Rum House and The Lantern's Keep

The formerly desolate midtown cocktail scene is improving, with several new bars that bring the downtown bespoke mixology revolution to the Times Square area. I tried two of these last week, Rum House and the Lantern’s Keep.

Rum House is in the Edison Hotel, although it also has its own street entrance. There’s been a Rum House here for decades, but it closed in 2010 after 37 years. I never visited the old Rum House, which was described as a dive. The new version has been brightened up and remodeled, though it retains bits and pieces of the old décor, and there’s a piano for live entertainment (not in use when I visited).

The folks from the Tribeca cocktail lounge Ward III are in charge, and there’s no denying they know their cocktails. But the space, which seats 60, is more raucous than most downtown lounges, with a large crowd clogging the bar at happy hour. Its Theater District location attracts a lot of tourists who drink beer and merlot and gin & tonic. The bartender is almost relieved when a real cocktail customer walks in the door.

To its credit, Rum House charges only $12 a drink, which is at least $2 lower than any other serious cocktail lounge I’m aware of at the moment.

The Lantern’s Keep is in the boutique Iroquois Hotel, a few blocks east of the Times Square mêlée. It’s in a quiet back room, with no indication of its existence at street level. Nevertheless, its 25 seats (21 at tables; 4 at the bar) were packed on the Thursday evening before Easter weekend, and like many downtown lounges (including the Raines Law Room, whose staff run it), standees are not admitted.

I returned on an atypical Saturday, the night before Easter Sunday, to find it nearly empty: staff outnumbered the customers. The quiet, luxurious vibe is very much like Raines: if you like one, you’ll like the other. I started with a Poet’s Dream, an orangy gin-based cocktail resembling a martini, then went off-menu with a Paper Plane, a bourbon-based drink that originated at two other downtown places, Milk & Honey and Little Branch.

Cocktails at the Lantern’s Keep are $14 apiece. I’m more likely to return here, as it is a more focused cocktail place, and it’s far enough away from the Theater to deter the casual visitor who just wants a beer.

Rum House (Edison Hotel, 228 W. 47th St., near Broadway, Theater District)
Lantern’s Keep (Iroquois Hotel, 49 W. 44th St. btwn 5th & 6th Ave, West Midtown)

The Burger Special at Má Pêche

For its inaugural Burger Week, Eater.com asked five restaurants that don’t ordinarily serve burgers to put a special burger on their menus.

For the record, the participating restaurants were Chinatown Brasserie, Kin Shop, Maialino, SHO Shaun Hergatt, and Má Pêche. All five chefs did a great job (or so it seems from the descriptions) of inventing a burger that looks like it belongs on their respective menus.

Most of the restaurants are offering the new burgers only at lunch, and only through the end of next week. They all sound enticing, but there’s not enough time—especially at lunch—for me to get to them all.

Chinatown Brasserie’s Peking Duck Burger was the one I craved the most, but Má Pêche’s Lemongrass–Chili Butter Burger was the most conveniently located, so I tried that one. The proceeds are being donated to Edible Schoolyard, a fact mentioned in the Eater post, but not on the menu. The price was $16, typical these days for a custom blend burger in Manhattan.

The beef is a Pat LaFrieda blend (aren’t they all?) of chuck and short rib, with a lower fat content than some LaFrieda blends. Eater documented the preparation and ingredients in stunning detail (which means I don’t have to). Chef Tien Ho’s Asian-accented condiments left a slightly bitter aftertaste, making it a very good, but not great, addition to the burger pantheon.

Incidentally, the restaurant was packed at 1:00 p.m., the busiest I have ever seen it.

Luke's Lobster

The admirable Luke’s Lobster succeeds like many I’ve been visiting lately—by doing one thing well. Or slightly more than one: there’s an admirable assortment of seafood rolls (lobster, crab, shrimp), chowders and bisques, but the centerpiece is the lobster roll, $15.

The eponymous Luke Holden, a native of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, is the company president. Jeff Holden, his father and a co-owner, is a former lobster fisherman who now runs a lobster processing plant. In this restaurant’s version of farm-to-table sourcing, Luke says that the catch comes directly to him without a middleman, and he can tell you precisely which Maine harbor your lobster was harvested from.

The original Luke’s, which opened in the East Village in late 2009, is mainly a take-out business: it has just eight stools. Another, on the Upper West Side, is scarcely larger, with 13 stools. That makes the Upper East Side Luke’s, with 23 stools, downright spacious.The two uptown branches opened in 2010; a fourth, in the Financial District, awaits approval of a beer license, which it should win easily.

I visited the Upper East Side Luke’s at around 10:45 p.m. on a Saturday, shortly before closing time. Even there, a lot of the business is take-out and delivery. A man came in with a take-out order at 10:55, just in time. (Luke’s doesn’t “cheat,” as some restaurants do, and close the kitchen before the nominal closing hour.)

The so-called “Lobster Ale” ($6) is one of the world’s worst beers. But the lobster roll was packed full of tender lobster meat. I can’t imagine better.

If the company can keep doing the important things right, Luke could soon have more lobster shacks than Danny Meyer has Shake Shacks.

Luke’s Lobster (242 E. 81st Street, west of Second Avenue, Upper East Side)

Tenpenny

Note: Jeffrey Tascarella, managing partner at Tenpenny when this review was written, left the restaurant to join the Daniel Humm/Will Guidara venture at the NoMad hotel. Two months later, chef Chris Cipollone left too. As of June 2013, Safet Kurtovic (of the Central Park Boathouse) is GM and Kay Choe is the chef.

*

The new restaurant Tenpenny hopes to disprove the rule that midtown hotel restaurants are for tourists. Named for a kind of carpenter’s nail, it has the chic rusticity that’s normally more at home south of 14th Street.

Tenpenny is in the boutique Gotham Hotel on 46th Street between Fifth and Madison. It’s in a quiet, dimly-lit, windowless room well back from the street. A comfortable bar anchors one side of the oblong room, with bare wood tables and a long banquette along the other.

There’s real talent at the helm, with Jeffrey Tascarella as managing partner and chief explicator of wines and cocktails. His resume includes Fiamma, Scarpetta, and Faustina. The chef, Chris Cipollone, also worked at Faustina, the now-shuttered Devin Tavern, and remains in charge at Tribeca’s Dylan Prime.

The website describes Tenpenny as an American restaurant, but both the menu and the wine list have a distinctly Italian accent—not surprising, given the principals’ backgrounds. Prices are about average for a 2011 opening, with appetizers $12–17, entrées $23–36 (all but one under $30). Tasting menus are offered at $68 for six courses, $115 (seven plus beverage pairing), or $125 (ten).

There are just seven choices each for the appetizer and the entrée, plus a couple of recited specials—always a good sign that the chef is focusing on doing a few things well. There is no burger (except at lunch), no steak, nor any of the big-ticket proteins-for-two that are routine on Manhattan menus these days.

The server brings pretzel bread (above left), literally the taste of a pretzel in the shape of a dinner roll. It’s warm and buttery, with soft honey butter and a wickedly hot mustard on the side. You could eat these all night.

Cipollini soup ($13; above right) is a riff on traditional French onion soup, with caramelized cipollini onions, fontina cheese, and a thick wad of croutons under the hood. It was too salty for my taste, and the cheese disappeared too quickly. And aren’t we about a month too late for it to still be on the menu?

Tortellini Nero ($24; above left), is a rich, spicy dish—also arguably a shade on the heavy side for spring—but a success nonetheless, with a smoky barbecued octopus ragu, green sage, tomatoes, and other vegetables. The meal ended with petits fours (above right), an unexpected luxury.

The staff were attentive and well trained, but the restaurant was only about 20 percent full on what was probably an atypical Saturday, the day before Easter.

Early reports from bloggers, yelpers, and the like, are mostly raves—remarkable for a location that is not really “on the way” to anything. It will be interesting to see how the restaurant evolves, as early popularity and an intimate space ought to allow the chef the opportunity to branch out from what is now a well prepared but slightly timid menu.

Tenpenny (Gotham Hotel, 16 E. 46th Street between Fifth & Madison, East Midtown)

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

The Acela Club at Citi Field

I was invited to a New York Mets game last week, and decided to try Citi Field’s sit-down restaurant, the Acela Club.

There’s high-powered talent behind the Acela Club: restaurateur Drew Nieporent and chef Michael Sobelman, who formerly worked at Nieporent’s Tribeca Grill. Their menu is predictably tame but well executed. For $48, you get a bountiful buffet spread of salads, antipasti, panini, cheeses, cured meats, etc., and an entrée. It doesn’t include dessert.

An appetizer buffet always brings the temptation to overdo it. There’s a much-heralded macaroni with white cheddar and pancetta, but it wasn’t quite as warm as it should be. Luscious asparagus, and a bit of prosciutto and salami, rounded out the first course.

There’s a curiously wide range of choices for the entrée, ranging from a burger to a spit-roasted chicken, all for the same fixed price. That the only steak is a filet ($5 supplement) is distinctly odd. I would expect a ribeye or a New York strip to sell briskly in this setting. Both of us had the short rib, braised forever, served on the bone with barbecue sauce. It’s an uncomplicated dish, executed competently.

By the standards of stadium dining, the Acela Club is a beautiful space. In the main dining room, the tables are large and comfortable. For $10 extra per head, you can sit in the premium section, with unobstructed views of the field. It’s well worth it, bearing in mind that you’re already in for at least $48. Aside from an outdoor terrace, which it was too chilly to use, the tables are behind a thick glass wall, which doesn’t admit much sound from the field. It’s easy to get lost in conversation, and forget that a game is in progress. Given the Mets’ poor play this season, maybe that’s a good thing.

Our reservation was at 6:15 p.m., an hour before game time. We were quoted a two-hour time limit, but that was apparently a bluff: there were other tables empty, and an 8:15 seating never materialized, so we stayed for the whole game.

The food at the Acela Club, if it were served in Manhattan, would be inconsequential. At Citi Field, it feels just about right, and you can’t beat the view. Now all it needs is a winning team.

The Acela Club at Citi Field

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

La Boite en Bois

La Boite en Bois, a Lincoln Center standby since 1985, fell off my radar in recent years. I’ve been there a few times, but until Saturday, probably not in the seven years I’ve been keeping this blog.

It’s rare that the coat-check girl is a restaurant’s smartest hire, but that just might be the case here. Walk in, and down a half-flight of stairs, and there she is, entoning “Bon soir, monsieur! Bon soir, madame!” When the website says that “you will feel as though you are in the countryside of France,” it is almost true. The cramped, rustic dining room really does transport you. I’d forgotten just how tight it is: this isn’t the place for a business deal or a seduction.

Appetizers are $8.50–13.50, entrées $19.50–30.50, but from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m., a $44 prix fixe is the only option. However, they offer almost their entire menu at that price. In contrast, Bar Boulud, a better restuarant, offers a $42 prix fixe, but your choices are limited to just three appetizers and three entrées.

Sausage with lentils is a perfect illustration: perfectly respectable, but nothing you’ll remember. It comes out in minutes and is obviously pre-made. The sausages were thicker and richer when I had the nearly identical dish at Bar Boulud in 2008. It was $16 there, but $9.50 here when ordered off the à la carte menu.

Roast salmon in a honey mustard crust, bathed in a rich cream sauce, was the best salmon I have had in a very long time, one of those sublime dishes that you wish would last forever. A similar preparation was the highlight of Bryan Miller’s one-star review for the Times, shortly after the restaurant opened.

For a pre-concert meal, reservations are mandatory. At 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday evening, the restaurant was already full, mostly with people headed to Lincoln Center. The staff is conditioned to get diners to their concerts on time, and this leads to some confusion. Wine was ordered, but never brought. A coffee was ordered; cappuccino came instead. Water glasses were not promptly refilled, and a spoon (rather than a fork) was the only utensil offered with a slice of cheesecake (housemade, and excellent).

La Boite en Bois (The Wooden Box) is one of many dozens of old-school French bistros that used to dot the city’s landscape, and if they’re a bit scarcer than they used to be, there are still plenty of them. They may be tough to tell apart, but this one delivers just enough charm to deserve a place on your pre-concert rotation.

La Boite en Bois (75 W. 68th St. near Columbus Ave., Upper West Side)

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

Fedora

Gabriel Stulman hadn’t planned to open another restaurant so soon. After launching Joseph Leonard in late 2009 and Jeffrey’s Grocery in late 2010, he was in no rush to expand his empire. But when 90-year-old Fedora Donato decided to retire from the West Village space she’d occupied since 1952, Stulman felt he had to take it.

The new Fedora has very little in common with the old, but it was a shrewd move to keep the iconic name, as Keith McNally did at nearby Minetta Tavern. I’m not sure how much of the décor he kept, aside from the neon sign outdoors, but the renovation took more than half a year.

The deep, narrow space, as now re-decorated, features a long, pretty bar (which serves a full menu) on one side and and an odd assortment of tables—some wood, others marble; some square, others round—on the other.

Much like David Chang, Stulman has become a savant for the no-reservations movement, giving a variety of (usually self-serving) reasons why they aren’t taken at Joseph Leonard or Jeffrey’s. He’s changed his tune at Fedora, or perhaps is changing it daily. Less than a month ago, Adam Platt wrote in New York that reservations are taken only for parties of four or more. Currently, they’re taken for parties of two or more, but only on the same day.

I am actually surprised that he relented. I was seated without a reservation at 6:15 p.m. on a Friday evening, but the place was full shortly thereafter, and the hostess turned away a steady stream of walk-ins. There is very little waiting space when the bar is full, and perhaps he now takes reservations to avoid alienating his neighbors, who might be annoyed by a long queue on the formerly quiet street. Make no mistake: queue, they would. Fedora is as big a hit as all of Stulman’s other places.

The kitchen, no longer Italian, is run by Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly, an alumnus of the famed Montreal restaurant Au Pied de Cochon. (Another PdC vet runs the hit Long Island City diner, M. Wells.) The menu isn’t a knock-off of his old haunt at all: there isn’t a single foie gras dish, whereas Au Pied do Cochon serves it by the bucket. Appetizers are $9–14, entrés $20–28 (not counting the obligatory côte de boeuf for two, $85), side dishes $8.

I adored the Cured Spanish Mackerel ($12; above left), served on a bed of puréed avocado with crushed chips for textural contrast. But a fine Crisped Duck Leg (above right) was ruined in a heavy slurry of barbecue sauce, a misconceived dish if ever there was one, and at $22 it is not exactly a bargain for such a small portion. The conceit of serving every dish in a bowl, whether it’s suitable or not, is not exactly endearing.

The staff is friendly and well trained. It is surely not their fault that the bread service consisted of two meager slices smaller than the palm of my hand, with soft butter that you’re expected to spread with the same knife given out for the appetizer. The two-page wine list is international, and fairly priced by my reckoning (see Decanted for more). The server offered a taste before pouring a glass of a Chateau Smith, a courtesy many expensive restaurants shamefully omit.

For all its limitations, I was prepared to love Fedora. I had a terrific dish and a dud, and at this point I can’t say which one was the aberration.

Fedora (239 W. 4th Street near W. 10th Street, West Village)

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

Brats & the Little Cheese Pub

Note: Brats closed in May 2011, and the Little Cheese Pub expanded into the space. The Little Cheese Pub has since been sold.

*

Brats and the Little Cheese Pub, though technically separate restaurants, might as well be discussed together. They have the same chef, occupy adjacent Chelsea storefronts, and opened within three months of one another.

And they share a theme seen a lot lately, common to places like Macbar, the Meatball Shop, and Crif Dogs: a narrow focus on many versions of just one dish: wieners and sausages at Brats; cheese at the Little Cheese Pub. The chef, Daniel Angerer, has a serious, full-service restaurant, the Austrian-themed Klee Brasserie. I found it underwhelming, but that was four years ago, and much may have changed since then.

That Angerer would open a cheese pub is ripe with irony, as he is best known for putting a recipe for breast milk cheese (his wife’s) on his blog. After the story was picked up in the Post, the health department told him to take the human cheese off the market. He later denied he had served it in his restaurant, but Gael Greene got a private tasting:

Surprise. It’s not the flavor that shocks me—indeed, it is quite bland, slightly sweet, the mild taste overwhelmed by the accompanying apricot preserves and a sprinkle of paprika. It’s the unexpected texture that’s so off-putting. Strangely soft, bouncy, like panna cotta.

If you’re not paying close attention, you could easily walk into the Little Cheese Pub expecting Brats, or vice versa. Indeed, I’d already taken a seat, and had to ask the server why the Cheese Pub menu seemed to have none of the wieners I was looking for.

The Little Cheese Pub resembles a conventional wine/beer bar, with its dark wood faux rural chic décor. There are several long communal tables and a number of two-tops with bar stools. You can order composed cheese platters, cheeses à la carte, or one of a half-dozen varieties of mac & cheese. The French Man Mac ($13; below left), served in a hot skillet, is better than it looks, with morbier cheese, balsam onions, and a hefty duck meat ball.

At Brats, there are eight sausage and wiener entrées, all house-made, $6.95–10.95, from a conventional bratwurst to a French duck sausage. An entertaining illustrated menu shows photos of the dogs, alongside models in seductive poses, with balloon quotes showing “wiener” double ententres.

The server said a similar menu is on the way for the milkshakes, which include such flavors as vanilla with bacon confetti, PB&J with honey popcorn, and the Volcano (not for children), infused with tobacco.

I ordered the Dragon (above right), a pork sausage with pickled kimchee cabbage, pea shoots, and a spicy sriracha mustard—not your standard hot dog, but I enjoyed its slow, tangy burn.

There’s a variety of side dishes (none of which I tried), and a generous selection of wines and beers. They’re all under $10, which makes sense, bearing in mind that this is basically an upscale hot dog stand. Most of the seating in the narrow space is at the bar.

Brats (362 W. 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Avenues, Chelsea)
The Little Cheese Pub (362½ W. 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Avenues, Chelsea)

Ditch Plains

Note: Ditch Plains on the Upper West Side closed in September 2014, due to an unaffordable rent increase. Ditch Plains in the West Village remains open.

*

Ditch Plains opened last month on the Upper West Side. The critics will ignore it, because it’s a clone of Ditch Plains in the West Village, which is now five years old. In a way, that’s a shame. It’s not that chef Marc Murphy is doing anything original, but a civilized restaurant from a chef with some ability, where you can dine happily on $20 entrées, deserves a shout-out.

Murphy is obviously not a risk-taker, in more ways than one. Rather than try his hand at something new, he replicated a concept that was already successful downtown. That was the formula too, when he cloned his Tribeca hit Landmarc at the Time-Warner Center. The menus at these restaurants don’t change very often, and they hew mainly to readily recognized comfort-food classics that don’t challenge the diner.

Murphy obviously has talent, and you have to wonder what he could do, if he ventured outside of his comfort zone. Instead, he makes news by winning the judges’ vote at the South Beach Burger Bash. Mind you, even winning a burger contest requires ability. It’s obviously not a fluke, as Peter Meehan of the Times loved the burger too, in an otherwise lukewarm review of the original Ditch Plains. (The restaurant got a more favorable reception from the Underground Gourmet in New York.)

The obscure name refers to a beach in Montauk. Despite the burger and a few other sops to landlubbers, Ditch Plains is supposed to evoke a seafood shack, albeit a pretty large one with 165 seats. The most expensive entrées are a lobster roll ($26) and a marinated skirt steak ($24); all of the others are $22 or less.

My friend, who was not aware of the West Village branch, thought that the menu was designed to appeal to children—hence, mac and cheese, hot dogs, wings, chili, and so forth. I think it’s just a coincidence, but the restaurant is perfect for the stereotype Upper West Side stroller-toting couple. Indeed, you’ll probably be sharing the dining room with young families, which is either a selling point or a drawback, depending on your perspective.

It’s also close enough for a casual, inexpensive meal before the opera: less costly and less crowded than the Lincoln Center restaurants. Reservations aren’t taken for parties smaller than six, but we had no trouble walking in on a Friday evening. When we left, at around 7:15 p.m., the dining room was about half full.

The kitchen turned out a very good bowl of mussels and fries ($20) and a perfectly respectable grilled fish (red snapper, I believe; $20). An appetizer of spicy pork meatballs ($13) was the highlight, an ample portion slathered in fontina cheese and tomato sauce, with grilled sourdough bread.

In common with Murphy’s other restaurants, the wine list features an abundance of half bottles, an innovation at the time that others have copied (Bar Henry, Ciano), albeit not widely. That might be the most original thing Murphy has done.

Ditch Plains (100 W. 82nd Street at Columbus Avenue, Upper West Side)

Food: ★
Service: ★
Ambiance: ★
Overall: ★