McNally has only occasionally departed from his signature motif, the all-day French brasserie. But even these other places, such as Schiller’s Liquor Bar and Morandi, bear his unmistakable stamp, long since copied by many others, though seldom as well.
With Cherche Midi, McNally has returned to the French brasserie template that has worked so well at Balthazar, Minetta Tavern, and so many others. It is, of course, reliably full with beautiful guests who know and love the formula, and the rest of us when we can get in. Whether it will fill a distinct niche, as his more successful establishments have done, will take time to sort out. For now, it is very good, and that’s enough.
McNally’s establishments are less chef-driven than most restaurants. You go to Balthazar for what McNally has created, not for who’s in the kitchen. Still, good food doesn’t happen by accident. There are co-executive chefs at Cherche Midi, Daniel Parilla (a former sous chef at Minetta) and Shane McBride (who still oversees the kitchens at Balthazar and Schiller’s). Should either man leave, McNally would replenish from his deep bench, and I doubt Cherche Midi would miss a beat.
The food is prepared with French technique, although the menu is mostly in English. Appetizers are $14–27 (all but one under $20), entrées $23–49, side dishes $9, desserts $10–11.
Successful second acts are rare in the restaurant business, but there are solid names behind the revamp, which opened in May under new management. Wolfgang Ban (of Seäsonal, Edi & the Wolf, and The Third Man) and Stephen Starr vet Markus Tschuschnig are co-owners. The executive chef is Bavarian Daniel Kill, from Kurt Gutenbruner’s chain of Austrian restaurants (Wallsé, Blaue Gans, Café Sabarsky, The Upholstery Store).
I never visited Paulaner v1.0, but the redesign doesn’t seem that dramatic (see the before and after photos on Eater). Still, it is a clear improvement. Photos on the walls have been ditched, leaving bare brick. Tables are now a darker wood. The long center aisle of the dining room is now taken up with communal tables and wooden benches. At the edge of the room, a row of rectangular tables is replaced with half-moon shaped booths.
The restaurant remains affiliated with the German beer of the same name. At the back of the restaurant, there are two huge copper and stainless steel fermenting vats imported from Germany. Beers brewed on-site are served unfiltered and unpasteurized.
The menu is inexpensive, with starters (appetizers, cheeses and sausages) $9–14, entrées $14–23, and side dishes $5–7. Portion sizes are ample, as you’d expect in a German restaurant. There’s a modest wine list (all $10 a glass). Cocktails are $11; beers $5, $7, or $13, depending on the size. When was the last time you saw food and alcohol this cheap, at a place run by a Michelin-starred chef?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the “restaurant story of the year . . . the explosion of casual restaurants with good—I mean, really good—wine lists right out of the gate.” Our visit to Racines NY prompted that comment, but I also had another spot on my mind: La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels, which opened at around the same time, not very far away.
Both take advantage of NYC’s sudden love affair with French cuisine, which seemed so terribly out of fashion just a decade ago, as Frank Bruni came off the plane from Italy and administered the last rites. Six months ago, when the Torrisi boys (both of Italian descent) announced they were opening Dirty French, it was like Nixon going to China. France had permission to be cool again.
But I digress. La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels is a mini-chain of three wine bars—Paris and Seven Dials in London have the other two. Just like Racines, there’s a Michelin star chef in charge of the food: La Chassagnette’s Armand Arnal. You’ll note I didn’t say, “in the kitchen.” This feels like a consulting job. The menu is timid, and has barely changed in four months.
What are a couple of Per Se vets doing in a Thai restaurant off the Bowery? I dunno, but they ought to keep doing it.
Like a lot of chefs trained in fine dining, Matt Danzig and Ann Redding (husband & wife) didn’t try to replicate that model when they struck out on their own. Redding’s from Thailand, Danzig had visited a lot and fell in love with the cuisine.
The early reviews have been mostly rapturous (two stars from Pete Wells), and they’re deserved. Danzig and Redding’s version of Thai cuisine is terrific, and well worth seeking out.
The space is decked out like a Thai tavern (a poor man’s Spice Market), and in a clever nod to the nearby Lighting District, no two light fixtures are the same. The rest of the décor is in dark wood and brick, with leafy plants in the window and an oldie sound track that doesn’t blast. Eater measured the sound level at almost 80db (comparable to a vacuum cleaner or an alarm clock), but we must have lucked out with our corner table: mercifully, we could hear ourselves talk.
The restaurant accepts limited reservations on its website, but many of the seats are reserved for walk-ins. There was nothing available online, but we took a chance at 7pm on a Saturday evening and were seated immediately. An hour or two later that probably wouldn’t have worked.
The Western influence is evident, in a focused menu that is practically old-school, with its recognizable appetizers ($8–15), entrées ($20–28), and side dishes ($3–8). Didn’t anyone tell them you’re not supposed to do that any more?
I’ve got mixed feelings about Estela, the new tapas-style restaurant from chef Ignacio Matos and beverage director Thomas Carter.
We last saw Matos at Isa, where he wowed audiences and critics (or most of them), but didn’t wow the owner, the world’s greatest poseur, Taavo Somer. Apparently unwilling to operate even one good restaurant, Somer fired Matos abruptly in the summer of 2012. Isa still exists, but is culinarily irrelevant, like all of Somer’s other places.
So it’s an understatement to say I was rooting for Estela to succeed. I didn’t love everything I tasted at Isa, but I loved a lot of it, and it mattered.
Alas, Estela is a let-down. The food is all pleasant enough and mostly pretty good. You won’t eat badly here. But most of it is beneath what Matos was trying to do at Isa. It was worth going out of your way to visit Isa. It’s worth dropping in at Estela if you’re in a few blocks’ radius.
It’s an even bigger come-down for Carter, who was beverage director at Blue Hill Stone Barns, and now serves a wine list that fits on a single page. (That is, unless there’s a larger list that the server neglected to show us.)
None of this is accidental. In a joint interview with Eater, Matos and Carter made their lower ambitions abundantly clear: “I don’t want us to think in terms of ‘developing dishes’ or anything like that,” says Mattos of the way he’s training his young and small kitchen to work. “These should just be plates of food, nurturing and relatively cheap, that remind you of the home-cooked meals you never experience anymore.”
The Musket Room opened in NoLIta in June 2013, after a build-out that took a year, and required an infusion of Kickstarter funding to pull over the finish line. I’d say the wait was worth it.
When we last saw this space, it was Elizabeth, a train wreck of a restaurant that endured a series of chef shuffles, and finally closed in early 2011. Its one redeeming feature was a lovely back garden with a retractable roof that annoyed the neighbors. To get community board approval, the chef had to agree not to use it. Musket Room has turned out so beautifully that it hardly matters.
Chef–Owner Matt Lambert came out of the stable of restaurants owned by the design firm AvroKO (Public, Saxon + Parole, and the now-closed Double Crown). He learned his lessons well. Musket Room feels justlike an AvroKO spot, with its exposed bulbs, low lighting, reclaimed wood, and whitewashed brick/plaster walls. Seating is stylish and comfortable. A stately indoor cherry tree (or what looks like one) anchors the bar, which has cute little study lights plugged in every few feet.
Those design elements have been repeated in an endless number of restaurants, but I don’t remember very many that got them so right. The space strikes the right balance between casual and upscale. The sound track is soft rock, played at an unobtrusive volume. The space feels immediately comfortable.
The restaurant is named for the Musket Wars, a 35-year conflict fought 200 years ago between the Māori tribes of New Zealand, the chef’s homeland. A big musket hangs over the bar, and there are little bits of musket imagery throughout the restaurant.
Last year, the brilliant chefs Fredrik Bersilius and Richard Kuo set the fooderati atwitter with their Scandanavian pop-up, Frej.
After it closed suddenly, the chefs went their separate ways. Bersilius re-opened in the same Williamsburg space, this time with a serious full-time restaurant called Aska. It’s quiet, austere, verging on formal, and still Scandanavian. It could get a Micheln star.
Kuo went rock ’n’ roll, with Pearl & Ash on the suddenly-hip Bowery. It’s loud, brash, casual, mostly walk-ins, pan-Asian-themed small plates. Criticsloveit. Well, almost all.
They’re on OpenTable, but the bulk of the seats are first-come, first-served. The dining room is beyond 100 percent occupancy. They’re squeezing folks into every square inch that the law allows.
On a Wednesday evening, we arrived early for our reservation, with no tables vacant and two-deep at the bar. The host sent us next door to cool our heels, a dive where cocktails are something like $8 each. When our party of four was finally seated, it was at a half-communal table with about as much legroom as the coach cabin on a budget airline.
Sommelier Patrick Capiello landed here as wine director and partner, after Gilt closed late last year. A greater contrast between the two restaurants couldn’t be imagined. Nevertheless, he’s built a list that his former uptown customers would recognize, even if they’re unlikely to visit. It’s studded with trophy Burgundies and Bordeaux that most three-star restaurants would drool over.
The risky gambit worked. The economy has improved, and if you’re looking for proof, you might as well start here. I don’t know who would order 1955 Château Palmer Margaux 3ème cru with this food, but apparently someone does. That’ll set you back a cool $1,000, and it’s not even the most expensive bottle.
I’m not in that league, and if I were I’d choose to drink it elsewhere.
But you can easily do business for under $60 a bottle, and even as low as the mid $30s. I always smile when I see wines from the Jura, and under-appreciated region many restaurants don’t stock. At Pearl & Ash, there are 19 whites and a dozen reds from there. The 2008 Philippe Bornard “Ploussard” (above right) from Arbois Pupillin, the Jura’s winemaking capital, was just $52. Served chilled, it tasted like a cross between red and rosé, well suited to the eclectic menu here.
The menu offers twenty items ($3–16) in six categories: raw, small, fish, meat, vegetables, sweet. If you want bread, it’s extra: $3. The seven meat and fish items can be super-sized and ordered as entrées ($24–28), in which case Pearl & Ash becomes a traditional three-course restaurant.
We went all-in for sharing. Typical of such places, it was tough to guess exactly how much food we needed, or which plates would be readily divisible, but we got it about right. The kitchen did a reasonably good job of timing and sequencing (good!) but plates and silverware weren’t replaced between courses (not so much).
Each item on the menu is a short list of three or four ingredients in lower case, without adjectives or verbs. I’ve quoted these descriptions below, to give a better idea of what’s confronting you when you order. (The party next to us offered several suggestions, which turned out to be excellent.)
We loved the hot, musky smoke of “octopus, sunflower seed, shiso” ($13; above left). But it also meant that bland “tea cured salmon, goat cheese, tamarind, seaweed” ($10; above right) barely registered.
We placed a double order of “pork meatballs, shiitake, bonito” ($11 a pair; above left). The dish seemed under-sauced: the rich flavor of the meatballs needed some extra kick. The “lamb belly & heart, kohlrabi, hazelnut” ($26; above right) tasted mostly of fat.
The hit of the evening was “quail, almond, pomegranate, chicken skin” ($28; above left), a technically impressive preparation of deboned quail wrapped and deep-fried chicken skin. I also loved the flavor of smoke (much like the octopus) in “skate, chermoula, cauliflower, leek” ($14; above right).
If you’re up for a side dish, you won’t go wrong with “potatoes, porcini mayo, chorizo” ($8; below left), served crisp with just the right amount of salt.
There are just two desserts, and both are a bit odd. The “coffee parfait & cake” ($7; above right) is better than it sounds, with only the slightest hint of coffee.
But the “fernet-branca ice cream sandwich” ($6; above) is more interesting than good. Fernet-branca is a digestivo invented in the 1800s as a stomach medicine: pepto bismol with alcohol. A member of our party who’d tried it straight, said that it’s barely tolerable to drink. In ice cream it’s acceptable, but nothing I’d rush back for.
The dining room is a long, narrow room with an open kitchen at the back. The walls seem to amplify sound, as the speakers go thump, thump, thump. The wall opposite the bar is an attention-stealer, a lattice of differently-sized blonde-wood cubby holes filled with candles and nick-nacks.
The friendly, eager staff do their best to keep up, but there are too many of us, not enough of them, and too little space for everyone. The food (at its best) is good, and the wine list is great. As long as they’re served in this room, I won’t be rushing back to try either one.
Pearl & Ash (220 Bowery between Prince & Spring Streets, NoLIta)
Food: An eclectic selection of vaguely pan-Asian small plates Service: Friendly and eager, but struggling to keep up Ambiance: A loud, narrow room, with an attractive modern design
I never thought I’d see the day, when French restaurants were opening in New York at such a pace that I cannot visit them all. But that’s the moment we’re in, and I am a happy camper.
The menu is overtly French, but the décor is all downtown New York. Picture windows on two sides look out on Kenmare Street, where shops, bars, and clubs are sprouting up like spring flowers. Unlike the last time I was here, the view is actually worth looking at.
The entrance is down a few steps. There’s a small lounge area, with bench seating and low stools. In the dining area, the tables and chairs are bare-bones. Around the room, there’s a few votive candles and a few bouquets, offsetting an austere slate grey ceiling and cement columns.
Parm, from the Torrisi/Carbone team, has an odd distinction: it’s a good restaurant and an over-rated restaurant.
It’s over-rated, mainly because of two very insane stars that Pete Wells awarded last year, thereby instantly insulting every real one- or two-star restaurant in town. Parm is a two-star restaurant like I’m the Queen of England.
But if we step back from the ledge beyond which madness lies, Parm is good for what it is, a slightly over-achieving neighborhood sandwich shop.
The one-page menu doesn’t change much: it’s kept inside of a plastic sleeve, to keep it presentable and avoid re-printing costs. There are a bunch of veggies, pastas and fried foods for sharing (various items, $6–14), sandwiches and platters ($9–17), and then just one entrée served every day, a Veal Parm that comes in three sizes ($16, $22, $25). Nightly dinner specials (keyed to the day of the week, and apparently unchanging) are $25.
All of this happens in a tiny space next to the chefs’ first hit restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties. We dropped in at around 6:00pm on a Saturday evening, with the tables full, but ample space available at the bar. The tables looked awfully cramped and dark: even if there’d been one vacant, I think the bar was the better bet.
If it were in any other U.S. city, Oficina Latina (opened 2½ years ago) would be one of the funkiest, hippest places in town. In New York, you might imagine that it’s just another Pan-Latin spot that you never heard of, though you would be overlooking its many charms.
The décor—really indescribable—is inspired by the Pan-American Highwaycirca the 1950s. The connection isn’t entirely clear: there’s a pressed tin ceiling recovered from a 1920s bank, various species of mismatched vintage furniture and light fixtures, a barber’s chair at the bar, marble and wrought iron tables, and distressed painted brick walls.
It’s not fancy or expensive: you can have brunch every day for just $12; add a Margarita or Bloody Mary, and it’s all of $15. Dinner will run you a bit more, but not a lot, with tapas $8–15, soups and salads $8–12, tortas $12–22 (but most under $15), mains $20–23.
The cuisine is not aligned to any particular Latin-American country: the chef is Mexican, the owners Italian. The publicist (at whose invitation I visited), says the menu is expected to be rewritten shortly: they’re going to shorten it a bit, and make room for rotating specials.
The bar and cocktail program deserve more exposure. There’s a selection of 100+ tequilas and mezcals, and another 100+ rums and piscos, many offered with custom infusions. A pepper-infused mezcal (right) garnished with a chili pepper was terrific. So was another, made with ancho and lychee.
But the printed menu offers just clichés like mojoitos, piña coladas, and margaritas. The printed specialty cocktails are flavored versions of these (e.g., a blackberry caipirinhas) that sound truly depressing. The beverage director (and co-owner), Paolo Votano, ought to flaunt his better stuff.
While the menu is being re-done, perhaps they’ll improve the plantain chips (above left) that begin the meal: they don’t have enough heft to stand up to the spicy dipping sauce they come with.
But there weren’t many other off-notes to the meal, which showed a kitchen of some accomplishment, especially when it can put the charcoal grill to good use.
Grilled octopus (Pulpo a la Parrilla, above left), served with a cilantro dressing, with a potato and celery salad, had a luscious smoky flavor. There was plenty of warm smoke, too, in tacos with roasted suckling pig (Tacos de Puerco, above right), crackling skin, grilled lime and sliced avocado.
I love blood sausage when it’s done right (Abrebocas, above left), but this preparation was too loose: it oozed out of the casing, like toothpaste, when you tried to cut into it. Chorizo was fine, but unremarkable.
A roasted deboned half-chicken in a garlic sauce (Pollo a la plancha, above right) was tender and full of flavor, probably from that same charcoal oven.
Chili caramelized pineapple (Pina Picante Caramelizada en Agave, above left) was a first-rate dessert, paired with the oddest after-dinner drink I’ve seen: “Passionate Love” (above right), consisting of rum straight-up with lemon wedges that you dip in strips of powdered sugar, cinnamon and coffee, laid out to resemble lines of cocaine.
I can’t comment on the service, since the meal was comped, but the 62-seat dining room was about two-thirds full by 9:00 pm on a Monday evening, so the restaurant apparently has a local following.
I’ve no way of knowing whether the rest of the over-long (and soon-to-change) menu is as interesting as the small sample that we tried. If you order the octopus, the suckling pig tacos, and the chicken, you’ll go home happy.
Oficina Latina (24 Prince Street between Mott & Elizabeth Streets, NoLIta)
Monday, November 24, 2014 at 08:55PM 
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
McNally has only occasionally departed from his signature motif, the all-day French brasserie. But even these other places, such as Schiller’s Liquor Bar and Morandi, bear his unmistakable stamp, long since copied by many others, though seldom as well.
With Cherche Midi, McNally has returned to the French brasserie template that has worked so well at Balthazar, Minetta Tavern, and so many others. It is, of course, reliably full with beautiful guests who know and love the formula, and the rest of us when we can get in. Whether it will fill a distinct niche, as his more successful establishments have done, will take time to sort out. For now, it is very good, and that’s enough.
