The NoMad

You’ve got to hand it to Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, chef and restaurateur of the city’s hottest new restaurant, The NoMad: they know how to make an entrance, whether it be the Goodfellas-inspired promo video, or the publicity machine that generated eleven Eater.com posts in a nine-day span.

Humm and Guidara are the team behind Eleven Madison Park, which Frank Bruni elevated to four stars in 2009. The pair later bought out restaurant’s former owner, Danny Meyer, after they signed onto the NoMad project without their boss in tow. Meyer no doubt recalled a similar split, when Tom Colicchio opened Craft without him, while remaining the absentee chef at Gramercy Tavern: it was bound not to work in the long run, and this time Meyer chose not to delay the inevitable.

It’s news whenever a four-star chef opens a new place, but I don’t recall anything quite like the breathless coverage here. One month in, The NoMad is packed every evening, at almost any hour. It sets up gargantuan expectations that the restaurant might struggle to meet in the long run, after the excitement dies down and the chef is once again spending most of his time at the mother ship.

The NoMad is a major opening, no question about it. Although it lacks tablecloths, everything about it screams luxury. One of its five rooms, the Atrium, is “inspired by the great courtyards of Europe.” Another, the Parlour, is a “stately room featuring dark oak furnishings, richly textured fabrics and over 100 pressed antique herbs.” Yet another is an “intimate cove [with] the original fireplace imported from a great French château.” Or if not there, the “fully curated, two-level library connected by an original spiral staircase imported from the South of France.”

The staff, dressed in crisply pressed suits, look the part. Under GM Jeffrey Tascarella’s direction, they put on a well-choreographed show. I should note that Mr. Tascarella recognized me as soon as I arrived. I’d like to assume they do the same for everyone, but I can’t vouch for that: a couple in front of me was quoted a 45-minute wait to be seated for drinks in the library, whereas they accommodated me immediately. (At the bar, revelers were stacked three deep.)

The house cocktails ($15) are outstanding, including two of the best drinks with brown spirits that I’ve had in a long time, the Satan’s Circus (rye, chili-infused aperol, cherry heering, lemon) and the Old Alhambra (Islay scotch, vermouth, sherry, creme de cacao).

Like many a hotel restaurant, The NoMad will be serving three meals a day, plus (I assume) room service, which gives the owners many more meals over which to amortize their investment. Nevertheless, dinner is expensive here, with snacks $8–16, appetizers $14–24 and entrées $22–39. Only the vegetarian mains are under $30: Eater has already made its share of jokes about the $22 carrot entrée.

Breads, baked in-house, change daily. A flat mini-bread fried with fingerling potatoes and spring onions was as good as anything of its kind that we’ve had in a restaurant this year.

 

We started with one of the snack items, a rich Beef Tartare ($16; above left) with cornichons and horseradish, with crisp slices of toasted brioche to spread it on.

The house sent out a “Grande Plateau des Fruits de Mer,” normally $24 per person. I didn’t note the components, but it was far more impressive than your usual seafood platter, in that most of the items were composed, and were not just raw shellfish on the halfshell.

 

The kitchen also sent out two mid-courses, which I think were variants on the two vegetarian entrées on the normal menu: asparagus with button mushrooms; carrots and parsnip. These were the two best dishes we had all evening.

  

A whole chicken for two ($78) is the restaurant’s signature dish, the only large-format item on the menu. The whole bird is presented tableside (above left), then sent back to the kitchen for plating (above right).

It’s an impressive technical achievement, with truffle, foie gras, and brioche under the near-blackened skin. But just like the duck for two at Eleven Madison Park, one can’t help feeling that what comes back is rather meager, especially at the price.

There’s a whole Chowhound thread about the inconsistencies in this dish, which I wish I’d read in advance, as I might not have been so keen to order it. I didn’t really taste much foie gras or truffle. The chicken itself wasn’t bad, but the accompanying fricassee of dark meat (above) was not very pleasant at all. A few days later, we had the fried chicken at Peels, a much more satisfying dish that costs only $21.75.

We dined in the luxurious Parlour, which struck me as a much nicer space than the other main dining room, the Atrium, which is louder, and in which the tables seem closer together. There is much on this menu that I’d love to try. The chicken was a disappointment, but also an anomaly, as we loved everything else we tried.

The next evening, we dined at Café Boulud, which like The NoMad, is the next peg down the scale, below a four-star chef’s flagship. But whereas the former is small, quiet and understated, The NoMad is massive, brash, and a little exhausting. Messrs. Humm and Guidara must, of course, choose their own path, but it will be interesting to see if all of this excitement is sustainable.

The NoMad (1170 Broadway at 28th Street, NoMad)

Food: A focused Euro-American menu, just a notch below luxurious
Service: Crisp, correct, and attentive
Ambiance: An over-the-top dining palace, without the tablecloths

Rating: ★★
Why? Humm is a great chef, and there’s nothing in NYC quite like The NoMad

Corsino

Corsino never made it to the top of my review list when it opened in late 2009. I was put off by the repetitiveness of the Denton brothers’ restaurant proffer: all they seemed to do was clone their original casual Italian spot, ’inoteca, with minor tweaks from one installation to the next. (An attempt at upscale Italian, Bar Milano, was a spectacular flame-out.)

In the meantime, the brothers split up recently, with Jason buying out Joe, who has moved to Australia.

Corsino sits on an ideal West Village street corner, with big glass windows on two sides letting in plenty of sunlight. The casual rustic décor is right out of the Dentons’ playbook.

The menu is a lineup of “the usual suspects,” with a few twists for the more adventurous, such as: tripe soup; oxtail ravioli with bitter chocolate; heritage brisket meatballs.

Prices are inexpensive, with crostini $2.50 apiece, antipasti $5–13, pastas $15–18, entrées $15–21, sides $7–9. The antipasti and pastas looked a lot more interesting, so we ordered only from those categories.

Affetatti (sliced meats) are $10 individually, but for $18 you get an impressive spread of testa (pig’s head), lingua (tongue), soppressata, prosciutto, mortadella, and speck.

 

The pastas were exemplary: strascinati (above left) with pork shoulder, pecorino & nutmeg; and clever special of buckwheat ravioli filled with spinach, decorated with flower petals (above right).

The wine list, too, is far better than you’d expect: eight pages, all Italian, grouped by region. You could spend hundreds, but there’s an ample selection below $40—as there should be (ahem: Gabe Stulman). Service was attentive, but our visit early on a slow Sunday evening, with the restaurant less than half full, may not be typical.

It’s hard to call Corsino a destination, when so many neighborhoods have Italian food of this quality, but it is certainly enjoyable here (especially when it’s not busy), and the wine list will reward repeat visits.

Corsino (637 Hudson Street at Horatio Street, West Village)

Food: good, seasona, casual, Italian
Service: friendly and attentive
Ambiance: cookie-cutter rustic chic

Rating: ★
Why? The food is pretty good and the wine list is even better

Bohemian

 

Any popular restaurant must decide how to ration access to its scarcest resource: seats. The two most common strategies are accepting reservations and taking walk-ins—first-come, first-served. Even those basic strategies have variations, from the funky online reservation system at Momofuku Ko, to the transferrable tickets sold at Grant Achatz’s Next.

Some restaurants that take reservations the old-fashioned way—by phone—are in such high demand that a prime-time table is practically inaccessible by normal means. Blue Hill Stone Barns takes reservations two months to the day in advance, and routinely fills up within minutes. You won’t find me anytime soon at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, the tasting menu at Roberta’s, or the three-day-a-week pop-up Frej, to name a few: there are too many hoops to jump.

Taking walk-ins is said to be more “democratic,” but the hassle we endured recently, just for the privilege of eating at Danji in Hell’s Kitchen, is a reminder that this often isn’t any fun at all.

At first blush, the door at the Japanese restaurant Bohemian seems more seems more impenetrable than all of these put together. There’s no listed telephone number, and it takes creative googling to find the website, the hopelessly unguessable playearth.jp, which it shares with sister restaurants in Nishiazabu, Japan, and Bali, Indonesia.

It doesn’t appear to be a restaurant website at all. After a few clicks, you find an explanation, and it’s not encouraging: “Please keep in mind that the location and contact info is not open to the public, so please be referred by somone who has already visited us.

“If there are people feeling, ‘I haven’t been there, but I really want to visit!’ please send us a brief introduction of yourself to the email address below. We may contact you to come over!”

I tried the latter, and within an hour had a favorable response by email, which included the “secret” telephone number. A day or so later, I called and secured a Sunday evening reservation, and that was that.

The system is strange, but try getting someone on the phone at Mario Batali’s Babbo: I remember getting busy signals for weeks, before I finally spoke to a human being. The first time I booked at Per Se, it took 45 minutes to get through—and I had to call exactly at 10:00 a.m. the day that bookings opened for the date I wanted.

I’m not here to defend Bohemian’s Byzantine ways, only to point out that it’s a lot more accessible than many restaurants that ration access using far more traditional methods. Plenty of folks have cracked the code: Bohemian has a 27/25/28 rating on Zagat.

Like everything else about Bohemian, the location is not at all obvious: at the back of a long, mysterious corridor fronted by a NoHo butcher shop on Great Jones Street. You ring a doorbell, and if you’re on the list (walk-ins aren’t accepted), the server admits you.

There are twenty-five seats, most at low-slung tables and sofas, as if you’re the guest in someone’s rec room. We were offered seats at the bar, which might be preferable. It’s a very deep bar, with ample room for placemats and drinks; seating is comfortable.

Despite various news stories and blog posts describing Bohemian as “private” or “mysterious,” they do not discourage publicity, once you finally get in. Illustrated blog posts, like this one, aren’t hard to find. But most reviewers honor the restaurant’s request not to disclose the address or phone number, as will I, even though neither is all that hard to find.

An evening here progresses, more or less, as it would at any restaurant. The izakaya style menu offers various small and medium-size plates, in a wide price range, but not expensive for what you get. (Click on the miniature image above to see more.)

The style of the cuisine might be called fusion, with traditional sushi and sashimi and the ever-present miso black cod, standing alongside “Mac & Cheese,” fresh oysters, and mini-burgers.

We had the six-course tasting menu, which at $55 might be one of the best bargains in town. However, I get the impression it seldom changes, as most of the other reviews I’ve read, featured mostly the same dishes.

  

The three starters were just fine, though not really memorable on their own: a fresh vegetable fondue (above left), an uni croquette (above center), and assorted cold cuts (above right).

But the entrée was one of the best dishes I’ve had all year, a pan roasted branzini with a bounty of seasonal vegetables, including potatoes, asparagus, olives, onions, garlic, Brussels sprouts, and several others I’ve forgotten. The skin of the fish was nicely crisped, and succulent inside.

We were served the whole fish, which (with the vegetables) was more than we could finish. It shows on the à la carte menu at just $28, which I assume is a half portion.

  

The fourth course is the only one for which a choice is offered. I had the mini-burger (above left), described as “Washu,” one of the breeds that appears on most menus as “Wagyu.” Served medium rare, it had a rich, fatty taste, served with two fried potato slivers. The other option was the Ikura Caviar Rice Bowl (above center), a dish so luscious it could almost be dessert.

A simple but effective Almond Pannacotta (above right) with black tapioca concluded the evening.

The restaurant was fully booked on a Sunday evening. Our tasting menu progressed at a comfortable pace. With its relatively small dining room, a couple of servers seemed to have no trouble keeping diners fed and lubricated.

The quality of the food took a notable step up mid-way through, with the arrival of the branzino, which was so good that it might almost have been worth $55 all by itself. To pay that for five courses was remarkable.

Bohemian

Food: Traditional Japanese and fusion cuisine
Service: Attentive and personal
Ambiance: The feel of a private club in someone’s home

Rating: ★★
Why? Relaxing and enjoyable. “Secrecy” works to its advantage.

Molyvos

Have you been to Molyvos latelty? Once at the vanguard of the city’s Greek dining scene, in recent years it had fallen into irrelevance, seldom mentioned, a scene for revelers and tourists. Of course, any decent restaurant near the Theater District is going to have customers, but Molyvos surely considered itself better than that.

I don’t know if it was the lack of press or a paltry 19 rating for décor on Zagat that made the owners finally take notice. On my last visit, I don’t remember disliking it. But I recall it was dark and and kitschy, dominated by amphorae and other Greek bric-à-brac. (There’s a slideshow of the old décor at New York.)

The space is now brighter and less cluttered, more in Aegean blues than archeological browns. This isn’t a bid to reclaim the three-star rating the restaurant once had (from Ruth Reichl) when it opened in 1997, before Eric Asimov knocked it back to two, five years later. It remains a Theater District restaurant at its heart, turning out food at too hectic a pace to be as careful and as luxurious as it should be.

But this is still very good Greek cuisine, a genre under-represented in Manhattan, and the wine list is fabulous. The website claims the most extensive selection of Greek wines in the United States: 400 bottles, with no bail-out for timid drinkers hesitant to order labels they don’t recognize. I have certainly never seen more Greek wines on one list. There are nearly 40 wines available by the glass, and should you find yourself at sea, the staff know the list well and give sage advice.

On the menu, there’s a separate category of about a dozen Mezedes, or small plates ($7–10) for the bar crowd. Appetizers are $12–18, entrées $22–36 (most $30 and up), with a separate list of a half-dozen whole fish by the pound, perhaps a trap for the unwary.

I’ve no basis for comparison with older menus, but there’s continuity here: the same executive chef, Jim Botsakos, has been around from the beginning.

 

I didn’t sample the Soupia (cuttlefish) on a bed of orzo ($24; above left), but both my guests said it was far too salty, and it was left half-uneaten. Arni Kokkinisto ($30; above right), a slow-cooked lamb stew, was tender and full of flavor, but an unimpressive presentation at the price.

 

I loved the Barbounia ($30; above left), four whole fish with a rich, wood-grilled flavor. You would expect the fish to be excellent here, as the same owners also run Oceana, midtown’s best seafood restaurant without four stars; and Abboccato, where the seafood is likewise a strength. A side of spinach ($7; above right) was quite good, as well.

Molyvos isn’t suffering for business at all. At 6:30 p.m. on a Monday evening, there was a large banquet at the back of the restaurant. By the time we left, most tables were taken, and there was a lively bar crowd. Post-renovation, Molyvos no longer looks old-fashioned, and its wine list has quietly grown to the best of its kind in New York. The menu must be carefully navigated, but I suspect the whole fish will never let you down.

If you haven’t gone in a while, Molyvos deserves another look.

Molyvos (871 Seventh Avenue between 55th & 56th Streets, West Midtown)

Food: Very good classic Greek cuisine and whole fish
Wine: 400 bottles, 40 by the glass, all Greek; the best of its kind in New York
Service: Knowledgeable and attentive, bearing in mind the size of the place
Ambiance: Bright, modern, less touristy than before

Rating: ★★
Why? For the incomparable wine list and the excellent whole fish