La Gauloise

You know that French cuisine has made a comeback, when classic bistros are opening at a faster rate than I can get around to trying them. I know, I know: it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Welcome to La Gauloise, the latest from Georges Forgeois, whose Gallic mini-chain also includes Cercle Rouge, Jules Bistro, Bar Tabac, Café Noir, and Le Signe Vert.

Forgeois also has The Clarkson, which feels like the answer to the old SAT question: which of these things is unlike the others? It’s a straightforward American bistro, albeit decorated (like all of his other places) with French nick-nacks that Forgeois picked up over 25 years of antique-hunting at flea markets.

Anyhow, The Clarkson had an extra dining room that wasn’t getting enough use, so Forgeois turned it into a separate restaurant. The two establishments are physically connected, sharing both rest room and kitchen space, but this isn’t immediately apparent, until you see staff passing back and forth between them, through a swinging wooden door.

La Gauloise feels like one of those little family bistros that you’d find on hundreds of Parisian side streets, with a small bi-level dining room, yellow pressed tin walls, and what feels like a staff of about three people. Not that it needed more, at least on a Friday evening in early spring, with only about four tables occupied and a couple of more patrons at the bar.

The location isn’t ideal. The West Village loses a lot of its intimate charm as you cross Seventh Avenue, headed West. The nearest streetcorner is dominated by The Clarkson, and the building is draped in scaffolding. You’re not going to notice La Gauloise unless you’re looking for it. (Perhaps it’ll be easier to spot once the weather gets warmer, and the outdoor tables come out.)

The chef is Rebecca Weitzman, formerly of ’inoteca and Cercle Rouge. (She also won an episode of Food Network’s Chopped in 2010.) She does double-duty here, continuing to look after the kitchen at The Clarkson. Her menu breaks no new ground: it’s practically all French classics, with appetizers mostly in the low-teens, mains in the mid-20s. It’s all capably prepared, but nothing we tried was especially memorable.

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Cafe Clover

 

One website called it a “farm-to-nutritionist-to-table restaurant.” That nutritionist, according to the pre-opening press, is Mike Roussell, Ph.D. His name isn’t on the website, but his presence looms large at Cafe Clover, which opened recently in the West Village.

The chef here is David Standridge, formerly of Market Table and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon. You’d think, with that pedigree, his menu wouldn’t need an editor. And yet:

“Unlike a health food restaurant that starts with a healthy perspective, I start from a delicious food perspective and then try to eliminate unnecessary calories and also try to make things more healthy,” Standridge, says, of the Café Clover concept.

To do that, he creates the menu and then gets a full nutritional analysis from Dr. Roussell, who will report on things like if a dish has too many calories or carbs, and then send Standridge back to the kitchen to tweak it.

The result is as joyless as it sounds: a cuisine that is clinically executed and hopelessly dull. Do we really want a restaurant where every dish tastes like a nutrition lecture?

Restaurants have struggled on this West Village street corner, most recently home to 10 Downing and La Villette. But there’s nothing wrong with the neighborhood, as El Toro Blanco is still packing them in, on the same block. If Cafe Clover fails, I’d blame the concept, not the space.

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Duet Brasserie

The all-day chameleon restaurant is a familiar idea, with pastries and omelettes at breakfast, salads and sandwiches at lunch, and fine dining at night. This is the formula that Balthazar nailed, and many others have copied.

This is also the plan at Duet Brasserie, which opened under the radar in late fall 2014, in the old Centro Vinoteca space, a spacious corner lot where Barrow Street meets Seventh Avenue South. The address is on Barrow, but most of the footprint faces onto Seventh.

Most of the downstairs dining room is dominated by floor-to-ceiling French doors, which will open in good weather, presumably with a sidewalk café, but the charmless view onto lower Seventh Avenue is not much of a selling point. Neither is the room itself, which is bisected by display cases showing off the ample selection of baked goods, protected under glass in harsh lighting more suited for a retail bakery.

The publicity photos show an elegant upstairs room, with white tablecloths and a custom-made Swarovski crystal chandelier. That room wasn’t in use the night we visited—a very slow Christmas eve, which attracted only a few customers. Instead, we were seated downstairs, where Duet Brasserie feels like a diner.

If only they charged diner prices. On the French-inflected menu, starters are mostly $12–28, entrées $32–48, side dishes $9–14. There’s also a $75 four-course prix fixe. The website shows a $200 ten-course tasting menu, but the staff did not offer that to us (nor would we have taken them up on it).

The chef here is Dmitry Rodov (his wife, Diana, is the pastry chef). His stated aim is to serve “home cooking, beautifully presented,” and this is generally the case, but many less expensive restaurants do the same, as well or better. The chef needs to prove he can operate a restaurant where no entrée is below $32, and at this he fails.

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The Clam

 

When Gabe Stulman and Joey Campanaro opened The Little Owl in 2006, they surely never imagined the multitude of restaurants such an unassuming little place would beget.

Anywhere in the Village, you’re never more than about five minutes away from one or another of their properties, all somewhat resembling each other in their commitment to straightforward, rustic, gut-busting cuisine, served in casual, comfortable dining rooms that appeal to a neighborhood crowd.

They’re actually not partners anymore. The pair split up in 2008, with Stulman starting up his “Little Wisco” empire, Campanaro retaining The Little Owl and their second restaurant together, Market Table. But you’d hardly know they ever disagreed, given the similarity of the restaurants they now operate separately.

Stulman is up to six restaurants. Campanaro has been slower to expand, opening The Clam, his third, earlier this year with his Market Table partner, chef Mikey Price. You’ll get no prizes for guessing the concept: it’s a seafooder, with the menu relying heavily on a certain bivalve mollusc.

They’ve got a terrific location, a spacious corner lot with broad, picture windows and the de rigeur exposed brick that no downtown restaurant can do without. Yet, there are white tablecloths, previously thought to be the kiss of death at a neighborhood spot, and—shock!—no one seems to mind. The restaurant has been solidly booked at prime times. It took me almost eleven months to get a reservation.

No matter what, you’re probably going to be eating seafood here. A couple of the entrées are sops to landlubbers (a half Bell & Evans chicken; a braised shortrib), but to choose these is to miss the entire point of the restaurant. Whatever you order, you’ll start with one of the terrific warm parkerhouse rolls (above right).

The menu is in five confusing sections: “iced delicacies” (what most people call a raw bar), appetizers ($13–19), entrées ($25–31), side dishes (“eight dollars each”), and then the perplexing part: “house specialties” ($13–24), not clearly delineated as starters or mains, linked only by the fact that they’re all made with clams.

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Sushi Nakazawa

I’ve never really found it that difficult to get into popular restaurants. It may require advance planning, such as calling the exact day that tables open up, 30 days in advance, at the exact hour the reservations line opens. Or perhaps the opposite—walking in at 5:30 and sitting at the bar. But it can almost always be done.

Perhaps the toughest challenge was Momofuku Ko, when it was new. There was a science of out-dueling the restaurant’s notoriously finicky website. Even the New York Times critic, Frank Bruni, admitted he relied on “tireless friends and readers” to get him in. I wrote a series of posts about reserving there, which I finally did on the third or fourth try.

My Ko Kwest was child’s play compared to Sushi Nakazawa, the toughest table in town since Pete Wells gave it four stars last December. Reservations open at midnight, thirty days in advance. Four times, I tried exactly at midnight to book the 10-seat dining counter, and failed. Finally, I settled for the 25-seat dining room. This was fifteen months after the restaurant opened. By the time Momofuku Ko was in its second year, reservations at its 14-seat kounter were reasonably easy to come by.

The restaurant’s backstory has been much repeated. In the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi, chef Daisuke Nakazawa was the apprentice who cried when, after 200 tries, he finally made an egg custard that his master, Jiro Ono, found acceptable. Alessandro Borgognone, owner of Patricia’s Italian restaurant in the Bronx, saw the film, found Nakazawa on Facebook, and lured him to New York.

Sushi Nakazawa is not a four-star restaurant. Pete Wells’s review made no sense, even if you assume that everything he wrote was true. How do you put Sushi Nakazawa on a pedastal occupied by only five other restaurants, when you concede that “not everything is the best in town,” and “the $450 menu at Masa may glide to a higher pitch of pleasure”?

Yes indeed, Masa is better. Nevertheless, if your standard is “pleasure per dollar spent,” Sushi Nakazawa is certainly compelling. To the owner’s credit, and unlike just about every other three- and four-star restaurant, he has not jacked up the prices since the review came out. It’s still just $150 for the omakase at the counter, $120 at the tables. (You cannot order à la carte, unless you want extra pieces after your set menu is over.)

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Blenheim

Note: Chef Ryan Tate left Blenheim abruptly in March 2015. Mazen Mustafa is the restaurant’s third chef in its first year of existence.

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When a restaurant announces that it’s “closing temporarily,” it’s usually done-for. So I promptly crossed Blenheim off my to-do list when opening chef Justin Hilbert was canned, and the restaurant shuttered, after a month in business.

Blenheim escaped the usual fate of such establishments—and recovered brilliantly, in fact—when Tribeca’s Le Restaurant closed, and the Michelin-starred chef Ryan Tate became a free agent. A couple of weeks later, Tate was in, and Blenheim had recovered from the dead. Full disclosure: I wasn’t a fan of Le Restaurant. I must’ve caught it on a bad day, as no one else disliked it as much as I did. The food at Blenheim is terrific.

The owners are husband-and-wife team Min Ye and Morten Sohlberg, best known for the Smörgås Chef mini-chain of Swedish restaurants. In 2007, they bought the Blenheim Hill Farm in the Catskill Mountains, which dates back to the 1700s, but had been abandoned since the 1970s. They restored the farm, and started raising pesticide-free produce and heritage breeds of pigs, cattle, and lamb.

You might’ve guessed that a farm-to-table restaurant wouldn’t be far behind. Welcome to Blenheim, which will remind you of that other restaurant with an affiliated farm, Blue Hill, in its humbler days, before it started serving S. Pellegrino cuisine and playing host to presidents. (Even Smörgås Chef now touts its farm-to-table bona fides, which wasn’t the case when we visited in 2007.)

The v1.0 release of Blenheim had no online menu, but The Pink Pig sampled a Guinea Hen dish that was $32; the same is now $27. Further comparisons aren’t possible, but I gather the new chef has thoroughly re-habilitated the menu, which is now firmly mid-priced, with appetizers $10–19 and entrees $20–34. There are no snacks or side dishes to plump up the bill.

There are also two so-called tasting menus: four courses ($65) and seven courses ($95). Wine pairings are $35 and $55 respectively. We chose the former. If I’m picky, the four-course option isn’t really a tasting menu, although it did come with a couple of amuses. The wine pairing came with four pours, and at the price would have to be called generous.

The amuse (above left) was a tomato carpaccio with lovage emulsion, about as perfect as tomatoes can be. The bread service (above right) offered a choice of three varieties, served warm, with soft butter from the farm.

 

Blenheim 1.0 was criticized for serving “overly precious creation[s] made mostly from greens that humans don’t typically eat for a reason.” You see it, too, in The Pink Pig’s far more favorable review.

There’s still some evidence of that at Blenheim 2.0 (a $15 gin and lime cocktail served with ice plant) and on the plates above, where farm greenery is tossed about, mainly because they can. Le Restaurant, the chef’s last place, suffered from similar self-indulgence, but here the dishes succeed.

We started with White Asparagus (above left), not from the local farm, but from northern Italy, with a poached egg, sorrell, and pine juice. “Mix it up and have fun,” the server exhorted, in case you were wondering. There was a crunchy, crouton-like ingredient, and something sweet I couldn’t identify. The chef had done something incredible with very little.

Greenery on the next plate was purely decorative, but the Skate Wing (above right) was exquisite.

 

Pork Loin (above left) had a pungent, “hammy” taste that was wonderful. I also enjoyed the salted peaches on the plate, but didn’t need charred okra or smoked onion.

The dessert amuse was a cucumber sorbet, tasting something like a key lime pie, which I didn’t photograph. The dessert was a cream cheese panna cotta (above right) with plums, whey, and buckwheat crêpes that was one of the best desserts I’ve had in a while.

The ambiance at Blenheim straddles the line between high-end informal and low-end formal. Despite the tablecloth-free décor of exposed wood and farm implements hung from the walls, the dining room feels upscale: it’s a third-date place. The staff are extremely attentive about the small things, such as the setting and clearing of plates and silverware. There are butter knives on the tables, and when was the last time you saw that outside of a three-star restaurant.

The dining room was quiet, and only about half full at 8:00pm; by 10:00 it was almost empty. There is nothing wrong with the location, an ideal West Village street corner, in a part of town where many restaurants have thrived. Blenheim has got the chef; now it just needs the buzz.

Blenheim (283 W. 12th Street at W. 4th Street, West Village)

Food: Haute barnyard
Service: Upscale
Ambiance: Straddling high-end informal and low-end formal

Rating: ★★

Decoy

Decoy opened in mid-May in a former laundromat below Ed Schoenfeld and Joe Ng’s hit Chinese restaurant, RedFarm.

There’s a faux mysteriousness about the project: the website is just a landing page, without so much as a menu, hours of operation, or really anything except a phone number and social media links. It doesn’t take much googling to find out everything you’d want to know about Decoy, so why the deliberate obfuscation?

In many ways, Decoy is just an extension of RedFarm. Call the phone number, and the RedFarm staff answer. Show up for dinner at RedFarm, where they don’t take reservations, and they’re liable to send you downstairs to Decoy’s ample bar, to cool your heels during the epic wait.

Decoy itself takes reservations (I already like this place better), and the menu is different. For $65, a party of two gets a whole Peking Duck, two small plates from a list of 13 choices, and one rice or side dish. Larger parties receive extra courses from the à la carte menu, in addition to the duck.

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Bar Bolonat

It took a while for the chef Einat Admony to follow-up Balaboosta, her hit Middle Eastern spot in NoLIta. There were the usual issues with permits and the city’s bureaucratic Department of Buildings. What should’ve taken six months took more than twice that. It’s a wonder anyone opens a restaurant in this town.

Bar Bolonat, which opened in March, offers Admony’s take on the modern Israeli cuisine of her native Tel Aviv. Judging by the crowds, you’d have to wonder why no one thought of this idea sooner. Of course, execution matters. The cooking is more precise and precious than at Balaboosta, but with a rustic soul that is immediately accessible and of-the-moment.

Some of her ideas are less inspired. A restaurant called Bar ______ that is not really a bar is so very 2009. I only wish that were true of Bar Bolonat’s other conceit, a small-plates menu, consisting of plates of unpredictable sizes, which the kitchen sends out in no coherent order, as and when they are ready, regardless of whether you are. Why couldn’t that tired concept have expired in 2009?

But if it must be a small-plates menu, at least it is a good one. The present menu is a tightly-edited list of 14 savory dishes in three bunches (lightest to heaviest). The categories are unlabeled, but they seem to be sort-of-snacks ($6–12), sort-of-starters ($9–16), and sort-of-entrées ($23–31). No guesswork is required to identify the last category, the three desserts ($10–12), which we didn’t try.

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Piora

You figured Chris Cipollone was gonna get another shot. The food media loved Tenpenny, his restaurant in the back of a midtown hotel, but he followed the founding GM (Jeffrey Tascarella) quickly out the door, citing low pay.

After a brief stint at Abe & Arthur’s in the Meatpacking District, he resurfaced at Piora, in the lovely West Village space that was The Goodwin. Going by the critical acclaim (three sparklers from Sutton, two apiece from Wells and Platt) and the difficulty of getting a reservation, I’d say Cipollone’s gonna be here a while.

Critics have struggled to describe the cuisine: Sutton called it “French–Italian–Korean fusion.” Wells said merely that “Korean flavors dart in and out of the menu.” (Owner Simon Kim is part Korean.) But in a lengthy interview with the Village Voice, Cipolline said, “we’re a modern American restaurant” and “we’re not fusing much.”

To the average diner, walking in the door without reading the publicity, Piora seems more Italian than anything else, down to even its vowel-heavy name, which in fact is the Korean word for “blossom.” But you’ll see a section of the menu for pastas, and assume the place must be Italian, although the menu is not in the standard five-part format, and there are no Italian headings like primi or contorni.

Actually, there are no headings at all, and the pastas are entrée-sized. As you’d expect for a hit restaurant, prices have edged up over the last six months. Chicken at opening ($26) is now Poussin ($29). The acclaimed Bucatini pasta has gone from $26 to $36; the duck from $28 to $33. But the chef now serves an amuse bouche, of which I saw no mention in the early reviews. An $85 tasting menu has been added, and there’s the obligatory off-menu dry-aged 40-ounce ribeye for two ($150).

None of this is to suggest that Piora is charging too much. This is simply the arc that successful restaurants travel. For the quality of the food, Piora is fairly priced, with appetizers $15–20, entrées (including pastas) $25–36, and side dishes $9. The menu is blissfully short, with fewer than twenty items fitting on one generously-spaced page.

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Pagani

I’ve run out of ways to describe enjoyable, inexpensive, faux-rustic Italian restaurants. But there are never enough of them when they’re done well.

Pagani, named for a former music store that once occupied its bright West Village street corner, is done well. You might’ve guessed that if you’ve been to the owners’ other place, the Upper East Side restaurant and wine bar Uva, which we visited a couple of years ago. It has similar charms.

The owners hired Taavo Somer to oversee the décor, which ensured it would be attractive, comfortable and unoriginal. Wisely, they let him nowhere near the food. Mark Barrett, a veteran of Tabla and Babbo (and quite a few other places), runs the kitchen.

The menu is the typical multi-category broadsheet, with a variety of snacks, cured meats, and cheeses as the opening act. Starters and salads are $8–12, pastas $16–21, main courses $19–27, side dishes $6. That qualifies as inexpensive these days.

None of it is very adventurous: even picky eaters could return again and again, without repeating a dish. It all just sounds so good. Four of us were able to sample nine items, and there wasn’t a dud among them. We’d happily order any of them again. There’s a steady 4–5 ingredients per dish, and they all make sense. It feels odd to write that, but it’s often not the case.

 

Apple fennel salad ($10; above left), with arugula, feta cheese, pistachio, and olive oil, was a bit on the tart side, but after some discussion we rated it a success. The obligatory Farm Poached Egg ($9; above right) keeps company with mushrooms, spinach, and crispy pancetta vinaigrette.

 

The Sliced Garden Zucchini salad ($9; above left), with grilled corn, string beans, and almond vinaigrette, had a pleasant lemony flavor. The Soft-Shell Crab special ($10; above right), served breaded and deep-fried, won’t be available by the time you read this: order it next year.

Folded Chicken ($19; above) is terrific, the least-expensive entrée and one of the best. The bird has plenty of company: arugula, Parmigiano, tomatoes, spinach, and dried figs. It never feels like too much.

 

Rich Potato Gnocchi ($19; above left) with walnuts, gorgonzola, and black truffle, were lovely. Garganelli ($19; above right) with whole wheat pasta, spicy sausage, spinach, red onion, and tomato sauce, were more conventional but exactly as they should be.

 

The desserts are a highlight: the Chocolate Banana Pudding Sticks ($9.50; above left) and the Fruit Torte ($7.50; above right).

The two-page wine list (mostly Italian) is not as deep or as compelling as at Uva, but perhaps that’ll change as the restaurant matures. In the meantime, it is at least fairly priced, with a majority of the bottles—even the majority of the reds—below $50. You rarely see that any more. A 2009 Sicilian red was $45.

We reserved our table of four the same day; nevertheless, the restaurant was packed, so I assume they get a lot of walk-ins. It took a server about 15 minutes to take our order, and only then did he get around to mentioning the specials. After that little glitch, the meal went smoothly.

As I noted, there’s nothing terribly original about Pagani, but if you’re in that neck of the woods, it’s a fun place you’d never get tired of.

Pagani (289 Bleecker Street at Seventh Avenue South, West Village)

Food: Rustic Italian
Service: Friendly but a bit slow
Ambiance: Blonde woods, mirrored walls; Taavo Somer playbook

Rating: ★