Bar Primi

I’m still not sure if Andrew Carmellini truly wanted to be the king of middlebrow restaurants, or if he just stumbled on them by accident.

That’s not meant as an insult, though I’m sure it sounds like one. Carmellini’s restaurants are places where we could eat well every day, which is a good thing, because we have to eat every day. He has nailed the genre.

For now, he apparently has no appetite for destintion dining, and he used to be very good at that too. I wonder if he misses it?

Anyhow, welcome to Bar Primi, which isn’t a bar (though it’ll russle up a terrific cocktail if you ask for one). It’s named for the middle course of a traditional Italian meal, the primi. It’s as if a traditional Italian restaurant had lopped a page off the menu: it ends with the pastas.

Ryan Sutton, Eater’s restaurant critic, apparently had no sense of irony, when he wrote:

Leave it to Carmellini, Josh Pickard and Luke Ostrom, the team behind Locanda Verde, Lafayette and The Dutch, to give New York what it wants, which in this case is a late night pasta parlor where you and a buddy can eat and drink well for about $120. Bar Primi is essentially doing for Carmellini & Co. what Parm is doing for the Torrisi boys: it provides an entry-level Italian experience that can still excite fans of the group’s more expensive brands.

It’s not a crazy idea. Americans have an indistinct relationship with the pasta course: it can serve as an appetizer, or it can be a meal in itself. Very few, in my experience, actually order it as a middle course, between an appetizer and an entrée: it’s just too much food. Still, the menu at Bar Primi is a bit disorienting. It feels like two-thirds of a restaurant, and despite Sutton’s protestations, not exactly cheap.

For the sops who must have secondi, there’s a rotating line-up of them—one per day—and sometimes an extra announced special. Or you can have roast beef, Italian peppers, provalone and arugula on a hamburger bun, which is dubbed “the sandwich,” as the restaurant serves no other. We didn’t try it, but we saw a specimen at another table: it looked terrific.

The bulk of the menu consists of little snacks, or piccolini ($9–14), antipasti ($14–17), and two groups of pastas, traditional and seasonal ($14–22). That sandwich is $16, and the few secondi offered are $23–33.

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Gato

Gato, Bobby Flay’s latest restaurant, asks us to ponder whether a TV chef best known for throwdowns and gimmicks, for a line of spice rubs and a middle-brow empire of tourist traps, can still cook food that matters.

For now, the answer is emphatically yes. Gato is so good, in fact, that it invites you to forget his multiply cloned restaurants at various casinos, his half-dozen TV shows (that’s only the active ones—there have been many others), his cookbooks, and his burger palaces in eleven states.

Flay is omni-present on TV, but he was once a serious restaurant chef. With the critically admired Mesa Grill in 1991 and Bolo in 1993, he was on the way to the kind of restaurant empire that chefs like David Chang and the Torrisi gang have built in New York today.

He chose a different path, proliferating his brand outside New York, and augmenting it with a lineup of cookbooks, spice rubs, and especially TV shows, where his good looks and winning smile made him a natural. He never entirely took his eye off his kitchens: he was already a minor industry in 2003 when William Grimes upgraded Bolo to three stars.

But the New York restaurants gradually faded. Frank Bruni demoted Mesa Grill to one star in 2008. Bolo closed in 2008 to make way for condos, Mesa Grill in 2013 after losing its lease. His remaining New York City restaurant, Bar Americain, was well off the radar.

The loss of Bolo stuck in his craw, and there were persistent rumors he would re-open it. He was certainly patient: he told Eater.com that he looked at “hundreds and hundreds of spaces” over “five or six years.” After securing a liquor license under that name, Flay changed his mind and called it Gato, after a stray cat that walked by while he and his partners were scoping the storefront they eventually chose.

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Lafayette

Lafayette is the fourth restaurant in chef Andrew Carmellini’s growing empire, joining Locanda Verde, The Dutch, and The Library at the Public Theater.

The theme is the all-day French brasserie, in the style that Keith McNally nailed at Balthazar and a bunch of other places. If McNally has proven anything, it’s that this type of restaurant can print money, if it’s done right.

So far, printing money is Lafayette’s major accomplishment. It reproduces the genre faithfully, and reasonably well by New York standards. If it can remain this good, after the critics have finished with it, Lafayette could even be essential. Of course, it could also become a mediocre tourist spot, like McNally’s Pastis. All options are open.

It’s hard not to be wistful at the thought of talent squandered. Carmellini at Café Boulud was one of the best three-star chefs in town, and his success at A Voce showed that it was no fluke. When he opened Locanda Verde, you could at least understand why he aimed low: the city was still recovering from the financial crisis. Despite that, Locanda Verde turned into a terrific place—as it still is—despite its modest aims.

But the financial crisis is no more. Michelin-starred tasting menus are sprouting up all over town, like spring ramps. Not that that’s the only way to aim high; but it is one of the ways. Carmellini no longer has to aim low. Apparently, he wants to. Whether Lafayette turns into another mediocrity, like The Dutch, or becomes a solid (if uninspired) asset, like Locanda Verde, remains to be seen.

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Le Philosophe

Note: Le Philosophe closed in early 2016. “Too many French restaurants around,” the owner told The Times.

*

Welcome to Ground Zero of New York’s French revival: Le Philosophe, a mash-up of haute barnyard tropes (lists of purveyors scrawled on a blackboard) and a menu Escoffier might recognize.

So far the critics are loving it, which for a French restaurant is remarkable. Robert Sietsema of the Village Voice, Ligaya Mishan of The Times, and Adam Platt of New York are among those who’ve filed raves. (If Platt has ever liked a new French restaurant before, I cannot recall it.)

The space was recently the short-lived noodle shop Hung Ry. In a quick re-do, they left the bar and the open kitchen practically as-is, bringing in dark wood tables and decorating the walls with photos of famous French philosophers. Dinner is on the house if you can name them all.

The chef is Matthew Aita, who worked under Jean-Georges Vongrichten and Daniel Boulud. He serves dishes like Lobster Thermidor, Tournedos Rossini, and Duck à l’orange that probably haven’t been seen together on a restaurant menu since the Nixon Administration. It gives a whole new generation the chance to discover what they have been missing.

You wonder why no one has thought of this idea before: reviving the classics in a modern casual setting that could have been a Momofuku with tables, Perla, or Cookshop.

The ambiance is a hybrid too: reservations are taken and coats checked, but at the bare-bones bar, the metal stools are the kind that make your thighs go numb.

There are about nine appetizers ($6–18), a similar number of entrées ($18–36), and a few vegetable sides ($6). Most of the mains are $25 and under, except for the lobster, the tournedos, and the duck.

Thursdays to Saturdays,, there’s a more limited late-night menu served till 1 am.

The wine list may be the most inexpensive I’ve seen in years, with bottles as low as the teens (though you could spend much more) along with a couple of dozen beers by the bottle. Wines by the glass are also inexpensive (as low as $6.50) and pours are ample, but the selection is meager.

The meal begins with two kinds of bread and soft butter (above right) — not made in house, as far as I can tell, but just fine for this sort of place.

 

Roasted Bone Marrow ($12; above left) was the third rendition of this dish that I’ve had in the last month, and I can’t imagine it done any better. A long bone trench is roasted, sliced in thirds, and topped with a spicy relish of shallots, lemon, capers, and watercress, with toasted warm country bread on the side. There’s oodles of gelatinous marrow, so rich and hearty it could be a meal in itself. Just wow.

Unctuous duck à l’orange ($27; above right) is sliced into triangles resembling hamentashen over a silky potato purée. The duck was just about perfect, but the orange sauce was too meek: it hardly made an impression.

Service was a bit on the slow side, but not to the point it became annoying. The restaurant was mostly full at 6:00 pm on a Sunday evening, which bodes well for the longevity of this place. Le Philosophe is a hit, and deserves to be.

Le Philosophe (55 Bond Street between Lafayette Street & Bowery, NoHo)

Food: French classics, modern preparation
Service: Can be slow when busy, but good enough
Ambiance: Benoit meets Cookshop

Rating: ★★
Why? For skillfully reviving classics that almost no one in town serves any more

Bohemian

 

Any popular restaurant must decide how to ration access to its scarcest resource: seats. The two most common strategies are accepting reservations and taking walk-ins—first-come, first-served. Even those basic strategies have variations, from the funky online reservation system at Momofuku Ko, to the transferrable tickets sold at Grant Achatz’s Next.

Some restaurants that take reservations the old-fashioned way—by phone—are in such high demand that a prime-time table is practically inaccessible by normal means. Blue Hill Stone Barns takes reservations two months to the day in advance, and routinely fills up within minutes. You won’t find me anytime soon at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, the tasting menu at Roberta’s, or the three-day-a-week pop-up Frej, to name a few: there are too many hoops to jump.

Taking walk-ins is said to be more “democratic,” but the hassle we endured recently, just for the privilege of eating at Danji in Hell’s Kitchen, is a reminder that this often isn’t any fun at all.

At first blush, the door at the Japanese restaurant Bohemian seems more seems more impenetrable than all of these put together. There’s no listed telephone number, and it takes creative googling to find the website, the hopelessly unguessable playearth.jp, which it shares with sister restaurants in Nishiazabu, Japan, and Bali, Indonesia.

It doesn’t appear to be a restaurant website at all. After a few clicks, you find an explanation, and it’s not encouraging: “Please keep in mind that the location and contact info is not open to the public, so please be referred by somone who has already visited us.

“If there are people feeling, ‘I haven’t been there, but I really want to visit!’ please send us a brief introduction of yourself to the email address below. We may contact you to come over!”

I tried the latter, and within an hour had a favorable response by email, which included the “secret” telephone number. A day or so later, I called and secured a Sunday evening reservation, and that was that.

The system is strange, but try getting someone on the phone at Mario Batali’s Babbo: I remember getting busy signals for weeks, before I finally spoke to a human being. The first time I booked at Per Se, it took 45 minutes to get through—and I had to call exactly at 10:00 a.m. the day that bookings opened for the date I wanted.

I’m not here to defend Bohemian’s Byzantine ways, only to point out that it’s a lot more accessible than many restaurants that ration access using far more traditional methods. Plenty of folks have cracked the code: Bohemian has a 27/25/28 rating on Zagat.

Like everything else about Bohemian, the location is not at all obvious: at the back of a long, mysterious corridor fronted by a NoHo butcher shop on Great Jones Street. You ring a doorbell, and if you’re on the list (walk-ins aren’t accepted), the server admits you.

There are twenty-five seats, most at low-slung tables and sofas, as if you’re the guest in someone’s rec room. We were offered seats at the bar, which might be preferable. It’s a very deep bar, with ample room for placemats and drinks; seating is comfortable.

Despite various news stories and blog posts describing Bohemian as “private” or “mysterious,” they do not discourage publicity, once you finally get in. Illustrated blog posts, like this one, aren’t hard to find. But most reviewers honor the restaurant’s request not to disclose the address or phone number, as will I, even though neither is all that hard to find.

An evening here progresses, more or less, as it would at any restaurant. The izakaya style menu offers various small and medium-size plates, in a wide price range, but not expensive for what you get. (Click on the miniature image above to see more.)

The style of the cuisine might be called fusion, with traditional sushi and sashimi and the ever-present miso black cod, standing alongside “Mac & Cheese,” fresh oysters, and mini-burgers.

We had the six-course tasting menu, which at $55 might be one of the best bargains in town. However, I get the impression it seldom changes, as most of the other reviews I’ve read, featured mostly the same dishes.

  

The three starters were just fine, though not really memorable on their own: a fresh vegetable fondue (above left), an uni croquette (above center), and assorted cold cuts (above right).

But the entrée was one of the best dishes I’ve had all year, a pan roasted branzini with a bounty of seasonal vegetables, including potatoes, asparagus, olives, onions, garlic, Brussels sprouts, and several others I’ve forgotten. The skin of the fish was nicely crisped, and succulent inside.

We were served the whole fish, which (with the vegetables) was more than we could finish. It shows on the à la carte menu at just $28, which I assume is a half portion.

  

The fourth course is the only one for which a choice is offered. I had the mini-burger (above left), described as “Washu,” one of the breeds that appears on most menus as “Wagyu.” Served medium rare, it had a rich, fatty taste, served with two fried potato slivers. The other option was the Ikura Caviar Rice Bowl (above center), a dish so luscious it could almost be dessert.

A simple but effective Almond Pannacotta (above right) with black tapioca concluded the evening.

The restaurant was fully booked on a Sunday evening. Our tasting menu progressed at a comfortable pace. With its relatively small dining room, a couple of servers seemed to have no trouble keeping diners fed and lubricated.

The quality of the food took a notable step up mid-way through, with the arrival of the branzino, which was so good that it might almost have been worth $55 all by itself. To pay that for five courses was remarkable.

Bohemian

Food: Traditional Japanese and fusion cuisine
Service: Attentive and personal
Ambiance: The feel of a private club in someone’s home

Rating: ★★
Why? Relaxing and enjoyable. “Secrecy” works to its advantage.

The Bread Man at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria

In Pete Wells’s ecstatic three-star review of Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, he was rapturous about the bread:

Is it … logical to fall for a restaurant because of sliced bread in a basket? It was remarkable stuff, with the gradually unfolding nuances of taste that are achieved only through a slow and patient fermentation of dough with wild yeast.

In my own review, I was respectful but far less excited:

The bread service is pretty good, but not quite deserving of critic Wells’s near-orgasmic description. It’s made in in-house and a tad fresher than you’ll get most places, but hardly anything to change your life.

This led to an email from Kamel Saci, the head bread baker at Il Buco A&V. From the photo in my review, he inferred I’d been served the ciabatta, a “very good” but “simple” example of his work, and asked if I’d revisit the restaurant for a “bread tasting.”

Mr. Saci works from 3:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., so we agreed I would drop in on a Saturday at about noon, near the end of his shift.

I little reckoned what I was in for. After I arrived, Mr. Saci emerged from the restaurant’s basement with a huge box, about twenty inches square, and led me to the second-floor dining room (which is unused during the day). The box contained about a dozen loaves of bread, all in different flavors and styles.

 

Over the next half-hour or so, Mr. Saci patiently cut a half-slice of bread from each loaf, delivering a mini-lecture on how it is made. My favorites were the parmigiana reggiano, black & green olive, and walnut & raisin breads, but this is without disparagement to the others, nearly all of which were very good. (There were one or two not to my liking, but it would be silly to complain when there are a dozen to choose from.)

Mr. Saci says that nowhere in town, outside of wholesale bakeries, makes so many different kinds of bread in house. I have no reason to doubt this. Even at restaurants reknowned for their bread service (Bouley, for example), I’ve never seen more than five or six choices at any given time.

But most of the breads I tried are not offered to the dinner guest. This is the drawback of a restaurant that doubles as a grocery, and wasn’t prepared to be quite as popular as it has become. By dinner time, the more interesting breads are gone. I had a fascinating lesson in the science of bread-baking, but most people couldn’t duplicate my experience.

 

After our tasting was over, Mr. Saci took me down two flights of stairs into the sub-basement, where there is a prep kitchen (above left) and the bread ovens (above right). The dough at Il Buco A&V is house-made and fermented with a natural leaven (not yeast), a process that takes 24 to 36 hours. He would prefer 48 hours, but I gather the cooler where the bread cures overnight (below left) doesn’t have enough space for that.

A circuitous route brought Mr. Saci, a French native, to Il Buco A&V. After several years on the ultimate fighting circuit, he took up baking in 1999. After training in Bordeaux, he eventually moved to London, where he supplied the breads for Pierre Gagnaire and Joël Robuchon. He then moved to Barcelona to open “the best bakery in Spain,” and in 2009 to a wholesale bakery in Miami, before coming to New York in 2011 to open Il Buco A&V.

  

After our tasting was over, Mr. Saci sent me home with about 10 pounds of bread, which we enjoyed over the next several days. Needless to say, we could not finish all of it. Several loaves are now in the freezer, which would probably make Mr. Saci cringe.

So, there are very good things, great things, going on in Il Buco A&V’s subterranean bakery. But it’s a pity that so little is left by dinner time.

Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria (53 Great Jones Street west of Bowery, NoHo)

Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria

 

Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria (“IBA”) doesn’t deserve the three stars Pete Wells of The New York Times gave it a fortnight ago, but you already knew that. It just might be the single craziest Times review of the last decade—and there have been some howlers, believe me.

What’s sad is not that IBA is overrated. What’s sad is that a good, earnest “neighborhood-plus” restaurant is now getting hammered with crowds it cannot handle, who arrive with expectations it cannot possibly meet.

Of course, it is also sad that the Paper of Record thinks believes IBA is in any respect comparable to Babbo or Marea, Italian restaurants with three deserved stars; or that it is in any respect superior to Lincoln, which has just two; or Osteria Morini, which has one.

This is not to take anything away from what owner Donna Lennard has done, which is to create a cute Italian market (an alimentari) with a pretty good sandwich shop by day (when they don’t run out of stuff—which seems to happen a lot), and an endearing (if crazily crowded) Trattoria by night.

The market came first: they sell cheeses, salumi, olive oil, chocolates, and the like. Then came the restaurant. It was clearly part of the plan all along: there is a bright, open kitchen in the back, and there are two bars. But stools and tables (several of them communal), surely as many as the law allows, have now been crammed into almost every nook and cranny. Plan on getting to know your neighbor really, really well.

It’s a three-meal-a-day operation, and the market remains open all the while. Kim Davis of The Times says serve the best porchetta sandwich in town. But presumably it’s mainly the dinner menu that got them three stars. (Click on the photo, above left, for a larger image.)

It’s heavy on appetizers (an even dozen of them, $12–18), pastas (a half-dozen, $17–21) and salumi (various prices; assortment for $32). There are just four secondi ($29–38)—and one of those, the spit-roasted short ribs ($38), is actually an order for two, though the menu fails to so state.

The bread service (above right) is pretty good, but not quite deserving of critic Wells’s near-orgasmic description. It’s made in in-house and a tad fresher than you’ll get most places, but hardly anything to change your life. I was actually a bit more addicted to the bread sticks. [Addendum: After I wrote this, the head baker asked me to come in for a bread tasting, where I had quite a bit more than the simple ciabatta shown here.]

 

House-cured salt cod fritters ($12; above left) are a decent snack; certainly a few steps better than Mrs. Paul’s.

I had set my hopes on the aforementioned short ribs (above right), not realizing that it was a dish for two. Plenty of restaurants would charge the same ($38) for a solo portion, so after being properly warned by the server, I went ahead and ordered it anyway. It’s the whole short rib, tender and luscious, with a garnish of olives, celery, walnuts, and horseradish, and—so says The Times—peppercorns and coriander seeds. It is awfully salty. That, more than the size of the portion, is why I stopped eating it halfway through.

 

On a second visit, I tried the Fried Rabbit ($15; above left). A leg, thigh, and “wing” are coated in an appealing bread crust with black pepper, honey, and lemon. Paccheri ($21; above right), with braised oxtail, greens, and parmigiano, was far less impressive. The pasta was too chewy and not warm enough.

IBA’s sister restaurant, just-plain Il Buco, to which I haven’t been, opened nearby in 1994. It received one star from Ruth Reichl—which in those days was a compliment. The food boards say that the dishes in common are a bit better at IBA, but the original looks like a more charming space: it doesn’t double as a grocery, and they haven’t shoehorned in quite so many tables per square foot.

The service is better than you’d expect: they take reservations (good luck getting one right now), check coats, and seat incomplete parties. I walked in on a Wednesday evening at around 5:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before dinner service, and was seated at the bar as soon as the dining room opened. The following Monday at 6:00 on the dot was also just fine. Both times, less than an hour later, it was packed. It is all they can do to keep up, but I hesitate to blame them: I doubt even they thought they were building a three-star restaurant.

Pete Wells said that IBA reminded him of a mythical Italian village. To me, it felt like an obvious product of Manhattan, not that that’s surprising: most Manhattan restaurants do; funny how that works. A diner asked to order appetizers, and he’d see about primi or secondi later on. “I’m sorry,” the server replied, “but Chef prefers to receive your entire order at once.” Try and find an Italian restaurant in Umbria where they’d say that.

The wine list, which fits on one sheet of paper, is limited to about eight producers (not all of them Italian), with half-a-dozen wines from each of them. Prices by the glass are reasonable (disclosure: one was comped), but the bartenders don’t offer you a taste before pouring.

With its extensive in-house baking and curing program, IBA clearly has more going for it than your average neighborhood Italian place. For now, it is a destination restaurant, and as the owners have been around for nearly two decades, you can figure they’re here to stay. But just like Eataly, a space that is trying to be both a grocery and a restaurant is not ideal at either one.

Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria (53 Great Jones Street west of Bowery, NoHo)

Food: Enjoyable but uneven and over-priced modern Italian cuisine
Service: Hectic
Ambiance: A market and a restaurant combined, to the detriment of both

Rating: ★
Why? Compelling at times, but too flawed and uneven to be a critic’s pick

Acme

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mercat

Note: Mercat closed as of August 2012.

*

Mercat is one of those intriguing—but not quite compelling—restaurants that I missed the first time around. Frank Bruni gave it a star three years ago, finding the “wonderful … but uneven” food somewhat undercut by the oppressively loud surroundings.

Fast forward to 2010. Mercat is still busy, but it’s no longer packed—at least not at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday. At that early hour, at least we could leave the earplugs and migraine medicine at home. I realize that, by downtown standards, the evening had not yet begun.

The menu offers Barcelona-style tapas: “Mercat” means “market” in Catalan. The concise bi-fold menu offers shareable plates ranging from $7 to $18. Five of these set us back $59—a very good deal given the quality, and that the portions were ample.

Bombes ($9; above left) are meatballs with chicken, pork, and beaf, with rice and a potato crust used as binders, and an aioli sauce. It’s remarkable how often these plate-sharing places serve three meatballs to a portion. Mercat solves this by serving two very large ones.

Espinacs ($7; above center), or spinach with golden raisins and toasted pine nuts, is less memorable. Botifara ($9; above right), or house-made sausage, was the only real dud: the meat was dry, and the casing was a bit tough.

Chickpea stew ($12; above left) was remarkably good. Who’d have thought so much could be done with chickpeas? Arros Amb Anec ($15; above right), or bomba rice with duck and orange zest, is a terrific and amply portioned paella-like dish, but with the rice more moist, and less crusty.

Plates came out at a decent pace, neither too fast nor too slow. However, we made the mistake of ordering wine at the same time as the food, and the bottle didn’t come out quite quickly enough. Plates weren’t replaced as often as they should be.

Minor complaints aside, Mercat is a terrific tapas restaurant, especially given the prices and the portions. I wouldn’t want to be there when it’s crowded, though.

Mercat (45 Bond Street between Lafayette Street and Bowery, NoHo)

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

Chinatown Brasserie

Note: Chinatown Brasserie closed in June 2012. The owners say it will relocated to an as-yet unidentified smaller space. The current space will re-open as a French restaurant helmed by Andrew Carmellini, with whom the same owners are in partnership at Locanda Verde and The Dutch.

*

Chinatown Brasserie is another of the high-concept big-box Asian palaces that have opened in recent years. But my girlfriend and I found it more pleasant and less cynical than many of its brethren. It’s owned by the same team as Lever House and Lure Fishbar, and once again they seem to have hit the mark.

The restaurant’s specialty is Dim Sum (various items, $8–22). We ordered a selection, of which I’m afraid I don’t have a specific recollection. The pièce de résistance was the traditional Peking Duck for Two ($48), which fully lived up to the better preparations of it that I’ve enjoyed elsewhere. (Other entrées were priced $17–28.)

Dim Sum

Peking Duck

Chinatown Brasserie (380 Lafayette St. between Great Jones St. and E. 4th St., NoHo)

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