Junoon

I wouldn’t call two a trend, and perhaps it’s only a coincidence that two upscale Indian restaurants have opened within the last two months: Hemant Mathur’s Tulsi; and from Salaam Bombay alumnus Vikas Khanna, Junoon, which means passion.

The space at Junoon is much larger than at Tulsi, with a comfortable bar and lounge area bigger than many whole restaurants. There is talent behind the cocktail menu, and a minor addiction to egg whites, featured in three of eight items. I especially liked the Agave Thyme (Reposado Tequila, muddled pomegranate, thyme, egg white, and white peppercorn).

The menu is on the expensive side for Indian cuisine, with entrées from $22–36 (most above $25). It is neither as clever nor as well executed as at Tulsi or Tamarind, but the elegant room and polished service offer sufficient compensation, if you want an unhurried experience where the ambiance is as important as the food itself.

The amuse bouche, as I recall, was a bite-size potato pancake. We shared the wonderful Hyderabadi Pathar Paneer ($12) appetizer, consisting of four small slices of house-made cheese in a turmeric (ginger), mint, and lime sauce.

Among the entrées, a braised lamb shank ($26) with onion, tomato, and yogurt, was the better choice. A Cornish Hen ($24), made in the tandoori oven, was over-cooked and dry. The kitchen sent out an extra entrée, a chicken curry, which was much better, but by this time it was more than we could eat, especially after we’d overdone it on the addictive Naan.

The 250-bottle wine list covers a wide range, priced from $38 to $1,800, with many in three figures but plenty below $50. For a 2006 Haut Bages Averous ($55), the sommelier rolled out a cart and put on a decanting show as if I’d ordered a 1962 Lafite Rothschild. He appeared to be doing it at every table. You may call it pretentious, but hardly anyone in town goes through the full ritual any more, and someone might as well do it. So why not here?

There were petits fours at the end—not memorable in themselves, but you don’t find them in Indian restaurants very often.

The restaurant was fairly quiet on a Sunday evening, traditionally a slow night. I have no idea how they’re doing on the other days, but they do have a large space to fill. I suspect the rent is stratospheric, and I don’t know how many of these places the market can support. The service and ambiance are memorable; the food a shade less so.

Junoon (27 W. 24th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, Flatiron District)

Food: *½
Service: ***
Ambaince: ***
Overall: **

Millesime

There’s plenty of great cooking in New York, but I am not often floored. I was floored on Friday by the quality of our meal at Millesime, the new French seafood restaurant in the Carlton Hotel, where Country used to be.

I don’t know if Millesime is the new restaurant of the year, but it certainly is the best restaurant that no one is talking about.

It is hard to over-state the obstacles that Millesime must overcome. I mentioned some of them in my review of the downstairs lounge, Salon Millesime, but they bear repeating:

1. A name most people can’t pronounce (roughly: MEEL-eh ZEEM-eh)
2. A location dead to foot traffic, and poorly served by transit
3. A cuisine that is not currently fashionable
4. A genre not favored by the city’s major critics
5. A chef without name recognition in New York

That Laurent Manrique isn’t better known is a product of poor memories and east coast bias. He was named chef at Peacock Alley in 1992, at the age of 26. After five years, he moved onto Gertrude’s, where he was named Bon Appetit Rising Star Chef of 1998. A year later, he left New York for San Francisco, eventually winning two Michelin stars at Aqua for three consecutive years, 2007–2009. (He later left the restaurant in a dispute with management.)

If he’d done all that in New York, he’d be a household name in this town—at least among those who follow the restaurant business. But as he hasn’t worked here since the end of the last century, most of the city’s diners have no knowledge of him.

At Millesime (French for vintage), he’s clearly aiming for a vibe more casual than Aqua, and far more casual than the previous occupant, Country. The space has been brightened up, in the brasserie style. It remains one of the city’s most theatrically grand spaces, thanks to the overhead Tiffany skylight.

Most of the entrées are in the $20s, most of the appetizers in the low teens. Still, it pains me to suggest that the menu might intimidate diners not familiar with “Pike Quenelles Jean Louis Dumonet Style,” or the three preparations of potato on offer (all $5): Mousseline, Salardaises, or Paillasson.

Most of the menu choices are translated, but I fear that diners will associate French with old-school formality, even if that’s neither valid nor fair. Somehow, I don’t think an all-Italian menu would have that effect.

There are no amuses bouches or petits fours here, but everything we tasted was executed flawlessly. If the rest of the menu is as good, this is three-star food, though slightly undermined by service that is eager but not yet quite polished. Warm bread straight from the oven was so captivating that even the chefs couldn’t help snacking on it. It’s too bad they didn’t notice that the butter on our table had come out of the fridge, and was hard as a rock.

I haven’t encountered this dish in any French restaurant: Harengs Pommes A L’Huile ($15; above left & center). That’s a spray of warm fingerling potatoes, with a salad of smoked herring, which you combine at the table. It’s a lovely dish, but one I associate with Scandinavia, not France.

Those Pike Quenelles Jean Louis Dumonet Style ($14; above right) were perfect, putting to shame the chalky ones I was served at La Grenouille a few years ago. The Dumonet style, I am assuming, refers to the rich lobster broth in which they’re served.

The market fish for two changes daily—here Monkfish ($41; above), presented to the table and returned to the kitchen for plating. If you’re going to offer just one market special, it takes some courage to choose monkfish, which is better known as the poor man’s alternative to lobster. But as presented here, monkfish needed no apologies: it had a rich flavor of its own.

The side dishes, too, were faultless: the Potatoes Salardaises ($5; above left) and the Creamy Spinach ($6; above center). An Apple Crumble ($9; above right) was just fine, but perhaps the least memorable dish of the evening.

The food bill was $90 for two. By a wide margin, this is the best food I’ve had at under $50 per head, bearing favorable comparisons to restaurants that charge twice that.

The bargain is undermined by the wine list, which had no bottles (even of white wine) below $55. A restaurant in Millesime’s price range needs drinkable whites in the $40–45 range. Moreover, when I ordered the 2006 Stag’s Leap Karia Chardonnay, it was the 2007 vintage that came out (at the same price, $80), which they realized only when I pointed it out.

Wine lists have a way of sorting themselves out: when the management sees what is not being ordered, they adjust. Still, it is a blunder at a restaurant that can ill afford that kind of mistake.

As now configured, the space has more tables than Country did, and on a Friday evening it was no better than 20 percent full. The restaurant had the usual media splash in the major blogs, but as we noted above, diners don’t fight for reservations to a French seafood restaurant on Madison Avenue, from a chef who won Michelin stars in California.

They should.

Millesime (90 Madison Avenue at 29th Street, Gramercy/Flatiron)

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

Ciano

Note: Ciano closed in April 2013. Management says that it will re-open on the Upper East Side in August 2013 as Cucina Ciano, with one of chef Shea Gallante’s assistants, but without Gallante himself.

*

Shea Gallante is back. The chef who made Cru into one of the city’s best restaurants, only to see his work undercut and eventually rendered irrelevant by the Great Recession, has his own place again: Ciano.

In an era of increasing informality, Cru was one of the few restaurants that actually got fancier between its 2004 opening and our most recent check-in, two years ago. But after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the restaurant was forced to reverse field, adopting a less expensive à la carte format and slashing the prices on its legendary wine list by 30 percent.

Gallante never explained his departure. A plausible guess is that when Cru became unsustainable in its original form, he preferred to go out on his own terms. Sure enough, Cru is now closed. Gallante went back briefly to David Bouley’s empire (from which he’d come), then did some consulting in Westchester, and is now back in New York.

Ciano occupies the pretty space that was formerly Beppo. I was never there, but as the re-fit was brief, I assume that a lot of the décor was retained. It’s a beautiful setting for what I call adult dining, with a long polished wood bar, flowers and tablecloths on every table, and a roaring fireplace.

The Italian serving staff—all men, and none of them youngsters—are likely carry-overs too: where else would they find so many waiters of that age on short notice? The patrons also skewed to middle-aged, though not exclusively so. Perhaps many of them had been Beppo regulars, and wanted to see if the new place measures up.

There was always an Italian accent to Gallante’s cuisine at Cru, but it is overtly Italian here. Prices are roughly in line with Cru’s à la carte phase, but without the tasting menus. No one would call it inexpensive. Insalate are $12–15, antipasti $11–18, pastas $19–28 (smaller portions listed for about 1/4th less), secondi $28–35 (not counting the ribeye for two, $48pp), and contorni $10.

Beyond Gallante’s sure hand in the kitchen, what elevates Ciano is its wine program, run by his former Cru colleague, John Slover. As he does at Bar Henry, Slover sells a slew of wines by the half-bottle — the majority of the list, in fact. And we’re not talking about the cheap stuff, either. Real wines of interest, bottles with age, are available by the half, at 50 percent of the bottle price. This is a boon for the customer, but it clearly entails a risk for the restaurnant, as an open bottle quickly deterioriates if another no one buys the other half reasonably promptly.

We began with two of the tenderest Roasted Veal Meatballs ($18; above left) that I’ve had in a long time, so smooth they could have been Kobe beef. Gnocchi ($28; above right) with black truffle butter and 36-month parmigiano were a creamy delight. 

I loved the Berkshire Pork Roast ($32; above left), but it exemplifies the challenge of attracting customers to a restaurant like Ciano. Gallante is clearly sourcing the best beef. With a Barolo vinegar and grilled maitake mushroom sauce, he isn’t stinting on the other ingredients. But diners may ask, “What’s with $32 for pork shoulder?” Lamb Chops ($33; above right) were so rare that I thought they could still “Baaaaa,” and that’s a lot of money for two measly chops.

The experienced server was more polished than one usually finds at a new restaurant, and he didn’t hesitate to share his opinion. He was quite adamant that the smaller-size pasta orders (generally $5–6 less than the full-size ones) aren’t worth the tariff. And when we asked that our shared appetizer and pasta courses be brought out separately, he insisted it would confuse the kitchen, which we found very difficult to believe. Apart from that, he was on top of things.

Obviously, this isn’t bargain dining . Gallante’s technical ability is rock-solid, but he is cooking in a simpler, from-the-gut, style than he did at Cru. Success here will depend on people being willing to spend a bit more for more polished versions of dishes that are available less expensively at more stylish destinations.

I, for one, am happy to do that, but I’m not the guy that restaurant investors are targeting these days.

Ciano (45 E. 22nd Street, east of Park Avenue, Gramercy/Flatiron)

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

Manzo

I had no desire at all to visit Eataly, the new Batali–Bastianich Italian food hall that offers the charm of a shopping mall with the crowds of an airline terminal the day before Thanksgiving. There are six or seven themed dining spaces, none of which take reservations, and where waits of 45 minutes or more are already legion.

There is also one real restaurant, Manzo (meaning “beef”), which takes reservations and offers something approximating a civilized experience. Reviews have been uniformly positive (e.g., a rare three stars from Adam Platt), so I decided to brave the crowds and try the place.

Manzo is expensive, and in line with those at the same team’s Babbo—the chef, Michael Toscano came from there. But Babbo, at least, is a nice-looking place. Manzo looks thrown together, with insufficient visual or aural separation from the rest of Eataly. Crude posters, advertising the owners’ new cooking school, adorn the walls.

It’s not that I mind eating in a supermarket. It’s that I mind paying $250 for dinner while doing so. For all that, the food at Manzo is extremely good—indeed, better than the last time I ate at Babbo. It ought to be easy to erect a real wall with a door (in lieu of the current makeshift screen), to set Manzo apart. Then, get rid of the crass posters, and they’d have themselves a great restaurant. Instead, what they have is an annoying one.

The staff wisely distributes the wine list first. I was already forewarned of the potential for rip-offs, and when I opened it up to Barolos in three figures, I figured I was about to get bent over the table. Dig a little deeper, and there are plenty of reasonable bottles below $65, or even below $50. The San Polo Brunello 2004 ($63) was an excellent foil to Manzo’s meat-centric menu.

Eataly has its own bakery, so it is no surprise that the bread was freshly baked, but the staff forgot to deliver the olive oil to go with it.

Appetizers were excellent: Crispy Sweetbreads ($15; above left); Top Round Carne Cruda ($17; above right), or the equivalent of steak tartare with a soft-boiled egg surrounded by rich, Piemontese beef.

We asked to share the Agnolotti del Plin ($23; above left), and the kitchen divided the order without prompting. It was a simple dish, but executed beautifully.

For a purportedly beef-centric restaurant, we longed for more choices among the secondi. There is a ribeye for two ($95), but we wanted to try different things. Tagliata ($35; above right) is a fairly lean cut of meat, and it needed more excitement than to be just simply roasted, as it was here.

The Veal Chop Smoked in Hay ($45; above right) is the dish several critics have raved about, and with good reason: it’s a huge, double-cut truncheon-sized specimen: juicy, smokey, and full of flavor. Braised greens with cannellini beans and pancetta ($10; above left) was also very good.

The dining room is not large, but a restaurant in this price range needed more than just two servers on duty. The host and two sommeliers filled in on their behalf, but still, it was sometimes difficult to get their attention.

Manzo is expensive, but not out of line for the quality of the food. The service will improve as the staff matures. What will not improve—at least, not anytime soon—is the terrible space. For $250, I want to enjoy dinner in peace, and I don’t want ads for Lidia Bastianich’s cooking school staring down at me. I might consider returning to Manzo—after they remodel.

Manzo (in Eataly, 200 Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, Flatiron District)

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

Eataly

After dinner at Manzo the other night, we wandered around Eataly for a little while.

The crowds have been ridiculous. The space is the size of an airplane hangar; yet, it is not big enough. On Sunday, security closed Eataly to new customers, due to over-crowding. The line to get in at the 23rd Street entrance was wrapped around the block, onto Fifth Avenue.

Eataly is half supermarket, half restaurant. It is divided into half-a-dozen or more themed departments, where you can buy food of a particular kind (e.g., vegetables) or order food of that same kind. The layout is surprisingly slapdash, with poor wayfinding and cardboard signs that look like they were thrown together.

There are several sit-down restaurants, though only Manzo takes reservations. Seating is demarcated with crude stanchions, as would be used in an airport. Other parts of the enterprise have counters where you stand and eat, while both shoppers and servers try to dodge one another, hoping to avoid collisions that could range from the disastrous to the merely embarrassing.

Many of the prices are ridiculous, like Pat LaFreida chickens for $23, and white truffles for $3,300 a pound (that’s three thousand, three hundred). Squid ink pasta was the rare bargain, just six dollars for a dinner-sized portion that serves two—a terrific deal, bearing in mind that very few places in town even sell the stuff. But for the most part, the food sold at Eataly is at an outrageous premium to what you could easily obtain elsewhere.

Photos are available after the jump.

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Primehouse New York

Note: Primehouse New York closed in September 2012 after a five-year run.

*

I had an evening meeting earlier this week in the vicinity of Primehouse New York, so I decided to drop in. The economy and my waistline being what they are, I ordered two appetizers.

Primehouse is a “Steakhouse Plus” — a restaurant that does steaks superbly, but where the non-steak items are far more than just afterthoughts. Both of my appetizers were preparations I don’t recall seeing in any other restaurant.

A rich Filet Mignon Carpaccio ($16; above right) comes draped in a pickled fennel salad, with foie gras “croutons” hiding underneath.

I considered omitting the photo of “Bacon & Egg” ($14; above right), as it really doesn’t do the dish justice. There is a double-cut log of pork belly and a soft-boiled egg deep-fried in panko crust in a pool of grits. Trust me: the dish is much, much better than my lame photo of it.

Steak prices remain on the high side, with most in the high $40s or low $50s, but I assume the aging program remains top-notch, as it was before. The steaks I observed at other tables had a wonderful sear and a uniform medium-rare finish.

Primehouse seems to be doing just fine — the bar is usually close to full, the dining room somewhere between half and three-quarters — but it doesn’t get as much attention as the better known brands. I rank it in the top tier of NYC steakhouses.

Primehouse New York (381 Park Avenue South at 27th Street, Gramercy)

The Hurricane Club

Note: The wind blew Hurricane Club out of town. It closed in late 2013, having been previously re-branded Hurricane Steak and Sushi. General Assembly, a “market-driven grill” (yawn) from the same owners, replaced it in 2014. This too quickly failed. Next up in the space is the transfer of Park Avenue [Season] from its original address, where they owners lost their lease.

*

Resistance is futile. That was my immediate reaction to The Hurricane Club, the new Polynesian-themed restaurant from the Quality Meats/Park Avenue Autumn team.

It is pointless to wish it were something else, to wonder why, or to belittle the concept. Just submit to its charms, or don’t go.

Apparently, these places were once popular in Manhattan. Sometimes called “tiki bars,” one of them even had three stars. By the 1990s, the genre once exemplified by Trader Vic’s at the Plaza, was practically dead.

This year, restaurateurs are banking on a revival, with three tiki joints set to open. Hurricane Club is probably the most elaborate of these.

To call it “Polynesian” isn’t quite accurate. It’s about as authentic as Fantasy Island, lacking only for Ricardo Montalbán and Hervé Villachaize screaming, “The plane! The plane!”

There is a protective gauze over all of the windows, and the doors are covered top-to-bottom, so that nobody outside can catch a glimpse of the space. Once inside, it’s an AvroKO playland, a South Pacific dreamscape that would make Club Med jealous.

The enormous 250-seat space has 20-foot ceilings, about six dining rooms and lounges, and a wrap-around bar with a life-size Buddha draped in pearls.

It’s hard to tell if you’re in a restaurant or on a cruise ship. Servers are dapper in their all-white, crisply pressed dinner jackets. Cocktail waitresses sport barely-there thin black dresses.

The cocktail list in ten categories is so long that you order by number. I practically never order frozen drinks, but here…why not? The #37 (left; $11) with cucumber and mint was pretty good. Most of the choices are $12 or less, which these days is pretty reasonable.

The liquor program goes well beyond cliché, with a list of about a hundred rums: they don’t come cheap, with prices ranging from $39 to $1,999. The five-page wine list emphasizes the Pacific Rim. It was hard to find bargains there, either.

In the lounge and at the tables, there’s a gimmicky “Pu Pu” menu, listing a dozen items—all finger food, $12 each, with 3 or 4 pieces. With the little pencils provided, you’re to write down how many of each thing you want; or, you can just order the Pu Pu Platter ($28/$58) and get a large sampler.

I didn’t bother to write anything down, and just asked the server for an order of the Peking Duck Tea Sandwiches ($3; below left), which tasted exactly as you would imagine.

The two-page dinner menu offers items in seven categories, none labeled “appetizer” or “entrée.” The starter-like substances are $9–17, the mains (or apparent mains) $17–44. Yes, that is a wide range. Portions seem to be very large, and there is a danger of over-ordering.

Rice Paper Shrimp Rolls ($14; above right) spent too little time in the deep fryer, and came out slightly mushy.

The server correctly advised that Crispy Peking Pig ($44; above), although listed as a single entrée, would be more than enough for two people. Basically, it’s a pig prepared in the style of Peking Duck, with the traditional accompaniments and pork buns to wrap it with. This was the best suckling pig preparation we have had in quite a while, but it came out not quite warm enough.

The pig is listed in its own box, a feat of menu engineering designed to make it Hurricane Club’s most often-ordered dish. Based on our observations, it seemed to have worked: we saw orders of the pig flying out of the kitchen. It is not a bad deal for two or three people, but if you order much else you’re liable to leave part of it unfinished—as we did.

Of course, to claim that this is the cuisine of any recognizable Polynesian nation is nonsense, but it is a very good dish, and who cares where it comes from? Chef Craig Koketsu (Quality Meats, Park Avenue [name your season]) is a proven talent, who will probably get more right than wrong.

The attentive service is excellent, bringing an air of seriousness to a place that could easily devolve into a tourist trap. Despite the hokey concept, there appears to be a legitimate attempt to do it right—whatever that might mean for a tiki bar (I am frankly not sure).

Hurricane Club won’t be for everybody. We suspect it will attract a lot of big groups, tour buses, families taking in a matinée, and so forth. There certainly are questions whether quality can be maintained in a 250-seat place: those soggy shrimp rolls are an early warning sign. Inevitably, some meals will seem mass-produced.

If you buy into the concept, just get on the boat, and enjoy the ride for what it is. There is some fun to be had.

Hurricane Club (360 Park Avenue South at 26th Street, Gramercy/Flatiron)

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

Salon Millesime

Millesime is the French seafood restaurant that will take over the old Country space in the Carleton Hotel. The fine dining room on the gorgeous second floor is slated for a vague “fall” opening (which means anytime in the next year). The former Café, now called “Salon Millesime,” is open now.

The challenges here are enormous, starting with a name nobody can pronounce (roughly, it’s MEEL-eh ZEEM-eh). And these aren’t the best times for high-end French food, which most of the city’s critics don’t understand, especially coming from a chef (Laurent Manrique) who made his name on the left coast. New York is tough, tough, tough, on outsiders.

The location is problematic too, a dead-zone for foot traffic. With enough buzz, you can attract an audience just about anywhere; getting noticed is the hard part. The “Salon” was sparsely populated at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday evening. Perhaps it gets more lively later on. Then again, maybe the word simply hasn’t gotten out.

The spectacular bi-level space that David Rockwell designed for Country is mostly intact, except that the bar in the middle of what was the café, has been removed in favor of a raised platform with a piano, where live music will be heard many evenings. (The space still has two other bars.) On Friday night, the band was just getting set up at around 7:30 p.m., when we were getting ready to leave.

The menu downstairs consists mainly of sandwiches and bar snacks, none more than $16, and they are much better than one has any right to expect. We tried five items, and there wasn’t a dud among them.

Crispy bacon ($4; left) was one of the best bar snacks I’ve tried all year, baked like a hard cracker, loaded with spices, and served in a basket.

 

Tuna tartare ($15; above left) comes with Moroccan spices, dates, almonds, and lemon, which the server mixes tableside. It was just fine, but probably the most pedestrian dish we tried. Pork Belly Lollipops ($14; above right) come on skewers with a bracing red pepper relish.

 

The menu didn’t identify the mix of seasonings and spices that elevated a Foie Gras Terrine ($16; above left), well above most others served in town. It was served with warm, toasted country bread and the two craziest spreading knives you’ll ever see. Profiteroles (above right) were wonderful, and at $7 the bargain of the evening.

The wine list is nothing to write home about, as the Salon no doubt expects to make most of its money on mixed drinks. A recent vintage VdP Syrah was fine, but at $58 over-priced for the space. Service was much more attentive and polished than I expected in lounge environment.

The menu at Salon Millesime is too limited to warrant a full review, but everything we tried was top-notch, and that does not happen by accident. If the staff can do as well in the main dining room, Millesime ought to be excellent. The question is, who will notice?

Salon Millesime (90 Madison Avenue at 29th Street, Gramercy/Flatiron)

Novitá

I must have walked by Novitá dozens of times, over the years, but it never actually registered until after Sam Sifton upgraded it to two stars in February (it previously had one from Ruth Reichl). The city is full of places like that — decent neighborhood restaurants that get zero media coverage, that you walk by on the way to someplace else without a second thought.

Sifton’s argument for awarding two stars was exceptionally weak — by which I mean that, even taking him at his word, it made little sense. Pasta is “excellent . . . a rejoinder to low expectations.” “[T]he plates are food, not art,” the chef makes a great prosciutto with melon, and “Main courses are less successful.”

It is, in other words, one of a hundred mostly interchangeable Italian restaurants in our fair city.

 

Gramigna alla carbonara ($14.50; above left), a concoction of macaroni with eggs, pecorino romano, guanciale and black pepper, was probably the best thing we tried, lustily flavored and amply portioned. Eggplant Parmigiana ($15; above right) was just fine, but it is fine at lots of other places.

 

The kitchen did well by a whole Branzino ($29; above left). Very few restaurants serve a pounded Veal Chop ($29; above right) on the bone, but one couldn’t avoid thinking that it was a preparation designed to bury mediocre product in a blaze of cheese and tomato.

On OpenTable, Novità is flagged as “romantic,” and that’s a mistake. The room is attractive, but it is too crowded, the tables too tightly packed, the service too impersonal. At prime times, you’ll feel like you’re dining in front of an audience: there is no waiting space for unseated parties, so they just line the edge of the room until a table frees up.

The restaurant was full on a Thursday evening, probably not due to Sifton’s review, but simply because the neighborhood is glad to have it. The waiter recites a long list of specials, which irritates the neophyte, but if you’re a regular it means there is always something new to try. Though not exactly inexpensive, it’s a fair deal given the size of the portions; the food, if unoriginal and unspectacular, is a step up from generic sidewalk Italian.

Novitá (102 E. 22nd Street, east of Park Avenue, Gramercy)

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

Sagaponack

 

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? How about a restaurant opening?

Sagaponack must have been the lowest of low-key openings in 2009. It did not attract a single professional review, which is unusual for a Flatiron District restaurant with entrées in the $20s. The various amateur sites (Yelp, Zagat, etc.) are mostly positive about the place, but from the critics it got no attention at all.

It turns out Sagaponack is a solid little gem: nothing revelatory, but a welcome addition to the neighborhood. The décor resembles a Hamptons beach house—hardly an original idea, but well executed.

You can probably guess the menu: a raw bar, lobster rolls, mussels, crab cakes, conch fritters, and the usual bistro standards. A few dishes sound like they belong on someone else’s menu, like Korean short ribs.

Prices are modest, with appetizers $8–12, salads $7–17, entrées $14–28, and side dishes $5.

  

The appetizers were all good, including Oysters Rockefeller ($9; above left), Lobster Bisque ($8; above center) with large hunks of lobster; and Duck Confit & Mushroom Duxelle Dumplings ($8; above right). I am not sure what the dumplings had to do with the restaurant’s theme, but I didn’t mind.

 

We also liked the entrées: Crab Cakes ($10; above left) and a hefty Lobster Roll ($26; above right) that is bigger than it appears in the photo. The accompanying fries, however, were too soggy. (Those crab cakes are technically an appetizer, but my mom ordered them as her main.)

On a Friday evening, the bar was packed three-deep with an after-work crowd. The tables were about half full. (The restaurant also has a large upstairs area for parties, which was not in use.) Service was about as it should be. The wine list is meh: I would have liked to see a few more Long Island wines at a restaurant that purports to represent the region.

Sagaponack feels summery—like a visit to the Hamptons minus the three-hour jitney ride, but also minus the beach. It’s not an adequate substitute for the real thing, but we can’t exactly run out to Southampton every day.

Sagaponack (4 W. 22nd Street, off Fifth Avenue, Flatiron District)

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