Breakfast at the Lambs Club

 

Geoffrey Zakarian has been quiet for the past year or two, ever since his three-star restaurants, Town and Country, imploded under the weight of mismanagement and a poor economy. Now he’s back at The Lambs Club, a fine-dining restaurant in the new Chatwal Hotel on 44th Street.

A chef with Zakarian’s resume shouldn’t have to prove himself. He rose through a long line of serious restaurants where excellence couldn’t be hedged or faked. But the rapidity of his demise at Town and Country, and the decline of those places long before that, raises difficult questions. Does he still have fire in the belly, or is this just another consulting contract? Opening in a hotel is usually good insurance against failure, but the last two places were in hotels too.

The Lambs Club—named for a famous theatrical club that formerly occupied the space—is not yet open for dinner. As I happened to have business in the area, I dropped in for breakfast. The dining room is comfortable, decked out in lipstick red furniture and dark wood paneling. There is an 18th-century fireplace, though it appears to be re-configured with a gas burner.

 

Breakfast has nothing to do with dinner, but this was a very good meal, and not as ridiculously over-priced as hotel food sometimes can be. That said, it wasn’t cheap either. I loved a nectarine smoothie ($9) and an egg sandwich ($13) with bacon, cheddar, and tomato confit.

Will this be the place where Geoffrey Zakarian retakes his place on the culinary stage, or will dinner just be a succession of better-than-average hotel dishes? We’ll find out in a few weeks.

The Lambs Club (130 W. 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Midtown)

Breakfast at The Breslin

Like most hotel restaurants, The Breslin is compelled to serve breakfast. I say compelled because it is not the meal into which the chef pours much creative energy, although it is comparatively lucrative. The profit margin on a $2.50 cup of coffee must be around five hundred percent.

Still, April Bloomfield’s fingerprints are all over the menu: I don’t know of many places that serve poached eggs with curried lentils, yoghurt, and cilantro, or beans in pork fat. Ricotta, Bloomfield’s favorite cheese, makes an appearance in at least two dishes.

 

I had the Seasonal Frittata with — yes, riccotta ($14) — and the house-cured bacon ($7). Unlike the bacon you have at home, Bloomfield’s doesn’t get crisp. It is really a portion more appropriate for sharing, given the high fat content, but there I was by myself . . . and finished it.

The Breslin (16 W. 29th Street between Broadway & Fifth Avenue, West Midtown)

The Pub Mutton Chop at Keens Steakhouse

I’ve written before about the so-called Legendary Mutton Chop (it is actually lamb) at Keens Steakhouse. It’s the most quirky item on the menu: no other restaurant I know of serves lamb butchered this way.

The mutton chop in the dining room costs $45, and like most steakhouse portions is more than all but the hungriest diner will finish.

In the pub, they serve a half-sized version for $25 that is still ample, especially if you order appetizers and side dishes. (The limp greens that come with it are nothing to write home about.)

It is nice to have warm rolls offered beforehand; not so nice that they are served with butter that just came out of the fridge.

Still, it is worth your consideration if you’re in the Herald Square area and want a light bite without signing up for a heavy steakhouse meal.

The other useful thing is that there is no break between lunch and dinner service: Keens is open continuously from 11:45 a.m. until late.

Keens Steakhouse (72 W. 36th St. between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, West Midtown)

The Breslin

I visited The Breslin alone about a month ago. I felt it was a two-star restaurant at the time, but hadn’t sampled enough of the menu to form a definite impression. Now I can correct that (and Sam Sifton’s wrong-headed one-spot).

I wrote about the background of The Breslin in an earlier review, so I’ll get right to the food.

 

The Terrine Board (above left) is excellent—the components being guinea hen, rustic pork, rabbit & prune, liverwurst, and head cheese. I wonder why there is no option for a solo diner? It comes in two sizes ($25 or $42), and even the smaller one, which we had, is too large for one person.

A whole trout ($32; above right) was exquisite, its pink flesh moist and tender. We also had the lamb burger and fries once again (the photo is in my earlier review), which was as good as before.

The wine list is a tad expensive, with too few bottles under $50. However, the 2007 Domaine des Martinelles at $55 was wonderful. The list describes it as “the rustic side of Crozes-Hermitage: meat-driven, earthy, funky, and amazingly yummy.” It arrived at the table properly chilled. Even restaurants much more expensive than The Breslin often serve red wine at room temperature.

I don’t know how Chef April Bloomfield divides her time between The Breslin and her other restaurant, The Spotted Pig. She was in the Breslin kitchen the night we were there, apparently (as far as we could tell) looking at every plate that went out.

The space is noisier than I’d like, and I wish they took reservations. The dining room hasn’t been full either time I visited (the packed bar is another story entirely). Perhaps it would even help business to get with the program, and join OpenTable. But I love April Bloomfield’s food too much to subtract points for that, so The Breslin gets two stars from us.

The Breslin (16 W. 29th Street between Broadway & Fifth Avenue, West Midtown)

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

iPad Wine Tablets at South Gate

Last week, South Gate restaurant replaced its paper wine lists with iPads. It struck me as a gimmick to get the critics back to a restaurant they largely ignored—out of kindness, I suspect—when it opened two years ago.

This is the fourth electronic wine list I’ve seen. The old Aureole had one. It was so difficult to use that we just gave up, and asked the sommelier for assistance. Adour has a wine list projected onto the counter at the bar, though at the tables it relies on paper. I found the electronic version finicky, and as I’d done at Aureole, gave up and asked for the printed version.

SD26 is the only other New York restaurant that currently dispenses with paper entirely. As I noted after my visit:

I quickly figured out the user interface, but found it frustrating. On a traditional wine list, I can flip through the pages quickly, getting an instant sense of its breadth and depth. A small screen that shows only a few bottles at a time is disorienting. You have no idea what you’re not seeing. It’s probably a lot, given an inventory of 1,000 bottles. Response time isn’t bad, but turning a page is a lot faster.

The iPad wine list at South Gate has much the same problem. The user interface is pretty easy to figure out, but you have to dig through several layers of menus to get to a list of bottles. Along the way, you have several decisions to make:

• Bottle, glass, cocktail, small format, large format, or beer? [I choose bottle]
• White, red, sparkling, or dessert? [I choose red]
• A particular grape, a particular country, or “all red”? [I choose country]
• Which country (out of 14)? [I choose United States]
• Which Grape (out of 4)? [I choose Merlot]

After all that, I find that South Gate has only one United States Merlot, and I later discover that there are only five U.S. bottles overall. So this is clearly not the strength of the list, which it has taken me a bit of searching to find out. On a printed list, you’d quickly see at a glance that the largest selection is French.

Response time for any given menu option ranges from one to four seconds, which doesn’t sound bad, but the minutes add up quickly, while you’re still not sure how big the list is, or how much you’re missing. Fortunately for me—but not for the restaurant—the place wasn’t busy, and the server let me hold onto the iPad for about 45 minutes, so I had plenty of time to browse. This wouldn’t work at a busy place, unless they’re prepared to invest in a lot of iPads.

Eventually, someone will develop the killer wine list app that beats paper, but it hasn’t happened yet.

*

Kerry Heffernan, the original chef at Eleven Madison Park, has been at South Gate since it opened. The Tony Chi-designed room has no charm; it could be a soulless hotel dining room anywhere.

The city’s most expensive non-Japanese restaurant, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, was once in the same building, so you don’t expect it to be cheap. And it isn’t. Practically all of the entrées are north of $30. Even the three-course pre-theater menu feels expensive, at $49.

A more gently priced bar menu was introduced recently (though, as at most places, you can get the full menu at the bar, too). I wasn’t hungry, so I sampled just one item.

Try to imagine Fried Macaroni & Cheese ($12). Does your mental picture agree at all with the photo on the left? I thought not.

A confused runner dropped the dish in front of another patron. He was sure he hadn’t ordered it, and handed it off to me. I thought it must be a mistake, but I couldn’t find a server and didn’t want the dish to get cold.

I had eaten four out of the five little fritters before the server returned, and assured me that this was, indeed, the fried macaroni & cheese. I didn’t taste much macaroni, but the dish wasn’t bad. I’m not sure that five bites are worth $12, but when the roast chicken is $30, I suppose it is not out of line.

A glass of wine and a bar snack were all I had, but I must have spent an hour there, as the server seemed in no hurry to…you know, serve. It’s not much of an improvement over my first visit, when the place was new. Inexplicably, I gave South Gate one star. I am not sure why. Nothing I saw here makes me want to return.

South Gate (154 Central Park South between 6th & 7th Avenues, West Midtown)

The Breslin

Note: Click here for a later review of The Breslin.

Time was, the cuisine of the British Isles didn’t travel well. No one went to England for the food, and no one opened serious English restaurants anywhere else.

April Bloomfield may be the chef who, more than any other, has proven that the food of her native country can be exported. It began at the Spotted Pig, a West Village hit six years ago that remains impossibly busy at practically all times (and does not take reservations).

Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, stumbled at the John Dory, a seafood restaurant in Far West Chelsea that won good reviews, but couldn’t stay in business. Friedman attributed the failure to the lack of lunch traffic in that neighborhood, and inefficient use of the space due to the decision to accept reservations, which he says he regrets.

The Breslin, a gastropub like the Pig, opened last fall. The neighborhood presented a bit of a risk, as West 29th Street is neither a nightlife hotspot nor a residential district. It’s in the unnamed gray space on the Manhattan map, north of Chelsea but south of Midtown. Restaurants too numerous to name have failed here. Nevertheless, they vowed not to take reservations.

By opening in the boutique Ace Hotel, Bloomfield and Friedman at least hedged their bets. Hotel restaurants are usually subsidized, since most establishments feel they must offer their guests a place to eat. A failure would mean leaving the space vacant for a prolonged period, which an upscale hotel would likely consider intolerable. The built-in captive audience gives the restaurant a cushion to rest on.

Not that the Breslin shows any sign of failing: it was arguably the hottest of the fall openings. It was less than half full on a recent Saturday evening, but I hesitate to draw conclusions during a summer weekend. But if this persists I suspect the no-reservation policy will get a second look.

Whether you like the Breslin or not, you have to take off your hat to Ms. Bloomfield, to this extent: She isn’t serving a Scotch Egg or a Beef & Stilton Pie because the market demanded them. No menu consultant gave her the list of obligatory standards that every place in town is serving. When you dine at Bloomfield’s restaurants, you’re getting her cuisine, and nobody else’s.

In a somewhat unflattering one-star review, Sam Sifton complained that too much of the menu sings in the same key: it’s heavy on salt and fat, and as he indelicately put it, tough on the digestive tract. It’s somewhat unfair to penalize the restaurant because he needed to fart, but it is a heavy menu. There is no denying that.

The menu is divided into snacks ($4–8), appetizers ($12–18), entrées ($17–32), and sides ($7–8). Terrine boards are $25 or $42, and you cannot order their contents individually. Even crazier is a ribeye for two at $139; no steak for one person is offered.

I visited the Breslin alone, and tried too little of the menu to form a definite impression. Boiled Peanuts Fried in Pork Fat ($6; above left) is a crazy dish that no one else serves. Whether due to boiling or saturation in fat, the shells are edible, and just as good as the nuts inside.

The Lamb Burger with Feta ($17; above right) is rich and flavorful, but I like the Spotted Pig’s beef burger with roquefort even better. It comes with addictive chips that, in keeping with the theme, are thrice fried.

The service is top-notch, at least by pub standards, as I have found at every one of Ken Friedman’s places. For a former record industry honcho, he seems to understand how to recruit and train a staff. They all dress casually, and indeed, you might have trouble telling them apart from the customers.

Friedman has done his usual bang-up job on the décor, assuming you don’t mind a Disneyfied version of what a real English pub looks like. The space is quite a bit more comfortable than the Spotted Pig, with the advantage of being built from scratch, and not having to fit into a landmarked neighborhood.

The Breslin is, alas, too far out of my way to be on the regular rotation. But there is much more of the menu that I am eager to try, if only to find out if the rest of the food tastes as good as it reads.

The Breslin (16 W. 29th Street between Broadway & Fifth Avenue, West Midtown)

Dropping In: Má Pêche

The Momofuku phenomenon has largely passed me by. Mind you, I like David Chang’s restaurants, having visited them seven times, in all. But I never bought into the unstinting bouquets of rapture that floated his way, from people whom I believed knew better.

That said, I’d love to have been able to drop in on the East Village Momofukus more often, during the era when Chang’s adoring faithful were teary-eyed over the latest new dish his chefs had created, on practically a daily basis. I’m sure many of those dishes were very good indeed, but that part of town was too far away for me to visit with any regularity—especially given Chang’s no-reservations policy, which meant one was not even assured of getting a seat.

The Momofukologists say that the East Village places have lost a step (though they remain packed at prime times). Chang himself is now tending a much larger empire. Tien Ho, the day-to-day chef at Ssäm Bar during its heyday, is now at Má Pêche. As I mentioned after my first visit, I find the cuisine at Má Pêche far too timid, but I assume Ho hasn’t forgotten how to cook. As it is on my commuting path, I’m willing to give it a few more shots. I keep hoping to see the inspiration that made Momofuku what it was. I haven’t found it yet.

Má Pêche is a Momofuku you can get into. My experience, and everyone else’s, is that the place is never full, or even close. Just a day after telling the Times that his no-resy free-for all is more “democratic,” Chang started taking them on the web, though only for lunch and prix fixe dinner from 5–7 p.m. I suspect that more will follow. Midtown diners tend to want reservations, and if the restaurant is empty, you might as well give customers what they want.

When I arrived last Friday evening, at around 6:05 p.m., the host said, “I can seat you at the bar or the raw bar.” I thought, perhaps they’re finally busy. I came down the stairs to find a dining room two-thirds empty. They couldn’t possibly have believed that all those seats would miraculously fill up—which, of course, they did not. So why offer me only a backless bar stool, when the long communal table was available.

One can speculate endlessly the reasons they might have had for putting me all alone, at a corner of the raw bar. Charitably, they might have believed a solo diner preferred the bar, but in that case I’d suggest they ask. A friend allowed that perhaps they thought it would look silly to have a solo diner alone at that long, X-shaped table. Perhaps, but they ought to be thinking of what the customer wants, especially when they have vast real estate that clearly is not filling up. Let’s just say they need to get a lot smarter.

Onto the food. I started with the pork ribs (left), which came out almost instantly. I take no issue with their being obviously pre-made, but they were slightly dried out. Pork spring rolls (right) were fresh as a daisy, as if the vegetables had been picked that day. I had a glass of wine, which was one of the stingiest pours I have seen—probably around three ounces.

Má Pêche remains a promising restaurant that needs a lot of work.

Má Pêche

Note: This is a review under founding chef Tien Ho, who has since left the restaurant. The new chef, Paul Carmichael, is introducing an American menu.

David Chang is the unquestioned King of the East Village, with four insanely-popular Momofuku restaurants to his name, holding six New York Times stars and two Michelin stars between them.

Does Chang’s hipster ethos work in a midtown luxury boutique hotel? That was the question when he took over the former Town space in the Chambers Hotel on West 56th Street.

Town had long ceased to be culinarily relevant when it closed in April 2009, but at least it offered the high-end, French-inflected fine dining experience that guests at the Chambers would expect. Chang’s new landlord probably wanted nothing to do with a name like “Momofuku,” which to the unanointed reads like Mother-Fuck-You.

So Chang settled on Má Pêche (Momofuku means “peach”), which gives the surface impression of bourgeois respectability. What he built, however, is “Momofuku for Tourists,” a restaurant that resembles his East Village empire the way Disney’s Epcot resembles France or Italy.

The only trouble is, so far the tourists haven’t shown up. On a Friday evening at 8:00 p.m., Má Pêche was two-thirds empty. During our meal, we saw four separate parties enter the dining room, take one look, and then leave.

What could have turned them off? Perhaps it’s the huge, X-shaped communal table that dominates the room, a feature of many New York restaurants, but probably unfamiliar to the businessmen from Chicago or the honeymooners from Des Moines.

Má Pêche, unlike the other Momofukus, does have detached tables and chairs with backs, but the communal table is the first thing you see. If Chang knows what’s good for him, he will get rid of it.

Like all of Chang’s downtown places (except Momofuku Ko), Má Pêche doesn’t take reservations. That policy works when you’re getting enough foot traffic to remain constantly full. And what about the nonsense of serving dessert only at the adjoining “Milk Bar”? It works in the East Village. At a midtown luxury hotel, it’s a recipe for failure.

Chang apparently realized that a midtown crowd will expect better service than at his East Village places. A memo to staff was leaked to Eater.com, describing the service rules in detail. Our server was clearly struggling, practically reciting them to us as he served the wine, to ensure he hadn’t left anything out. But if they’re so persnickity, why are there still paper napkins, when dinner for two will easily run up to $150 or more, especially if you order from the over-priced, unimpressive wine list?

The chef de cuisine is Tien Ho, who used to run the kitchen at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The menu is written in a French–Vietnamese pidgin that I suspect many customers will find utterly baffling. The food seemed to us no more Vietnamese than Chang’s East Village restaurants are Korean.

None of this would matter if the food at Má Pêche were anywhere near as good as it is downtown. The four dishes we tried were shockingly insipid, unadventurous: bland. There is very little to tempt the original Momofuku clientele to make the trip uptown, while those who never bought into Chang’s act (or never heard of it) will be wondering, “Where’s the beef?”

Actually, beef is the one distinctive offering: a traditional Vietnamese “Beef 7 Ways” dinner for 6–10 people that runs $85 a head, and is currently the only option for which reservations are taken. But this certainly won’t attract tourists and business travelers, who won’t know all the tricks of visiting the Momofuku website, poised to click on the green check mark at exactly 10:00 a.m., a week in advance.

Mang tây gribiche ($18; above left) is typical of the menu’s timidity. Asparagus salad, crab, and egg yolk sounded promising, but the egg tasted like the egg salad that comes out of a buffet line, and I didn’t taste much crab at all.

Chou-fleur chiên ($12; above right) was the dish I ordered and enjoyed on my last visit, but this time the fried cauliflower was a flat, soggy mess, and the curry was so weak as to be almost non-existent.

Aloyau de porc ($36; above left) is the most expensive of the entrées. You get plenty for your money, as it’s a twenty-ounce pork porterhouse that two can easily share. But it was curiously flavorless and was sliced too thin, causing it to slightly dry out in the process. However, we liked the fingerling potatoes and English peas that accompanied it.

Bun du riz ($18; above right), or rice noodles with spicy pork, had great potential if only the pork were spicy. Instead, it almost completely failed to register.

Má Pêche today is like a mirror-image SD26, the former uptown luxury Italian restaurant that is now trying (and failing) to appeal to the downtown crowd. We suspect that David Chang is more adaptable than SD26’s Tony May.

Adapt he must. If he wants to bring in the tourists and businessmen, he needs to ditch the communal table and paper napkins, take reservations, and serve a menu they’ll understand. If he wants to attract New Yorkers, he needs to take some culinary risks. If he wants to do both…well, that just might be impossible.

Má Pêche (15 W. 56th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, West Midtown)

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

First Look: Má Pêche

Has there ever been a more drawn-out opening than Má Pêche?

Oh, there are plenty of places that are announced and then take forever to get past the plywood stage. But Má Pêche has been serving lunch for almost six months! Then they added breakfast. Then a bar menu.

To keep the critics out, they’ve studiously avoided serving dinner. Once you serve dinner, you’re a real restaurant, and that means Greene, Richman, Cheshes, Sutton, Sietsema, Platt, and Sifton are on their way. No such compunction applies to bloggers.

I suspect that David Chang isn’t the first chef who has dreamt of soft-opening for months at a stretch while they get their act together. Apparently he has the financial backing that allows him to do it. Good for him. Meanwhile, the Chambers Hotel hits the jackpot, with more attention in the last half-year than it has had in the last half-dozen.

Má Pêche is right out of the Momofuku mold: asian spices, local ingredients, French technique, and a minimum of formality. He has tweaked his forumula for the transfer uptown. The supposedly Vietnamese-inspired menu seems a bit more Frenchified, the staff a bit more professional. But only a bit. Má Pêche seems about as Vietnamese as Momofuku downtown was Korean.

I stopped in just for a snack, ordering the chou-fleur chiên, or fried cauliflower with curry, mint, and fish sauce ($12). I’m no Momofukologist, but this seemed right out of David Chang’s playbook.

True to form, the menu advises that the cauliflower is from Satur Farms, Long Island. It’s an excellent dish—better for sharing, as that much cauliflower gets cloying after a while. But this is a bar menu, after all.

There are about a dozen dishes available— nothing like a full menu, but certainly more than enough to put together a terrific meal. The cocktail list consists of classics, slightly tweaked, such as the Seven Spice Sour that I had. At $14, they aren’t giving them away.

The bar space isn’t especially pleasant, with the countertop bisected by an unsightly column. If this wasn’t a Momofuku restaurant, it would be nobody’s favorite bar. Even now, based on reports and my own observation, you can basically walk in anytime. That surely won’t last.

Osteria del Circo

It’s fascinating to read the old reviews of Osteria del Circo, way back when it was new, in 1996. People were fighting like mad to get into the place. In the Times, Ruth Reichl awarded two stars.

The restaurant is the brainchild of the Maccioni family, the same folks behind Le Cirque. The circus theme pervades the Adam Tihany design, which is remarkably clever. Quite apart from the food, I enjoyed just looking at Osteria del Circo.

Nowadays, you can get in whenever you want, though it’s in no danger of going out of business—the space was mostly full by 7:00 on a Saturday evening. It does a lot of pre-theater business: we were asked twice if we had a show to see (we did). The server cautioned that we should get our order in early. Sure enough, we got noticeably less attention after the crowds turned up.

The cuisine is Tuscany through an American lens, with a Pat LaFreida veal chop having appeared on the menu; is there anyplace he doesn’t sell to? You won’t pay what you would at Le Cirque, but this probably won’t be a cheap night out. The overly long menu has a wide range of prices, from pizzas (around $20 each) to a ribeye for two ($38pp).

The kitchen did well by a simple salad ($14; above left) of arugula, endive, sliced apple, bacon, and blue cheese croquettes. My son loved the antipasto appetizer ($19; above right) with salumi, crostini, and marinated vegetables.

Tagliolini with tomato sauce and basil ($14 as an appetizer; above left) is one of the more simplistic pasta dishes. But the pumkin tortelli with foie gras ($29 as a main course; above right) was first rate.

Neither of the entrées wowed. Spicy Brandy Flambéed Shrimps (above left) sound fancy, but it’s not a very impressive plate for $36. I suspect my son would have preferred fries to fried zucchini and eggplant strips. Veal scallopine (above right) was merely competent, bearing in mind its $34 price tag.

The service comes with none of Le Cirque’s legendary “attitude” towards the hoi polloi. The staff happily seated our incomplete party, plied us with house-made bread, and promptly took our drinks order. The wine list had a good selection at lower prices; we settled on a red for $42.

We left well fed and well cared for. All of the food was at least competent, and a few dishes were better than that. With the right selections you can dine well here, but it’s expensive: the bill for three people was $212 before tax and tip.

Osteria del Circo (120 W. 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Midtown)

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