Abe & Arthur's

Note: The owners of Abe & Arthur’s replaced it with La Cenita in 2013 and La Cenita Steak in 2014, before closing entirely later that year to become “an events and catering facility.” As of late 2014, the space was expected to become a branch of the Italian restaurant Tony’s di Napoli.

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Abe & Arthur’s is a Meatpacking District dining barn that opened last October in the old Lotus space. It accommodates more guests than a 747 jetliner.

Early reviews weren’t ecstatic, so the place wasn’t high on my list until Ozersky.TV filed on chef Franklin Becker’s unique way of preparing a steak. Briefly put: he quickly sears the meat at intense heat, then puts it in a hot butter bath, then finishes it once again under the broiler. The skeptical Ozersky was persuaded, and therefore so was I.

I walked there after work and took a seat at the bar. The place was nearly empty at 5:30 p.m., but that quickly changed. A loud party of three guys came in, started telling lewd jokes to the barmaid, then ordered a magnum of red wine. It was going to be that kind of evening.

While I waited for my steak, the server dropped off a bowl of warm popovers. They’re not as good as the ones at BLT Prime, but still better than the bread service that most restaurants settle for.

Becker sources his beef from Creekstone Farms, which supplies many of the high-end steakhouses. He offers a filet, a strip (which I had), or a porterhouse for two. The rest of the menu, mostly bistro standards, is expensive. If you don’t order steak, entrées range from a wild mushroom risotto ($27), to scallops and bacon ($34).

The steak itself, served on a sizzling cast iron skillet, is excellent. I prefer a bit more char, but there was just enough to supply a satisfying crunch with every bite. The dry-aged prime beef is as good as it comes, and it was prepared expertly to the medium rare I requested.

It is not, however, as good as the city’s current gold standard, the bone-in strip at Minetta Tavern, which currently sells for $45. That’s four dollars more than at Abe & Arthur’s, but Minetta is a much more satisfying restaurant overall. Of course, the fact that you can get into Abe & Arthur’s weighs in its favor.

Service was friendly, but frantic. Once the bar started filling up, it was not easy to get the over-taxed barmaid’s attention. Unlike Ozersky.TV, I do not have the benefit of a private audience with the chef. The steak certainly lived up to Ozersky’s endorsement, but I won’t rush back. It isn’t an especially pleasant place to dine, and there are other restaurants that can satisfy a steak fix equally well.

Eater.com reported that the owners are hoping to open three more Abe & Arthur’s restaurants in Manhattan. That sounds like over-expansion to me, but what do I know?

Abe & Arthur’s (409 W. 14th St. between Ninth & Tenth Ave., Meatpacking District)

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

Review Recap: The Mark by Jean-Georges

Apparently, when an absentee chef opens a mediocre restaurant in a neighborhood accustomed to mediocrity, he gets two stars. That is the lesson of Sam Sifton’s review in today’s Times:

Mr. Vongerichten himself has been present, on and off, standing by the passage to the kitchen, his hands clasped in front of his waist, dressed in crisp kitchen whites. What he sees before him surely matches the prospectus he offered the newly renovated hotel: a neighborhood restaurant for a neighborhood sorely lacking in neighborhood restaurants, with the prospect of hotel guests as insurance against those periods when the neighborhood is in Palm Beach or Paris, Nantucket or Gstaad…

The menu at the Mark is a smart hedge against the possibility that his inattention would lead to a drop-off in quality there. It is so unambitious that it is difficult to fumble, at least as long as Pierre Schutz, a loyal Vongerichten lieutenant for decades who serves as the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, is there to keep a close eye on the plates…

Mr. Vongerichten’s great genius used to be how he used the spare aesthetics of Asian cooking to improve classical French cuisine. Then it became how he used the lessons of that experience to raid other larders, and to create steakhouses and street-food emporia, Japanese noodle bars and market-driven French bistros.

Now he opens hotel restaurants all over the world. This one is hardly a risk. But it is a welcome addition to the Upper East Side.

I wouldn’t really have an issue with the rating, if it wasn’t the identical rating awarded to a vastly better restastaurant, SHO Shaun Hergatt, a week ago.

Instead, Sifton just gives the impression that he is just a star-struck amateur.

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.

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

Club A Steakhouse

I know what you’re thinking: “Another steakhouse? Wake me up when it’s over.”

Actually, that’s what I thought when Club A Steakhouse opened two years ago in a part of town that already had plenty of them. We paid a visit the other night on the spur of the moment, when our original Saturday evening plans fell through, and Club A was available on OpenTable at short notice.

From 1977 to 2008, the space was Bruno, a Northern Italian restaurant that appealed to the Upper East Side moneyed set. The owner, an Albanian named Bruno Selimaj, decided that it was time for a makeover. Whoever suggested the name “Club A” needs to have their head examined.

Luckily, it’s the only bad decision Mr. Selimaj has made. He is a gracious host, and still in charge. The man knows how to run a restaurant.

The menu follows the “Luger-plus” model, with thick-cut Canadian bacon and sliced porterhouse for 2, 3, or 4 people as centerpieces, but with much more variety, better service, and a much more comfortable room than Luger itself.

We started with the bacon to share (below left)—surely the most inexpensive appetizer in midtown at $5. The kitchen divided it in two and sent out both halves on separate plates, each with its own serving of the house steak sauce. That’s not bad for $2.50 per person.

The porterhouse for two ($94; above right) was dry aged prime, a very good example if not the best I’ve seen. If we are to pick nits, it was cut a bit more thinly than I would like, and the chef erred on the side of rare, rather than the medium rare we’d asked for. It was a shade larger than the typical porterhouse for two, and we took a good bit of it home.

The side dishes—Five Cheese “Truffle” Mac ($10) and Sautéed Asparagus ($11) were both perfect.

I haven’t yet seen the steakhouse that serves a complimentary bowl of grapes on ice after the meal (right). I wonder where they got that idea? It wasn’t a comp, as we saw it on every table. After that, who needs dessert?

As part of the renovation after Bruno closed, the walls were redone in bordello red. The wall is covered with photos of past guests, perhaps the room’s least attractive features. But the tables are large and comfortable.

The restaurant has one of the best collections of wine decanters I’ve seen, and every bottle is decanted. Service is attentive and first-rate.

Although we got a Saturday night 8:00 p.m. reservation with ease, by 9:00 the room was nearly full. We are guessing that Club A has a cadre of neighborhood regulars, as there has been little publicity to speak of. It deserves to be better known.

Club A Steakhouse (240 E. 58th St. between Second & Third Ave., Upper East Side)

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

The Tangled Vine

The Tangled Vine is a cute restaurant and wine bar that opened about two months ago, about a block from the Museum of Natural History.

If the Upper West Side is always a bit risky for a new restaurant, this is the place to be, as the residential community is upscale, subway access is good, and the area has been hospitable to the right kind of destination dining.

The Tangled Vine ought to fit in well here. It’s pretty, without being fancy; intelligent, without being snooty; inexpensive without being cheap.

The focus is on Old World wines that are organic, sustainable, and/or biodynamic. I suspect there are aren’t many customers who can explain the difference between those three terms. They are explained on the menu, and even then I keep forgetting. Do patrons choose their wine bars based on that?

Fortunately, the wine list is very approachable, with dozens of bottles below $75, and plenty below $50. If you order by the glass, as I did, the pours are generous.

The Spanish-themed menu is by David Seigel, who earned one star at Mercat in 2007. Frank Bruni found the space insufferably loud, implying that the food alone might have been closer to two stars. Several dishes Bruni liked, and others resembling them, make their way onto the menu at the Tangled Vine.

The menu is dominated by cheese, crostini, and charcuterie—the kind of snacks you’d expect to order at a wine bar. There are also about a dozen larger plates, ranging from $9–23, with most under $20. Cauliflower Crostini ($6; below left) were a perfect start.

The menu offers several “trios”—generous two-ounce pours of thematically related wines with paired food. An excellent Sherry and Madeira trio ($19) came with the Chickpea crostini (above right), an addictive concoction with morcilla (blood sausage) and apricots.

The Pinot Noir trio ($21) came with a Montadito (left), or pork belly slider, here served in a pita pocket with pickled radish and garlic dijonaise. This was my favorite of the three dishes.

I came here on a publicist’s suggestion, and although I paid fully for my meal, it did seem that I got a bit more attention after I’d introduced myself. For the first half-hour, I felt a bit neglected, even though plenty of staff were on hand, and the room was nowhere near full. As it was early, perhaps they were still setting up.

When you order a single glass, most wine bars first offer a taste before a full pour. That wasn’t done here. I don’t think I have ever declined a wine, and I don’t think many customers do, but it’s a nice touch that the Tangled Vine might want to consider.

I’m not really qualified to write about the wines themselves, but I loved the sherries, and the Pinot Noir trio included a reserve Givry that normally sells for about $20 a glass that was absolutely terrific. After you’ve had that, it’s hard to move on to anything else, but after I gave them the challenge, the server recommended a smooth Montalcino that ended the evening on a strong note.

Great wine bars have sprung up all over town, so it’s hard to recommend the Tangled Vine as a destination. Personally, I think its affordable Old World theme and great Spanish tapas-style cuisine make a more compelling story than the organic spin, which you tend to forget after the first sip of a wonderful Pinot Noir.

The Tangled Vine (434 Amsterdam Avenue at 81st Street, Upper West Side)

Sifton Still Getting Hammered for Hergatt Review

Today, OZERSKY.TV is out with a video piece on why Sam Sifton’s two-star review of SHO Shaun Hergatt is so spectacularly wrong. The Pink Pig agrees, as do most commenters on the Times website.

Let us be clear about this: I would not mind the review if Sifton had thought the food or service wasn’t up-to-snuff. But that’s not the case: he acknowledged that the food was inpeccably prepared, and that the service matched.

Rather, he slammed the restaurant for not hewing to some kind of abstract “this is how we eat now” zeitgeist. I mean, it would be as if the Times music critic slammed the New York Philharmonic for not featuring the latest rock band.

I’m not naive enough to suppose that my shouting reaches the tender eardrums of the Times critic. It is gratifying to find a more influential commentator, like Ozersky, calling bullshit as only he can.

Review Recap: SHO Shaun Hergatt

I never thought that I would be quoting @OzerskyTV for review commentary, but today Josh nails it:

Sifton’s off. his. rocker. Two stars for Shaun Hergatt? Absurd. The obligatory middlebrow preening. When will this mummery end? The whole review is one big cheap shot. I’m sorry. This “fine dining is over” meme has now officially jumped the shark.”

Here’s another thing I never thought I’d say:

Come back, Frank Bruni! All is forgiven!

Bruni, lest we forget, made many of the same mistakes. But he was at least an original voice. Sifton is just lazy. The review is a mash-up of what Pete Wells wrote eight months ago.

Can we count all the ways the review is incoherent?

• He complains that SHO isn’t locally sourced. Marea isn’t locally sourced. It got three stars.
• He complains that SHO is old-fashioned. La Grenouille is old-fashioned. It got three stars.
• He complains that SHO looks like it “a good business hotel in Sydney or Zurich, Miami or Bonn.” Colicchio & Sons looks like Vegas. It got three stars.

Does Sifton have any plans to be relevant? If so, Right Now would be a good time to start.

ABC Kitchen

For years, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s has been the “love ’em and leave ’em” of chefs, opening new restaurants at a vigorous clip and abandoning them after the reviews are in. He claims to remain in charge, but you never see him there again.

So when we heard that Vongerichten was opening two restaurants in the space of a month—first the Mark (which we visited last week), then ABC Kitchen—we were more than a little skeptical. Much to our surprise, ABC Kitchen turns out to be the better restaurant, and it just might remain worthwhile long after Vongerichten’s attention wanders elsewhere.

ABC Kitchen is part of the department store ABC Home. There have been other restaurants in this space, though none I have visited. The space fits the sparse ABC aesthetic, with its off-whites and exposed beams.

At first, the concept sounded like a big bore: yet another environmentally conscious haute barnyard with organic, locally sourced ingredients and an herb garden on the roof. We’ve heard that song before.

But ABC Kitchen takes it farther than just about anyone else, with tables made from reclaimed wood, vintage dessert plates and flatware purchased on eBay, coasters made from corrugated cardboard, soy-based candles, and even organic cleaning products.

None of this would matter if the food didn’t deliver, but we liked almost everything we tried. Chef de cuisine Dan Kluger has worked at Union Square Café and Tabla, and more recently at the Core Club. At a restaurant where the menu, by definition, will need to change constantly, we assume that the food is really his, and not Vongerichten’s. That gives us some confidence that the place might avoid falling to the static torpor that dooms most Vongerichten places..

Prices are reasonble, with snacks and appetizers mostly $12 and under, pastas and whole wheat pizzas $12–16, entrées $22–35 (only steak and lobster above $30), and side dishes $5–8.

I started with a plate of crudités ($10; above left) at the bar with a terrific anchovy dip. Bread seemed to be house-made, served—we are told—in hand-made baskets “by the indigenous mapuche people of patagonia.”

It’s not often that a roast carrot and avocado salad ($12; above right) is a highlight of the meal, but we loved its bright, forward flavors. A pork terrine ($12; below left) was the evening’s only dud. It tasted mostly of the grease that was used in the deep fryer.

A Four Story Hills pork chop ($24; above right) was perfectly done. Crispy chicken ($21; below left) was also very good. We also liked the baked endive with ham and gruyère ($8; below right), not your typical side dish.

ABC Kitchen was doing a brisk business on a Friday evening. The crowd seemed to be drawn from the neighborhood, and not from the adjoining store. (It could be very different at lunch.) Hard surfaces and tables packed close together make for a loud space, but not unpleasantly so. For such a busy place, servers are well trained and reasonably attentive.

We can’t say whether ABC Kitchen will avoid the downward spiral that has spoiled so many of the Vongerichten restaurants. But if the farm-to-table haute barnyard concept appeals to you, right now this is one of the better versions of it.

ABC Kitchen (35 E. 18th St. between Broadway & Park Ave. S., Gramercy/Flatiron)

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

Review Preview: SHO Shaun Hergatt

Photographers from the New York Times were spotted in SHO Shaun Hergatt’s dining room last week, which likely means that it will be reviewed tomorrow. We’ll post the Eater.com odds when and if they appear. In the meantime, we offer our usual instant analysis.

We’ve dined at SHO three times and reviewed it twice (here, here). We think it was the best new opening of 2009, and easily a high-end three-star restaurant. The Times thought otherwise, relegating it to a Pete Wells Dining Brief during the interregnum between critics Frank Bruni and Sam Sifton.

We thought that Wells missed the point of the restaurant by a country mile. Yet, Hergatt should be grateful that he didn’t file a rated review. Had he done so, it clearly would have received no more than two stars, and would have foreclosed the review that Sifton is filing tomorrow.

Business has been picking up at SHO: that was not only our own observation, but that of others who’ve visited lately. Hergatt and his backers deserve credit for sticking to their guns, and continuing to offer a high-end experience, when they could very well (and quite understandably) have dialed down the concept when the economic crisis hit.

Sifton has been unpredictable, to say the least, but we assume he would not invest a review slot unless it were to upgrade Wells’s judgment. We therefore make the only prediction we can: three stars.