Huertas

Note: As far as we know, Huertas is still a great restaurant; however, it no longer offers the tasting menu described in the review below. The restaurant nixed that in April 2015, in favor of a broader Basque à la carte menu.

*

What does a restaurant have to do to get reviewed in this town? Huertas in the East Village has been open for nearly six months, and the only professional review I can find is by Robert Sietsema in Eater: three stars.

Our sample size is smaller than Sietsema’s, but we share his enthusiasm: Huertas is shout-from-the-rooftops good. Imagine a Basque Torrisi Italian Specialties, as it was originally, before the Torrisi sensation went viral.

You might have predicted success, when a couple of Danny Meyer alums are in charge. Chef Jason Miller has worked at Chanterelle, Gramercy Tavern and Savoy, before joining the opening team at Maialino, where he was sous-chef. After leaving Maialino, Miller did an apprenticeship in Northern Spain—hence the Basque connection. His partner and General Manager is Nate Adler, who was beverage director at both of Meyer’s Blue Smoke locations.

Huertas is two restaurants in one. In the front room, there’s a bar and high-top tables where you can order a variety of pinxtos ($4–12 each, passed around dim sum style), cheeses, cured meats, and larger plates (raciones).

In the 24-seat back room, there’s an astonishingly good deal: a reservations-only five-course prix fixe menu for $55 (a few months ago, it was $52 for four). It changes daily, and if you book on OpenTable, they email it to you in advance. Wine pairings, which are generous, are an additional $30.

Click to read more ...

La Fonda del Sol

Whatever happened to La Fonda del Sol? Not Joe Baum’s 1960 masterpiece, but its reincarnation six years ago? It got the deuce from both Frank Bruni and Adam Platt—favorable reviews by their standards—but quickly fell off the media map.

Opening chef Josh DeChellis left after two years, as anyone who knew his background would’ve expected. Chris DeLuna has been there since 2012, though you wouldn’t have known it from any of the websites that report on New York City restaurants. The owners, Patina Restaurant Group, seem utterly innocent of the word “marketing”.

I was drawn back by a Valentine’s Day prix fixe of just $55. That’s a bargain, on an evening when mediocre restaurants attract three-figure sums for mass-produced, dumbed-down versions of their regular menus. La Fonda del Sol did the opposite, serving (as far as I could tell) a better menu than their everyday norm. You quickly see why they couldn’t charge more: the place was only about half full.

The food hasn’t lost a step since we visited in March 2009. I’m sure the menu has changed many times since then, but it still seems to be basically the same kind of upscale Spanish cuisine that DeChellis served, although without the petits fours, which at the time were some of the most luxurious I’d seen in New York.

The 20-page wine and spirits list has one of the better selections of Spanish and Portuguese wines in town, including the 2007 Douro we enjoyed ($65; above left). It was a romantic evening, and I didn’t take detailed notes on the food. The photos after the jump (not my best, in low light) give a general idea of the style of the cuisine and its presentation.

Click to read more ...

Estela

I’ve got mixed feelings about Estela, the new tapas-style restaurant from chef Ignacio Matos and beverage director Thomas Carter.

We last saw Matos at Isa, where he wowed audiences and critics (or most of them), but didn’t wow the owner, the world’s greatest poseur, Taavo Somer. Apparently unwilling to operate even one good restaurant, Somer fired Matos abruptly in the summer of 2012. Isa still exists, but is culinarily irrelevant, like all of Somer’s other places.

So it’s an understatement to say I was rooting for Estela to succeed. I didn’t love everything I tasted at Isa, but I loved a lot of it, and it mattered.

Alas, Estela is a let-down. The food is all pleasant enough and mostly pretty good. You won’t eat badly here. But most of it is beneath what Matos was trying to do at Isa. It was worth going out of your way to visit Isa. It’s worth dropping in at Estela if you’re in a few blocks’ radius.

It’s an even bigger come-down for Carter, who was beverage director at Blue Hill Stone Barns, and now serves a wine list that fits on a single page. (That is, unless there’s a larger list that the server neglected to show us.)

None of this is accidental. In a joint interview with Eater, Matos and Carter made their lower ambitions abundantly clear: “I don’t want us to think in terms of ‘developing dishes’ or anything like that,” says Mattos of the way he’s training his young and small kitchen to work. “These should just be plates of food, nurturing and relatively cheap, that remind you of the home-cooked meals you never experience anymore.”

Click to read more ...

Andanada 141

If at first you don’t succeed…you know how the saying goes.

Andanada 141 is the third attempt to create a destination Spanish restaurant at a particularly cursed address, following on the heels of Graffit and Gastroarte. The graffiti-inspired décor remains largely intact, despite the new name, which refers to the top tier of seats at a bullfighting ring.

Chef Jesús Núñez, the chef behind the first two attempts, is gone. Replacing him is Manuel Berganza, who earned two Michelin stars at two different Madrid restaurants. You’d think those chops would be worth at least a look, but after seven months, the Daily News has supplied the only pro review, awarding four stars out of five.

I guess modern Spanish cuisine is a tough sell in this neighborhood. On a Friday evening, before the ballet, the restaurant was not half full. That’s a pity. Andanada 141 is the best of the three Spanish restaurants that have tried to make a go of it in this space.

The cuisine is more conservative than Jesús Núñez’s sometimes baffling creations—which we mostly liked, but not everyone did. We had time to try only a few items. I look forward to trying a lot more.

The menu offers tapas in a wide price range ($6–25), entrées ($28–32), paellas ($24–25 per person, minimum two guests), and desserts ($9).

 

In Pulpo a la Gallega ($16; above left), tender chunks of octopus were in a potato purée, seasoned with olive oil and pimienton de vera, or what tasted to us like chives and paprika. This was one of the best appetizers we’e had all year, rich and satisfying.

We were also fond of the Migas al Pastor ($13; above right), a crockpot of chistorra (Basque sausage) with breadcrumbs and grapes, topped with a poached egg. Good as it was, it would have made a far better impression had it not been served at the same time as our entrée, the paella, which deserved the stage all to itself.

Four paellas are offered: seafood, meat, vegetarian, and mixed. The carne ($25; above), which we ordered, was one of the best paellas I’ve had in a while, a happy brew of pork belly, rabbit, chicken, carrots, chorizo, red peppers, and yellow rice. For one week only, the restaurant was offering a free pitcher of sangria (very good) to go with the paella, so we didn’t explore the wine list. That’ll be for next time.

We dined at the bar, where it was sometimes a challenge to get the server’s attention, despite the restaurant not being full. That, coupled with the late delivery of our second tapa, took the edge slightly off what was otherwise an excellent showing. It’ll take a few more visits to establish if Andanada 141 lives up to the promise of the three dishes we tried. We are certainly looking forward to it.

Andanada 141 (141 W. 69th Street, east of Broadway, Upper West Side)

Food: Modern Spanish, but fairly conservative, and very well prepared
Service: Earnest and friendly, but needs polishing
Ambaince: A comfortable UWS townhouse, artfully decorated

Rating: ★★

Manzanilla

Note: Manzanilla closed in February 2014.

*

Spanish cuisine is on the upswing in New York, with places like Boqueria, Salinas, Terdulia, and Barraca receiving strong reviews in recent years.

As the Observer’s Joshua David Stein notes, their successes must be weighed against high-profile flops, like Gastroarte, Romera, and Ureña.

Perhaps the chef Dani Garcia and owner Yann de Rochefort (of Boqueria) had those flops in mind when they opened Manzanilla near Gramercy Park two months ago. Garcia has a Michelin two-star restaurant in his native Andalucía, but here he aims a lot lower, bargaining that Manhattan diners aren’t ready for his $150 tasting menu.

It’s a pity that chefs don’t feel they can bring their best work to New York, but that’s the world we live in. I can’t blame the chef for opening an unabashedly populist spot that will succeed, in lieu of a more ambitious one that probably wouldn’t.

Manzanilla, a close twin of one of Garcia’s restaurants in Southern Spain, styles itself a brasserie. It’s mid-priced by Manhattan standards, with snacks (7 items; $8–29), appetizers (8 items; $13–18), entrées (10 items; $26–40) and side dishes (3 items; $8).

You could put together a “tapas” meal from the snacks portion of the menu, but they’re not the focus; unlike most of the competition in New York, there are no paellas to be found. Most of the dishes, at least as described, come across as fairly tame, but in our small sample, they were all executed well.

 

Tomato Tartare ($8; above left) is as much of a pun as the chef will allow, but it bursts with robust flavor.

A foie gras terrine ($18; above right) is decorated with caramelized goat cheese, green apple purée, and raisins. It doesn’t bust any culinary boundaries, but foie gras junkies will go home happy. The chef gets no extra credit for burnt slices of toast (right), half of them with holes a baby’s hand could slip through.

 

I’ve less to say about Striped Bass ($27; above left). Suckling Pig ($34; above right) was one of the better renditions of a classic dish that I’ve had in a while.

There’s a bustling bar area up-front. The cocktails are terrific, although you might wait a while to get a bartender’s attention. The Spanish-heavy wine list is excellent for a new place. There aren’t many bargains, but there are many good selections to be had above $60.

In the early days, the kitchen at Manzanilla is operating at a high level, allowing for the limitations inherent in the format. The question with these types of places, is whether they can sustain that after the review period is over and the founder returns home to tend the rest of his empire.

Manzanilla (345 Park Avenue South at 26th Street, Gramercy)

Food: Classic Spanish cuisine, classic execution
Service: A shade on the slow side, but mostly very good
Ambiance: A bustling brasserie with a large bar and an open kitchen

Rating: ★★

The Bazaar by José Andrés, Beverly Hills

Last November, we paid a visit to The Bazaar in Beverly Hills, the tapas brasserie by José Andrés. It’s hard not to be a bit cynical, given how thin the chef has spread himself (ten restaurants in four cities).

The Bazaar is a high-concept, high-gloss space that seats 678. How he keeps up the quality is a considerable mystery, but he does it somehow. Almost everything we tried was excellent. There was one dish I disliked — a take on shrimp cocktail, where you squirt the cocktail sauce into your mouth with a plastic eyedropper. But I took that to be an error of conception, not of execution.

The four-page menu is divided into two parts, traditional tapas and modern tapas. Most items are in the $10–15 range and suitable for sharing, but you’ll need a bunch of them. Our party of four ordered about fifteen of these (some in double portions). As I recall, the kitchen sent them out at a reasonable pace, and in a reasonable sequence.

In lieu of detailed descriptions, I offer a slideshow below. You’ll have to visit the Flickr website to read the photo captions (a limitation of their system, I’m afraid).

The Bazaar by José Andrés
SLS Hotel Beverly Hills
465 South La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90048

Aldea

 

Note: Just a month after switching to a prix fixe-only format, chef George Mendes flip-flopped after regulars told him they preferred the à la carte menu. So Aldea now has the same menu every day (though there is still a $95 tasting menu). Ironically, the switch to prix fixe is what drew me back to Aldea, but obviously with the customers who mattered, it wasn’t popular.

*

Last week, Ryan Sutton, Bloomberg’s restaurant critic, reported that Aldea has switched to a prix fixe-only format on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. The chef, George Mendes, told Sutton that the new format would “mak[e] Aldea better” and although it’s a price hike, it’s “more about the ingredients and what I’m offering.” The chef also said that he’d eventually like Aldea to be a prix fixe restaurant every night.

I hadn’t written about Aldea since shortly after it opened, in mid-2009. I gave it 2½ stars at the time. Every pro critic in town gave it two or three. It also won a Michlen star in 2011, which it has maintained. The Sutton piece made me curious to see what has changed.

The space remains, as I described it four years ago, “flat-out gorgeous.” It’s on the casual side of formal, but comparatively serene by today’s standards. The sound track is quiet enough not to interfere, and consists mostly of items a guy my age would recognize.

The à la carte menu remains relatively brief, with six Petiscos, or snacks ($8–16), five selections of hams and terrines ($9–18), eight starters ($11–21), and eight entrées ($27–38). By way of comparison, four years ago $27 was the most expensive main course, rather than the least expensive. That was, of course, right in the teeth of the financial crisis, and Aldea was an unproven restaurant then.

On weekends, your choices are a $75 three-course prix fixe (probably with an amuse or two, though the menu doesn’t say that) or a tasting menu at $95. Given such a small difference, the tasting menu was the obvious choice. (Click on the image, left, for a larger copy of the menu.) We also ordered the wine pairings, which add another $50 per person, bringing the total for two to $376 including tax and tip.

The wine list remains a weakness. As it was from the beginning, it’s just one sheet of paper, printed on both sides. It’s a decent selection, and fairly priced, given that limitation. But you’d think, after four years, critical acclaim, a Michelin star, the economy in better shape, and the restaurant well past its probation, that they’d have upgraded it.

The printed tasting menu listed nine courses. Fifteen items were sent out, although many (especially early in the meal) were rather small—essentially just bites.

 

The amuse bouche was described as a “mojito meringue” (above left). This was followed by a number of small courses, several of which appear on the regular menu as “Petiscos.” First up was a trio of items (above right): an Island Creek oyster with Steelhead trout caviar; a terrific mussel soup with fennel and chorizo; and a Bacalhau Croqueta with roasted garlic aioli.

 

Then a beet floret with goat cheese sitting in moss (above left) and a dellicate poached quail egg (above right).

 

Finally, a remarkable warm stew of roasted bacalhau (codfish), scrambled egg, crispy potato, and black olives, served warm inside a hollowed-out egg (above left); and a dish that I believe has been on the menu from the beginning, the sea urchin toast (above right).

 

There was a rich Foie Gras Terrine (above left) with cranberry jam and an apple poached in vanilla. The toasted brioche (not pictured) was a considerable improvement over the untoasted country bread that the chef sent out four years ago, but he sent out only two slices of it, when four were needed.

A Diver Scallop (above right) was the evening’s one blunder. The delicate flavor of the poor scallop was overwhelmed by a bitter black radish sitting on top of it, and not redeemed by glazed turnips and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.

 

A crisped brick of suckling pig (above left) suffered no harm from accompaniments of little neck clams, pickled cauliflower, carrots, and savoy cabbage; but I didn’t feel like those extra items enhanced the pig, either.

The cheese course (above right) was a Kinderhook sheep’s milk cheese from the Hudson Valley, with a wheat cracker and spice fig marmelade. (Sorry about the awful photo.)

 

The pre-dessert (above right) was exactly what such an intermezzo should be, a vanilla custard with mango sorbet and mint granita.

The dessert (above left) was a lemongrass and coconut-milk panna cotta with a blizzard of other ingredients: poached kumquat, coconut-Thai basil granita, and coriander-fennel crisp. This struck me as a bit too citrus-y. Your mileage may vary. There was a plate of petits fours (right) that we were far too full to fully appreciate.

The service was excellent. The meal took about 2½ hours to complete, which is a reasonable pace for this amount of food. The wine pairings were well chosen, given the constraints of the list, but I am not going to itemize them. There were seven generous pours, which was more than enough alcohol for one evening. I can’t evaluate the economics of the chef’s prix fixe experiment, but I had no trouble getting a prime-time Friday evening reservation the same day. The dining room was doing a good business, but was not full.

As is so often the case, the smaller courses at the beginning of the meal (the petiscos and appetizers) pleased us more than the main courses, although the scallop was the only dish that failed outright. No chef is going to send out fifteen courses that please everyone. Among tasting menus available in New York, this is surely one of the better ones below $100.

Aldea (31 W. 17th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, Flatiron District)

Food: Modern Portuguese cuisine, liberally interpreted
Service: Upscale but not formal
Ambiance: A beautiful, fairly quiet, modern room.

Rating: ★★★

Barraca

Note: Jesús Núñez has left Barraca and its sister restaurant, Melibea. Alex Ureña has replaced him.

*

I was a big fan of Gastroarte, chef Jesús Núñez’s avant-garde Spanish restaurant near Lincoln Center. But his work there was too edgy for the neighborhood, and critics found his cooking uneven. Earlier this month, Núñez re-surfaced at Barraca, where he doesn’t challenge diners as much—and if he did, would probably find a more receptive audience.

It’s your typical attractive downtown space, with dark wood tables, bright blue seats, wood pillars, timber beams, and exposed brick. Miraculously, on a Friday evening it was not as loud as such places usually are, even though the 80-seat dining room was nearly full.

The menu fits on one sheet of paper, featuring a dozen tapas ($6–12), a similar number of salads and vegetable dishes ($6–12), cheeses and charcuterie ($12–32), six varieties of paella ($19–27), just a few entrées ($23–30), and four desserts ($7–9).

The paellas take about 25 minutes, and in the meantime the server suggested six tapas to share. I’d say that’s on the high side, unless you’re quite hungry; we ordered four.

  

The tapas are the chef’s best work: the Croquetas ($9; above left; top); Esparragos (White Asparagus) with anchovies and vegetable vinaigrette ($7; above left; bottom); Albondigas, or meatballs, in a vegetable sauce ($10; above middle); and a spicy Setas Alajillo, a stew of sautéed mushrooms in a garlic sauce with pork sausage ($10; above right).

Paellas are served for a minimum of two people, but the kitchen will prepare different varieties of paella in a large skillet with a cast-iron divider between the two halves. (I’ve seen some photos with the skillet divided in three.)

We tried the Paella Roja de Carabineros (several varieties of shrimp and prawns in a shrimp stock) and the Paella de Tierra (chicken, rabbit, pork belly, pork ribs, string beans and fava beans), $27 and $23 respectively. We found both too salty and greasy, and the rice at the bottom lacked the right crusty crunch. In the Paella de Tierra, the various meats were mostly indistinguishable, aside from the pork belly, which stood out (as it always does).

The Coca de Chocolate ($9; above) was one of the more unusual desserts we’ve had in a while, a crisped tortilla covered in chocolate, topped with berries and cream. We’d certainly order this again.

The wine list is not extensive at this point, but we did well with a 2006 Rioja Riserva for $46. Service was fine, and if only the chef could get the paellas in order, this place would be just about perfect. Still, there is much to enjoy here, and I suspect it will only get better.

Barraca (81 Greenwich Avenue at Bank Street, West Village)

Food: Inventive tapas and paellas, mostly well prepared (especially the former)
Service: Casual and just fine for what it is
Ambiance: Attractive garden-variety West Village casual

Rating: ★★

My Moon

My Moon is a big-box restaurant that feels like it belongs in Hell’s Kitchen, rather than in Williamsburg, where most dining is on a much smaller scale.

There’s a large outdoor garden, leading to a converted brick-clad factory dominated by soaring double-height ceilings. There are booths on either side of the room, with strange curved walls, tilted at an angle that envelops you.

Do the crowds ever flock to this place? At 7:30pm on a Friday evening, we were practically the first to be seated. By the time we left, past 9:00pm, it was a bit busier but nowhere near full.

What opened in 2007 as a Turkish restaurant is now Spanish. The new chef, Ivan Vilches, claims to be an “El Bulli protégé.”

“We’re currently playing with smoke,” he told The Brooklyn Paper. “We smoke a sea bass carpaccio on oak in front of our customers… The waiter lifts the crystal bell that covers it, and the smoke billows out. It’s a lot of fun.”

We saw that dish come out at another table. It does indeed make a striking impression, at least visually. Alas, nothing we ordered—nor saw at any other table—was as interesting. Did we order wrong?

On the menu, there’s a long list of tapas (mostly $5–9), appetizers ($9–19), entrées ($19–25) and side dishes ($4–6). The server pushed boatloads of food, leaving us unsure how much to order. We’d had a snack elsewhere, so we decided to start with six tapas, and see how that went.

One tapa never appeared, which is just as well. The food wasn’t impressive, and I wasn’t dying to have any more of it.

Bread (resembling focaccia) came out warm. Wrapped dates ($6; above right) with almonds and bacon didn’t have much flavor.

The next two courses were the best. Grilled Squid ($7; above left) with parsley and garlic oil was on the bland side, but well prepared. Garlic Shrimp ($7; above right) had a strong, spicy kick.

The so-called Bomba Meatball ($6; above left) was bizarre, consisting of more potato than meat. A Peas and Bacon appetizer ($16; above right) was too salty, and flecked with ham that was too tough.

The wine list offers about two dozen bottles, most priced from $30–45, though selected without much apparent rhyme or reason from France, Argentina, Spain, and California. But I would sooner re-order the Luzón Crianza 2008 from Spain ($40) than re-try the forgettable food.

If you get one of the booths, this isn’t a bad spot to hang out and drink. In one corner of the large dining room, a DJ keeps the music going, but if it’s not my cup of tea, at least it’s not too loud. After we were seated, the server clearly hadn’t cottoned to the fact that we wanted to take our time: it seemed like he was circling back every 3½ minutes.

In all fairness to the new chef, he has been at My Moon for only a short time. Perhaps his best work is yet to come. But if he’s taking the cuisine in a more experimental direction, I’m not sure the big-box space lends itself to the project.

My Moon (184 N. 10th St. between Driggs & Bedford Ave., Williamsburg)

Food: Modern Spanish
Service: Perhaps we didn’t get the best server
Ambiance: Distressed industrial chic on a large scale

Rating: Not recommended
Why? After five years, this restaurant hasn’t found its soul

Tertulia

The new Spanish restaurant Tertulia is this year’s “I-don’t-get-it” place. It isn’t bad: I visited three times, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d hated it. But I don’t understand the hype.

And hyped it is. Tertulia got an enthusiastic two stars in The Times, two-and-half in Bloomberg, three in New York, and four out of five in Time Out. Serious Eats was a notable dissenter: they rated it a B, and said, “We don’t get it.”

To be fair, I wasn’t taken with Boqueria, chef Seamus Mullen’s last place, which he left “amicably” last year. The two places are similar (same cuisine, casual vibe, reservations not taken, quite loud when full), so perhaps Mullen and I are just not on the same wavelength.

The printed menu changes frequently, and there seem to be announced specials every day. Most of the offerings are in two categories: breads, cheeses, and charcuterie ($5–20) and tapas ($6–16). There are usually two or three larger plates offered, for which prices can vary widely. A 40-day aged prime rib, shown on the website and mentioned in some reviews, was $72, but as of last Friday it was no longer on the menu.

Anyhow, the tapas are the core of a meal here, but very few of them pleased me. Either they were too bland, or too salty, or too greasy. A couple were pretty good, but Mullen’s batting average wasn’t high enough.

Tomates de Nuestro Mercado, a salad of heirloom tomatoes, melon, cucumbers, fresh cheese, and herbs (, $14; above left) was competent and forgettable. Spanish mackerel with Fabes beans ($12, above right) was so bland that it left no impression at all. Even the roasted and pickled peppers were unable to come to the rescue.

Cojonudo…Revisited ($5; above left) was a hit, and one of the better bargains on the menu. It’s just two bites of smoked pig cheek topped with a fried quail egg and pepper, but packed with all the flavor the first two dishes lacked.

Nuestras Patatas ($9; above right) ought to come with a warning: not to be ordered by one person. Crispy potatoes drizzled with Pimentó and garlic had a spicy kick, but you want at least two or three fellow-diners to share it.

Mullen touts Arroz a la Plancha ($16; above left) as a signature dish, but I hated it. The description (Calasparra rice, snails, wild mushrooms, celery, fennel, Ibérico ham) sounds promising , but it’s dominated by a torpedo of greasy brown rice that had none of the crisp char that you would expect from the plancha.

The flavors really pop out in the Ensalata de Otoño ($13; above right), with squash, kale, mushrooms, Idiazábal cheese, and mushroom vinaigrette. There is not a lot going on here, but it’s a successful dish.

The last item I tried was one of the large-format plates, the Fabada ($32; above left), a bean stew with pork belly, house-made morcilla and chorizo. The pork belly was crisped up nicely, and the chorizo had a strong, spicy kick. The morcilla, or blood sausage, seemed a bit too loose, and the Fabes beans still seemed bland to me, as they had the first time. The cold side of red cabbage that came with it (above right) did not add much.

The beverage program emphasizes sherries, ciders, and wine. There is no printed cocktail list, but the mixed drinks are good, if you ask for them. As I was alone, I didn’t have an opportunity to explore much of the wine list, but the Spanish ciders are worth a try. One one visit, I was served wine in a juice glass, which a Facebook friend said is common in Spain, but on another I was given a proper wine stem.

The dining room occupies a long, narrow space, with distressed brick walls, dark wood tables without tablecloths, and an open kitchen in the back. It is rather dark, and there are no windows, except at the front. Unlike Boqueria, Tertulia at least has real tables and seats with backs, though I didn’t get one: I sat at the bar three times. Last Friday night, there was a 10-minute wait for a bar stool at 6:00 p.m., with most tables taken. It was standing-room-only by 7:30.

That is the rhythm of dinner at Tertulia, three months in. Servers are friendly, knowledgeable, and good at multi-tasking, as they have to be in a place this busy. The cuisine here makes a nod at ambition. The menu seems to rely heavily on authentic ingredients, and the chef is not afraid to challenge his audience, but the ratio of hits to misses is not good enough.

Tertulia (359 Sixth Ave. between W. 4th St. & Washington Pl., West Village)

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