Juni

  

You’ve got to give Shaun Hergatt credit for persistence, if naught else. His first fine-dining restaurant won two Michelin stars but took a critical drubbing. The critics acted clowns, but the same clowns (or some of them) are still running the circus.

A lot of chefs would have followed it up with a steakhouse or a noodle shop. But here he is again, giving the critics what they already told him they don’t want.

To be fair, dumb reviews weren’t all that went wrong at SHO Shaun Hergatt. It was in a terrible location, not visible from the street, on an upper floor in a building surrounded with scaffolding and Jersey barriers. Even with the best reviews, I’m not sure he could have overcome that.

Juni (a diminutive of the Latin word for June) isn’t a SHO clone. It doesn’t look like a hotel in Dubai, the room isn’t as spacious or as opulent, there are no tablecloths, he’s not sending out edible gold leaf, and the wine list is far more modest. But it’s still an expensive fine-dining restaurant in a boutique hotel (The Chandler at 31st and Madison), a genre the foodocracy does not embrace.

There are two gracious, comfortable dining rooms, decorated in taupe and other muted colors, with custom flower prints on the walls and a large floral centerpiece. The flower motif is in the food too, with colorful petals on many of the dishes. Servers are in navy suits and ties, runners in dark blue coats, with a low diner-to-staff ratio. There’s a heavy ceramic pedestal at every place setting, and plates are served on top of this. Water glasses, silverware, and serving pieces, etc., are first-rate.

The cuisine is recognizably Hergatt, but there is a hint of the new Nordic here and there, with a heavy dose of crisps, flower petals and herbs, assymetric platings, and austere presentation. Whether you like this style of cooking or not, it is obviously labor- and ingredient-intensive, and beautiful to look at.

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Bistro Lamazou

Note: Bistro Lamazou closed in July 2012. In a familiar story, they closed for renovations, then two months later announced that the closure was permanent.

*

I don’t spend much time in Kips Bay, but apparently Nancy and Aziz Lamazou did everything right: their neighborhood cheese and sandwich shop, Lamazou, has fans galore.

So they decided to double down, opening a new restaurant, Bistro Lamazou, taking over a store that used to be a Blockbuster Video. The space is striking, with two bars (one for liquor, the other cheese), a communal table, and an ample dining room, which I fear may be too large for the area.

The chef, Jean-Claude Teulade, who once worked at La Côte Basque, offers a menu centered on North Africa (where Aziz Lamazou is from), though it pays tribute to many other cuisines. The Times describes it as French, a somewhat misleading label.

The menu, with its many categories, meanders more than it should. Appetizers are roughly $8–18, entrées $18–29, though it is sometimes hard to tell which is which. The burger is $18, which strikes me as audacious.

A whole section of the menu is captioned “From the Cheese Bar.” Given the owners’ background we had to try some. The Cheese and Charcuterie Sampler ($24; left) was bizarre, with its centerpiece a fountain of prosciutto and melon balls dangling out of a martini glass, with cornichons and pickled onions on the side. (It also came with a plate of bread, not pictured.)

It was far too much for two people. Four could have shared it happily. The ingredients were fine, but the selection balance was off: it could have used more cheese and less meat, especially coming from a team that specializes in the former.

Entrées were ample too: Couscous with Lamb & Vegetables ($27; above left); the Braised Lamb Shank ($25; above right). If no new culinary ground was broken, they were well prepared and attractively presented.

The wine list is ambitious, for a restaurant like this, with more than fifty bottles, mostly from France, Italy, and Tunisia, with plenty of options below $50. But I was less impressed when I ordered a 2005 Valpolicella Classico Superiore, and was presented with a 2008, which the server did not notice until I pointed it out. The printed price, $42, would have been a bargain for an ’05. Not so much for a bottle three years younger.

Aside from that, service was fine for a restaurant roughly two months old. It was not crowded at 8:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. It’s a cute place, and I would certainly visit again if I were in the neighborhood.

Bistro Lamazou (344 Third Avenue between 25th & 26th Streets, Kips Bay)

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

First Look: Teqa

Teqa is a new tacos-and-tequila place on the western edge of Kips Bay. Someone with talent is doing their P.R., as the restaurant managed the rare feat of getting the chef’s photo into Florence Fabricant’s weekly New York Times column, Off the Menu.

That chef is Lisa Schoen, who has worked as a Food Network stylist and as the private chef for Saturday Night Live, the Rosie O’Donnell Show, and for New York Yankees star Derek Jeter. She also appeared on the Food Network competition show Chopped. This is her first restaurant, as far as I can tell.

The owner is Derek Axelrod, who has worked as head of product placement for his family’s company, French Connection apparel. The website says that he “built a number of restaurants,” without naming them. The site is not shy about getting to the point: if Teqa succeeds, it will be “expanded to other locations,” that is, cloned.

The dining room is attractive, with dark wood tables, dim lighting, and a spacious bar with 100 tequilas on display. (The illustration, above left, is a concept rendering from the website; the actual space looks a bit different.) Mercifully, the sound track is quiet enough to allow a conversation without having to yell.

I don’t usually visit restaurants on the first night of service, as I’d rather give them time to work out the kinks. But I had a craving for this type of food, and I figured that tacos and guacamole were fairly low-risk bets. There were minor service glitches that I won’t even bother to mention. Teqa was running well, for an opening night.

An initial reaction is that such a nice space could offer more than just appetizers, tacos, salads, and sandwiches. Not that there’s anything wrong with the food I sampled, which was very good for the price, but I think a broader menu would work well here.

Another reaction is that the kitchen can afford to amp up the heat. Two kinds of “Guac & Chips” ($11) are offered: “Mellow or MEGA-WATT.” I ordered the latter, which I found pleasantly spicy. But those who expect a three-alarm fire from the words “mega-watt” might be a bit disappointed.

I had the same issue with a Spicy Cucumber Margarita ($11), which didn’t live up to its billing. When I pointed this out, the bartender made an extra-spicy version of their oddly named “Tommy’s Margarita” ($9), which was much more like it. I am not really sure what accounts for the $2 price difference between the two.

A side order of fries (sent out as a comp; normally $8) was an unexpected delight. They had all the heat that was missing from the other dishes. A visit for the fries alone would be well worth it.

There are eight kinds of tacos, served on house-made soft tortillas (except for the so-called “Old School,” which comes in a hard shell). They cost $13 for three, but you can’t mix and match. I had the Guiness Braised Short Rib tacos, with roasted corn, frizzled leeks, Cojita cheese, and an unspecified “Teqa sauce.” It’s an excellent creation, but in keeping with the evening’s theme, a shade under-seasoned.

I’ll emphasize again that it was the first night of service, and seasoning could very well be adjusted in the coming weeks as the kitchen gets into its routine.

As of today, the front page of the website is a blog entry showing photos of all the celebrities that attended the restaurant’s opening party. That’s the wrong strategy. Diners who chase celebrities have the attention span of a flea: it won’t be long before they move to the Next Big Thing. Long-term success depends on attracting customers who care about the food, not those who care about the Big Names who supposedly have dined there.

On this showing, the food at Teqa is worth showcasing. For someone who hasn’t run a restaurant before, Chef Schoen seems to have her act together. If you’re in the Murray Hill or Kips Bay area, it’s well worth dropping in.

Teqa (447 Third Avenue between 30th & 31st Streets, Kips Bay)

Riverpark

The unwritten rules that divide success from failure in the restaurant world are counter-intuitive. When Tom Colicchio’s new Riverpark opened in late September, Eater.com noted that it “provides a much needed dining option to the vast number of hospital workers in the wasteland that is the upper 20s around 1st Avenue.”

You’d think that a fine-dining restaurant by one of America’s best-known celebrity chefs, in a neighborhood where it’ll have the market to itself, would be a sure thing. Oddly enough, it usually doesn’t work that way. There’s a reason why nobody else has put a destination restaurant along hospital row. A health care worker in scrubs, after a long shift, isn’t looking for a $14 burger or $55 chicken for two.

Colicchio has doubled down on this location, which also has an outpost of his ’wichcraft sandwich chain, in a gorgeous all-glass building (see photo, right). I suspect it will do quite well; the restaurant is an entirely different matter.

Riverpark is in the brand new Alexandria Center, a biotech tower on East 29th Street past First Avenue, more than half-a-mile from the nearest subway station. To reach the restaurant, you walk past an unmarked gate at 29th & First, up a long unmarked driveway, and finally get to the dining room at the back of a sterile-looking lobby that smells like car dealership. It will get zero walk-in business, because you don’t even know it’s there. Drug reps will need to buy a lot of expense-account meals to fill this place.

It’s not all bad news for Riverpark. At this early date, the food is pretty good. That’s a contrast to Colicchio & Sons across town, where our early meal was a disaster—and many critics (though not the Times) had a similar experience.

The décor is right out of the Craft–Craftsteak handbook, with the addition of unobstructed East River views. It’s a pity that the floor-to-ceiling windows don’t open (as far as we could tell). The terrace just might be the city’s best outdoor dining destination, but first, Riverpark will have to tough out a long winter. Opening now, just as the weather is turning, was clearly not the best timing—even if a construction schedule beyond the restaurant’s control was the reason for it.

Though Riverpark is billed as “A Tom Colicchio Restaurant,” it doesn’t charge Tom Colicchio prices. Except for a few entrées “for two,” all of the mains are $28 or less. There’s also a separate bar menu, with entrées all under $20. That $55 chicken is an anomaly; everything else is quite reasonable, especially given the tariff at Colicchio’s other places.

The staff somewhat arbitrarily calls half the room “the pub,” but there is no noticeable difference between the two spaces, and either menu is served at any table. I think the so-called pub tables, situated closer to the water, are actually more desirable. In an odd design choice, the bar occupies the middle of the room, blocking the view for many of the so-called “dining room” tables, and leaving many of the bar patrons facing the wrong way.

Colicchio has handed over the cooking duties to his deputy, Sisha Ortuzar, who was the corporate chef of ’wichcraft for the last seven years. I wondered how well a sandwich guy would transition to fine dining. Quite well, it turns out.

Squab Mole ($15; above left) doesn’t look that great in the photo, but it’s a very good dish. So is Glazed Pork Belly ($9; above right) with pickled vegetables and jalapeño. The former comes from the dinner menu, the latter from the pub menu, but you would never guess that.

Sea Bass ($25; above left) was nicely done, in a rich seafood sauce, though I could have done without the crostini (shown at the top of the plate), which got a bit soggy. Spaghetti ($24 as an entrée; above right), clearly house-made, was just fine, with calamari, lobster, cockles, tomato, black olives, lemon, and basil.

We weren’t quite ready for dinner to end, so we ordered a Fruit Crisp ($10; right) to share, which was as good as it ought to be.

The restaurant is offering a 20 percent discount for the first two weeks. Even without that, the meal would have been $150 including cocktails and a bottle of wine, which is more than fair for food of this quality. You’d pay at least $50 more at Colicchio & Sons or Craft, with no assurance you’d enjoy it any better.

Our server was attentive, if slightly over-stretched, and there were some inexplicably long gaps between courses. However, that is one of the reasons why opening discounts are offered. I do not hold it against them.

The dining room was fairly empty at 6:30 p.m., but by the time we left, around 8:30, it was around 90 percent full. Keeping it full will be a challenge, as there is no history of fine dining in this neighborhood, and as a destination Riverpark is a very long hike from just about anywhere. On a value basis, this is probably the best of Colicchio’s New York restaurants, but I don’t know how often he’ll lure diners this far east.

Riverpark (450 E. 29th Street, east of First Avenue, Kips Bay)

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