Contra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to read more ...

Happy Ending

Note: This is a review under chef Francis Gabarrus, who left the restaurant in April 2015, after just four months. We liked his work, but felt that his classic French menu clashed with the history of the space and wouldn’t be embraced by the neighborhood. His only professional review came in The New Yorker, one of that publication’s rare pans.

*

To clubhounds of a certain age, Happy Ending isn’t a French restaurant. It’s “a Lower East Side nightspot that specialized in sloppy, Tao Lin fever dreams of emaciated 20-somethings mugging for party flicks.”

The original Happy Ending closed in 2013, but the website lives on, with photos that give a pretty good idea of what was going on there. Before that, it was a massage parlor called Xie He Health Club, and perhaps you can guess what the “Happy Ending” referred to.

The space is under new ownership, and quite curiously, they’ve installed chef Francis Gabarrus, who had a Michelin star in France at La Ville Stings, and also spent time with Joël Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, and Thomas Keller.

What’s curious is that they didn’t change the name. There wasn’t much left in the Happy Ending franchise when it closed, and whatever brand equity it still had, was decidedly not invested in French comfort food. A fresh start might’ve been a better bet.

One could make a long list of New York bars and restaurants that are deliberately difficult to find. Sometimes, it’s part of the game. The original location of David Chang’s Momofuku Ko was unmarked, but Chang was already on the way to culinary sainthood: he wasn’t depending on walk-ins. It doesn’t work so well for a new French restaurant that cries out for validation.

The 61-seat dining room reminded Eater of a “1970s basement,” but the windowless space is nicer than any basement of my acquaintance, with its white tablecloths and artwork curated by gallerist Max Levai. (The basement where the “happy endings” formerly took place is apparently now a dance club; we didn’t check that out.)

The bar has its act together: they mad a terrific Gibson ($13). The wine list is not online, but it struck me as a shade over-priced. A bottle of the 2012 Domaine Faiveley was $65.

The food menu is French in style, but a number of these dishes could be served anywhere: mac and cheese; chicken soup; Tuscan chopped salad. It isn’t terribly expensive, with eight small plates ranging from $8 (mixed olives) to $25 (charcuterie), and seven entrees from $19 (mussels or a pork belly sandwich) to $36 (an 8 oz. filet). Sides are $7–9.

Click to read more ...

Birds & Bubbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to read more ...

Chez Jef

Note: Chez Jef closed in July 2014, as expected, for a re-vamp. It is expected to re-open in fall 2014.

*

Earlier this year, Mathieu Palombino (of the Motorino pizza chainlet) closed his indifferently-received Bowery Diner, replacing it with a French pop-up, Chez Jef.

The re-do was modest: the “Diner” sign remains, with most of its neon letters no longer functional. A few red-and-white checked curtains are basically all that stands between the former diner and a cute little French bistro, with the words “Chez Jef” stamped on the butcher paper that covers ever tabletop.

In February, Palombino told Eater.com that he intended to run the pop-up “for two to three months.” Four months later, it’s still there, although the customers are not: we practically had the place to ourselves on a Wednesday evening.

Click to read more ...

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: ★

Mission Cantina

What is it about tacos that attracts chefs not previously known for them?

Alex Stupak (a former pastry chef) opened Empellón Taqueria two years ago. Then, British chef April Bloomfield opened Salvation Taco, and French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened ABC Cocina.

Now Danny Bowien, a Korean-born chef raised in Oklahoma, best known for his Mission Chinese restaurants, has gotten into the act with Mission Cantina.

It’s a cantina in name only: a hip, divey-looking place on a busy street corner, where the Mexican tradition is very loosely re-interpreted for the Lower East Side. The “Mission” DNA is very much in evidence, from the minimalist décor to the tiny space where reservations aren’t taken.

The sizable kitchen on two levels is a formidable operation. Bowien, as he does at nearby Mission Chinese, sources his ingredients with some care. The quirky menu is uniquely his own, and will be found nowhere else. It’s fairly inexpensive, with appetizers $8.50–13, individual tacos $4–5, and side dishes $6–8. A whole chicken or a rack of lamb ribs is $35, but you need a posse to share them. The individual tacos are quite hearty: two of them plus an appetizer is ample, though you could order three if you’re really hungry.

Unfortunately, what could be a very good restaurant is scuppered by the service. The kitchen sends out a bowl of fried peanuts in chili sauce (above left), but then your entire order comes out practically at once: the appetizer and both tacos. Either it’s a cynical table-turning strategy, or the kitchen just can’t space out an order. (Mission Chinese is just as crowded, but didn’t seem as rushed when I tried it.)

Click to read more ...

Pig and Khao

Pig and Khao is the first solo venture for Top Chef alumna Leah Cohen, who is better known for shagging fellow cheftestant Hosea Rosenberg than for her performance on the show.

Cohen is actually a better chef than that. A CIA grad and former chef de partie at Eleven Madison Park, she opened Centro Vinoteca in the West Village with Anne Burrell, and was later promoted to executive chef. She left the restaurant in late 2009 and spent a year in Asia.

This new restaurant, in the old Falai space, is a partnership with Fatty Crew, the outfit behind the various “Fatty” restaurants (Crab, ’Cue). The food may be Cohen’s, but there’s Fatty DNA all over the place, from the casual no-reservations vibe, to the cocktail program and even the china.

The cuisine is nominally Filipino (as is Cohen on her mother’s side), though like most “Fatty” restaurants, it’s a mash-up of so many different Asian and American culininary styles that it really isn’t authentically anything.

The whole menu, including the cocktail and wine list, fits on a single sheet of paper. It’s dominated by small plates ($9–15), with just three proper entrées ($24–28), a few sides ($4–8), and a couple of desserts ($8). Cocktails are inexpensive ($10); along with beers, they vastly outnumber the wines (just five choices).

But none of this is necessarily a drawback. Especially at a new restaurant, I’d rather choose from a dozen items the chef thinks she can nail than from many dozens she can’t.

Sizzling Sisig ($12; above) is a legitimate Filipino dish, with chillies and pork face. The whole egg on top may be Cohen’s idea, as it’s not mentioned in any of the online recipies I checked. It’s served on a cast-iron skillet, still frying as you eat it. This is one of my favorite dishes of the year.

 

Curry Lamb Ribs ($24; above) are grilled at a low heat for many hours. They pull off the bone easily, then you wrap them in whole wheat pancakes with beets and yogurt. This is another terrific dish.

I visited quite early on a Friday evening—I was practically the first customer—so I was well taken care of. Cohen was in the house, but working mostly downstairs in the prep kitchen. She did make two brief appearances, wearing a thin red t-shirt with the words “Pleasure Dispenser” printed across her chest.

The space is attractively remodeled, and more casual than in the Falai days. It isn’t a large restaurant, especially with the backyard garden closed in colder weather. For a solo diner, a seat at the chef’s counter is the way to go.

The two dishes I ordered may be the best ones: I had the advantage of reading early reviews and heeding their recommendations. We’ll have to see if the chef has more arrows like that in her quiver.

Pig and Khao (68 Clinton St. between Rivington & Stanton Sts, Lower East Side)

Food: Flipino cuisine, liberally interpreted
Service: Casual, but just fine for what it is
Ambiance: Right out of the Fatty playbook

Rating: ★
Why? A couple of excellent dishes, but menu and beverage program need to grow 

Mission Chinese

 

Note: Mission Chinese closed in November 2013 after the Department of Health found a major rodent infestation from a nearby construction site. Chef/owner Danny Bowien had hoped initially to fix the problem and re-open, but eventually concluded that the space was un-fixable. In the interim, Bowien ran a much-admired Mission Chinese pop-up at Frankies 457 in Brooklyn, and later at Mile End in Manhattan. As of September 2014, Bowien planned to re-open in the Lower East Side space that was briefly Rosette.

*

You’ve got every right to be skeptical of hyped restaurants, including Mission Chinese Food, which opened recently on the Lower East Side in the old Rhong Tiam space.

Mission Chinese deserves that hype. The food is clever, well made, and inexpensive. The chef, Danny Bowien, is a Korean from Oklahoma. The food doesn’t replicate any of the well known Chinese cuisines. According to the Times, the chef calls it “Americanized Oriental food.”

Among recent openings, perhaps RedFarm is the closest precedent—not that Bowien’s cuisine resembles Joe Ng’s in any but the vaguest way, but they both take Chinese cuisine as a point of departure, cooking with local ingredients and adapting the tradition to their own style.

Reservations aren’t taken, except for twelve seats at and around the bar. At most reasonable meal times, expect to wait an hour or more. I was seated immediately at 5:45pm on a Tuesday evening. By 7:00pm, when I left, standees were already three-deep at the bar, and the line to get in snaked out the door.

(At least there are other useful places in the neighborhood to cool your heels while you wait—an option not available at the city’s other hot new no-reservations Asian joint, Pok Pok NY, on the Brooklyn waterfront, fifteen minutes’ walk from the nearest subway, and not near anything else of interest.)

The restaurant is similar to a sister establishment in San Francisco, making Mission Chinese one of the very rare examples of a restaurant that has succeeded here after first succeeding somewhere else (which is likewise true of Pok Pok NY). New York is not usually so kind to imports.

The place is a bit ramshackle. You go down a few steps, through a narrow corridor, past the kitchen, and into what looks like a back yard with a makeshift roof that they ran out of money to finish properly. What will that porch will be like when the weather turns cold?

But the price is right, with small plates $4–13 and large ones $6–15. The restaurant donates 75 cents from each entrée to the Food Bank of New York City, a remarkable gesture for such an inexpensive place. The same amount from every cocktail sold will go to a different charity each month.

Even the so-called “small plates” are ample. I ordered one of each, and didn’t finish them. I’d like to try more, though I’m not sure when I’ll be able to return at an hour when the wait would be acceptable to me.

The menu continues to evolve: just today, Bloomberg’s Ryan Sutton tweeted that there are two new dishes: $10 red braised pig tails & $9 “married couple’s” beef (tongue, heart, tripe, numbing chili).

 

Thrice-cooked bacon ($11.50; above left) is a devilish concotion, with Shanghainese rice cakes, tofu skin, bitter melon, and chili oil. It merits two “chili peppers” on the menu, and the chef ain’t kidding. It’s a hot dish.

Tea-smoked eel ($9; above right) has rotated off the menu as of today, and from the photos I’ve seen the chef makes it a number of different ways. It was served as an open-ended and over-stuffed dumpling filled with eel, and (I believe) pulled ham, celery, and soy. This was actually the smaller of the two plates, but it came out later and offered a welcome contrast to the blistering-hot bacon.

Cocktails, like the food, are clever, amply portioned, and inexpensive. The One-Eyed Jack ($9) is a characteristic example, with Soju (a Korean vodka), Umebashi (a Japanese plum), mint, and mirin (a Japanese condiment). Another, the Michelada, was made with smoked clam juice, chili, szechuan pepper, and beer.

No, these aren’t grandpa’s cocktails.

I arrived just after the health inspector and was warned the food would be delayed. (I didn’t hear what grade they got, but apparently the gentleman left without incident.) One of the cocktails was silently comped, probably for that reason. Aside from that, service at the bar was just fine. I can’t judge how long the food would take on a normal evening.

In New York, you could eat in another Chinese restaurant every day for years, and not run out of new places to try. There are specialist bloggers who have done practically that. For an assessment of exactly where Mission Chinese Food fits in this vibrant and widely varying community, I would refer you to them.

I can only say for myself, that Mission Chinese has some of the cleverest and most enjoyable inexpensive food I’ve had in quite a long time.

Mission Chinese Food (154 Orchard St. btwn Stanton & Rivington, Lower E. Side)

Food: Chinese-influenced, with pan-Asian and American ingredients
Service: Fine for such a casual establishment
Ambiance: A ramshackle back porch

Rating: ★★
Why? Some of the cleverest and most original food I’ve had in a while

Mary Queen of Scots

Note: Mary Queen of Scots closed in April 2012 after an 18-month run.

*

Mary Queen of Scots opened a year ago in the former Allen & Delancey space. It’s the second Scottish-themed restaurant from the Highlands team. Early reports weren’t encouraging, and most of the pro critics didn’t review it.

Lauren Shockey in the Village Voice gave it a “meh.” Sam Sifton filed a “brief,” as he much prefers reviewing club joints and restaurants that peaked in the 1980s.

The concept, I have to admit, was unwise: French cuisine through a Scottish lens, or something like that, inspired by the fact that the historic Mary was a queen of both France and Scotland.

The original idea has quietly been pushed to the side. Uninspired dishes like pasta carbonara, steak frites, moules frites, and beet salad, no longer appear on the menu. Prices are moderate, with most appetizers below $15 and most entrées below $25. (The most expensive item is a Venison Wellington, $27.)

The décor is East Village chic with a cold splash of Scotland in the form of tartan plaid banquettes. The bar, in the back of the restaurant, is worth exploring. Cocktails are $11–13 a pop, and they transfer the tab to the table. I can vouch for the Respect Your Elders ($12), with Plymouth Gin, Rosemary Syrup, Lemon Juice, Angostura and Lavender Bitters.

There is nothing complicated about Chilled Asparagus ($11; above left) with thyme-parmesan crumbs and hollandaise sauce, but it’s the ideal summer appetizer. Seared Tuna ($20; above right) with haricots verts, a quail egg, and worcestershire-red onion dressing, was quite good, and clearly a step above the less ambitious salads offered on earlier menus.

Roast Lamb Sirloin ($26; above left) with heirloom carrot salad, coconut yoghurt, and mint jelly, was less impressive. There wasn’t much of the lamb, and although tender, it was a shade over-cooked. We don’t usually order a side dish, but when we saw the Chips & Curry Sauce come out of the kitchen ($5; above right), we had to have some. Crisp and tangy, they’re a treat.

The wine list of about 30 bottles is a shade more expensive than it ought to be, in relation to the food. It could use a few more options under $50. The 2008 Francoise & Denis Clair Cote-de-Beaune, decent but not spectacular, was priced at $48, or about 228 percent of retail, which is a bit dear. There is, as you’d expect, an abundant selection of whiskies, though we didn’t have any.

Typical of many Lower East Side places, other than the most popular ones, the restaurant was nearly empty at 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening, although the front room had filled up by 9:00 p.m. (I didn’t check the back). Service was attentive and thorough. On this showing, Mary Queen of Scots is a more comfortable and polished restaurant than Highlands, though your mileage may vary.

Mary Queen of Scots (115 Allen Street near Delancey Street, Lower East Side)

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

The Fat Radish

Just when you thought that there were no dusty corners of Manhattan left to be colonized by destination dining, The Fat Radish arrived a month ago on a desolate Orchard Street block.

The area is technically the southwest corner of the Lower East Side, but functionally it’s Chinatown. At night there’s nothing else doing on this block, nor the next one, nor the one after that. Then you walk into the restaurant and it’s full—and clearly not with a neighborhood crowd.

This must’ve been what it was like when Keith McNally opened the Odeon in Tribeca, or Wylie Dufresne launched 71 Clinton Fresh Food on the Lower East Side several blocks north of here, when nobody thought of visiting these neighborhoods to dine out.

Much of the Fat Radish’s proffer will seem familiar: farm-to-table cuisine in a rustic, no-reservations setting. Owned by the catering and events firm Silkstone, the cuisine is loosely that of the British Isles, which is suddenly chic. The incongruous name recalls the random adjective–noun format of places like the Spotted Pig and the Rusty Knot.

The menu, which changes daily, is relatively inexpensive, with appetizers $9–15, entrées $16–24, side dishes $7, desserts $8. There are vegetables in every dish, appropriate to the season, e.g., kale, celery root, hazelnuts, winter squash, beets, and so forth. The amuse bouche (if it may be so termed) is a plate of pickled radishes (above left).

The Beet Crumble ($12; above) is typical, made with goat cheese, aged cheddar, hazelnuts, and oats. It’s sweet enough to be a dessert, and big enough to be a side dish for four people. It was double the amount that two could eat.

A richly flavored Heritage Pork & Stilton Pie ($7; below left) made more sense as an appetizer.

I didn’t detect much honey in slightly over-cooked Honey Glazed Duck ($24; above right), and the winter squash on the plate was too tough.

Monkfish Vindaloo ($21; below left) was more successful, although not as spicy as one might expect a vindaloo dish to be.

Caramelized Banana and Clotted Cream ($8; above right) was a winning dessert. One can hardly go wrong with that much sugar on the plate.

The décor is farmhouse-pretty, but there are no soft surfaces to absorb sound. Carrying on a conversation was a real chore, and a couple of particularly loud parties were nearly headache-inducing. Service was slow: our three-course meal took more than three hours. Even coffee took about twenty minutes to arrive. I began to wonder if they’d flown to Colombia to harvest the beans.

Although the food was mostly enjoyable, and I am willing to forgive the noise and the slow service, I am not sure the Fat Radish is distinctive enough to keep drawing crowds after the novelty has worn off. Other restaurants, more conveniently located, are serving similar food, and doing it as well or better.

The Fat Radish (17 Orchard Street between Canal & Hester Streets, Lower East Side)

Food: *
Service: slow
Ambiance: pretty but loud
Overall: *