acme then.

Is Refslund here for the long haul? This menu is not replicable without him. In a tug-of-war between the fashion scene and the dining scene, one must prevail. If it’s the former, I suspect he’ll get fed up pretty quickly. If it’s the latter, we could be in for a wild and exciting ride.

Acme (9 Great Jones Street, west of Lafayette Street, NoHo)

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

White Slab Palace

Note: White Slab Palace closed in October 2011. As of May 2012, the space is Grey Lady, a New England-style raw bar.

*

White Slab Palace has been open since late February on the Lower East Side. The cuisine is vaguely Scandinavian, but the vibe is more like a “bar that serves food” than a true restaurant. The narrow space has a long, high counter with tall bar stools. The there are about a dozen low-slung wooden tables next to the tall windows facing out on Allen & Delancey Streets.

A forthcoming expansion into the neighboring space promises a more formal dining room, but we decided not to wait for that. Alas, we should have waited, or better yet, skipped White Slab Palace altogether. This was one of the most disastrous meals we’ve had in a long time.

Food took about 45 minutes to arrive. “Sometimes, we need to give the kitchen a nasty stare,” the server admitted. At last, our main courses were delivered, bypassing the appetizers entirely. We had both ordered the meatballs—just four smallish things the size of golf balls, dried out and over-cooked. No wonder they took 45 minutes.

A moment later, a plate of deep-fried stuff arrived. We thought it might be an appetizer. Then we had a taste. It was a fish-like substance, apparently a herring, just as parched as the meatballs. There were other deep-fried fishy things on the plate, none of which we could stand after more than one bite. Our server circled back: “You didn’t order that, did you?” Nope.

We weren’t sure what was happening next, but finally the appetizers came. An order of shrimp tasted like it had been swimming too long with the herring. We tasted one shrimp apiece and gave up. A hunk of lamb was so densely packed with gristle that my knife could not get through it. This was apparently a cheap cut that needed braising it hadn’t gotten.

That was the end of White Slab Palace for us. The server conceded that it was a rough night, but didn’t offer to comp anything to make up for it. Food, beer and cocktails set us back $117, including tax and tip. Oh, and they don’t take credit cards.

White Slab Palace (77 Delancey Street at Allen Street, Lower East Side)

Food: awful
Service: slow
Ambiance: it’s a bar
Overall: awful

Smörgås Chef

My friend spent a year in Sweden during high school, and she’s gets nostalgic for Swedish food. The options in Manhattan are limited. We’ve been to the fancy and expensive Aquavit once, and to the more informal Aquavit Cafe twice. I hadn’t realized there was anything else like it, until the other day I stumbled upon Smörgås Chef in the West Village.

It turns out there are three Smörgås Chefs, including one on Stone Street in the Financial District, just a ten minute walk from home. We paid a visit on Friday night. Though not full, there was a decent crowd—mostly neighborhood residents, we would guess. It’s a small, charming space. Our server informed us that the chef-owner, Morten Sohlberg, designed the tables as well as the bottle lamps hanging in the window. (See photo.)

The West Village location is larger, and has more of Mr. Sohlberg’s handiwork, but the quiet informality of the Stone Street space appealed to us. The street itself is a time warp; somehow, developers missed it when all the skyscrapers were being built in the late 20th century. For years, Stone Street was an eyesore and was used only as a parking lot, before preservationists had it declared a landmark in 1996. Closed off to traffic, it is now a home to restaurants and clubs. Most of the construction dates to 1836, and no building on the street is older than 1929.

 

We started with two quintessential Swedish dishes. I had the Gravlaks (smoked salmon) with mustard sauce ($10), which was just about perfect. My friend said she was pleased with the Herring Sampler ($8).

 

Alas, we didn’t have equally good luck with the main courses. My Rack of Lamb ($28) was dry and over-cooked. My friend was happier with the Swedish Meatballs ($18) — not as good as Aquavit’s, but perfectly respectable.

Though not as polished or elegant as the Aquavit Cafe, Smörgås Chef is priced a dollar or two lower per item. It’s in the neighborhood, and it’s nice to know we can drop by anytime. Perhaps that over-cooked lamb was an anomaly. I’m sure we’ll be back.

Smörgås Chef (53 Stone St between Hanover Sq & Coenties Alley, Financial District)

Food: ★
Service: ★
Ambiance: ★½
Overall: ★

Return to Aquavit Cafe

My friend and I were wowed by our dinner at Aquavit Cafe in April. The kitchen sent out a bunch of free food, and everything we had was first-rate, so we decided to try it again on Saturday night.

We both decided on the prix fixe ($37), choosing the herring sampler and the Swedish meatballs. I chose the Arctic Circle for dessert. I described these dishes in two earlier reports (here and here), so I won’t repeat myself. This time, there was no free food—not that I had any right to expect any. Service was somewhat less efficient than before.

A $20 wine pairing is available with the prix fixe. The herring sampler came with beer and potato vodka, as in the main dining room. It’s a Swedish tradition, and I can’t complain. But the meatballs came with the most bitter Merlot I’ve ever been served. Didn’t these guys see Sideways? This was an uninspired choice, to say the least. Happily, fizzy dessert wine with our third course washed away the Merlot’s acidic taste.

I continue to like Aquavit Cafe for an offbeat casual dinner. It’s also an excellent date place, as you can actually hear yourself talk—an increasingly rare luxury in Manhattan restaurants.

Aquavit Cafe (65 E 55th St between Park & Madison Aves, East Midtown)

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

Aquavit

Note: This is a review under chef Marcus Samuelsson, who no longer cooks at Aquavit. (He remains a minority partner.) Marcus Jernmark is his replacement.

My friend and I had a terrific meal at the Aquavit Cafe in April (report here), so we were tempted to try the main dining room. Our dinner there a couple of weeks ago was peculiarly underwhelming.

We had the three-course prix fixe ($80). My friend started with the Herring Sampler, which came with a glass of beer and a shot of what must have been 100-proof potato vodka. I had a foie gras starter, but the accompanying strips of bacon stole the show.

For the main course, my friend had the bacon wrapped New York strip, and again, she found that the bacon stole the show. Spice rubbed venison loin came in a peculiar apple-pine broth that turned the dish into a swimming pool. I found the dessert choices underwhelming, and settled on a selection of three scoops of ice cream.

Aquavit is, of course, capable of great things, but on this occasion we weren’t wowed. The design is supposed to suggest Scandinavian minimalism, but my friend, who has spent a lot of time in Sweden, found the space sterile.

Aquavit (65 E. 55th St. between Park & Madison Avenues, East Midtown)

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

Aquavit Cafe

Note: Click here for a more recent visit to Aquavit Cafe. It was less impressive the second time around.

My friend and I dined at Aquavit Cafe last Friday night. As Frank Bruni noted in that day’s paper, there are now several restaurants in New York that have an informal cafe attached to a fancy main dining room. I’ve tried several of these “little sister” restaurants, and the Aquavit Cafe is the most refined of them. Despite its comparative informality, tables are generously spaced, and there’s plenty of fabric to deaden the sound. Service is top-notch.

We started with cocktails (a bit pricey at $14 ea.), two kinds of Swedish bread with luscious goat cheese butter, and an amuse of toast with sour cream and a hot mushroom sauce.

My friend ordered the Herring Sampler ($12), while I had the Salmon Sampler ($18), and we each sampled each other’s plates. My friend observed that my appetizer had “enough salmon to feed all of Chelsea.” Okay, not quite, but it was a large portion. On days when I’ve had a full lunch, it could be dinner all by itself. But it is also perfectly prepared, and not at all “fishy.”

Quite to our surprise, the kitchen sent out mid-course plates, compliments of the house. We aren’t celebrities or regulars, and we weren’t spending much on liquor, so this was most unexpected. My friend was served a lobster roll, while I got a plate of duck carpaccio.

For the entrees, my friend had the Swedish meatballs ($18), one of chef Marcus Samuelson’s specialties, made with beef, veal, and pork. It was an enormous portion, and even after I shared a bit of it, she was unable to finish. I ordered the hog smoked salmon, which was poached in wine, cauliflower, pearl onions and lentils. (I know, salmon twice — what was I thinking)? This was a bit bland, as I am wont to find with fish courses, but technically excellent. The kitchen recommends paired wines with each entree, and we adopted their excellent suggestions ($14 ea.).

When my friend ordered, our waiter noted that her appetizer and entree choice were both on the prix fixe, so she might as well get that, and have dessert in the bargain. She had the Arctic Circle, a terrific goat cheese parfait with blueberry sorbet and passion fruit curd. Although I had not ordered dessert, the kitchen sent out a plate of chocolate cake for me anyway, compliments of the house.

We left Aquavit happy as could be, stuffed to the gills, and eager to try the main dining room. The bill for all of that food was just $121 with tax. I left a 25% tip.

Aquavit Cafe (65 E. 55th St. between Park & Madison Aves, East Midtown)

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