Alder

Note: Alder closed in August 2015. Wylie Dufresne, the chef and owner, did not explain the decision, but when we dropped in a couple of months earlier, we found the dining room almost empty on a weeknight. Earlier in the year, he instituted a tasting-menu format that, perhaps, didn’t go over as well as he’d hoped.

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Give Wylie Dufresne credit. Give him double-credit.

When WD~50, his modernist—and not always approchable—restaurant, struggled during the Great Recession, he stayed open. For a while, he was doing just five nights a week, but he didn’t give up, and he never dumbed down the menu.

And for ten years, WD~50 was all he had. Unlike most chefs with three New York Times stars, he didn’t open a more casual restaurant that might’ve distracted him, or competed with the flagship for his attention.

In May 2012, WD~50 abolished the à la carte menu in the main dining room. Tasting menus are now all you can get. They’re also back up to seven nights a week. I guess the Great Recession is over. (Not everyone thinks the new format is an improvement.)

About that time, he started planning Alder, a new casual restaurant in the East Village, which finally opened in March 2013. Alder is à la carte and less elaborate than WD~50. It’s Dufresne’s take on classic pub food, recognizably in his style, but not as avant-garde as WD~50 sometimes can be. There are four cooks in the kitchen at Alder, as opposed to twelve at WD~50, so the food is a lot simpler.

Generally, you’ll recognize what you eat, which at WD~50 is not always the case. You can take grandma or perhaps even your picky Aunt Gertrude, provided she doesn’t mind the noise. Sound levels in the dining room can be punishing. We visited on a warm summer evening, and fortunately were able to sit outside. Indoors, I might like Alder a lot less.

But we ate outside, so I loved it.

The menu consists of eighteen items priced $8–24, served tapas-style, and suitable for sharing, with no explicit division between appetizer and entrée. Like most small-plates restaurants, it only seems inexpensive. Our fairly modest order of five plates, a cocktail each, and a $48 bottle of wine, ran to $177 before tax and tip.

 

Every meal at Alder begins with a serving of Giardiniera (above left), an Italian–American relish of pickled vegetables. It’s a bit odd, as several critics have noted, as it doesn’t really go with the rest of the food, and no bread is served with it. But it’s very good on its own terms: we made fast work of it.

“Pigs in a Blanket” ($13; above right), like so much of the food at Alder, is a play on the old classic, here made with Chinese sausage, Japanese mustard, and a sweet chili sauce. Consider it a must-order.

 

Sun Gold Tomatoes ($18; above left) are served with Peekytoe crab, fried naan, and edamame; but what comes through is mostly tomato, and not enough of the crab.

I could eat the foie gras terrine ($19; above right) all day. It was served with watermelon and shiso on a Ritz cracker. (Some critics have mentioned poached apple, so I think the recipe changes periodically.) But the Ritz cracker is a constant: who knew it paired so well with foie gras?

 

New England Clam Chowder ($16; above left) comes with “oyster crackers,” which you toss into the soup. It’s a terrific combination. A party of two need not worry about ordering this: they send it out in two bowls.

 

The kitchen aced the Roasted Chicken ($21; above left), served with oyster mushrooms and charred romaine. But Halibut ($24; above right) was bland and dry: I was more fond of the corn underneath it than the fish itself.

The pacing of the meal was just right; silverware was replaced after every course.

There’s about 40 bottles on the wine list, plenty of them below $50. The server decanted our 2010 Morgon ($48), which was served at the correct temperature, but in juice glasses. For a check that rises above $200 after tax and tip, you’d think they could afford wine stems.

Out of five dishes, I count three hits, one dud (the Halibut), and another in between (the tomatoes with crabmeat and edamame). That’s pretty much what everyone says about Alder: Dufresne and his team don’t hit a home run with every dish, but there’s more than enough to make the restaurant hugely worthwhile.

Alder (157 Second Avenue at E. 10th Street, East Village)

Food: A modernist take on pub food
Service: Very good; would be great if they’d bring in real wine glasses
Ambiance: East Village chic, and too noisy: east outside while you still can

Rating: ★★

Umami Burger

The California-based Umami Burger chain opened its first New York City branch three weeks ago, backed by a chorus of heavy panting by the usual sources. All that excitement for a burger joint, and an imported one at that?

You can see why. They serve a very good burger, named for that indescribable taste sensation common to such foods as aged beef, cheeses, and shellfish.

The whole menu consists of a handful of salads, starters and side dishes, and eight—count them, eight—kinds of burgers. That last castegory includes items like turkey, tuna, and duck burgers, in addition to traditional ones.

There are eight beers on tap and sixteen in bottles, nine wines (most available by the glass or bottle), and fifteen house cocktails ($12 each). That’s not the typical beverage list for a burger joint. If you’re teetotaling, there are the obvious sodas and odd ones too, like Mexican Sprite (whatever that is). I visited in the early afternoon, so I drank just lemonade.

I ordered the Truffle Burger with Fries ($12.50), and — what more is there to say? It was a great, thick burger, cooked to a perfect medium rare, and with an ideal patty to bun ratio. I didn’t detect much truffle flavor, nor did I care. But if you prefer the smash technique, perfected (should I say ruined?) at places like Bill’s Bar and Burger, then this place isn’t for you.

The fries are thin and crisped, excellent specimens of the style.

You’d call the bi-level space “bare bones” if it were anything but a burger joint. For a burger joint, it’s upscale. There are bars and free-standing tables on both levels, plus a row of banquettes on the ground floor.

A host seats you. Service is very good. There was no wait to get in, but I visited at an odd hour, although even at 1:30pm, well past the lunch rush, the place was about half full.

I don’t want to over-sell Umami Burger. It’s a burger spot, and a good one.

Umami Burger (432 Sixth Avenue at W. 10th Street, Greenwich Village)

Food: Burgers are the focus
Service: Very good, even excellent, for a burger joint
Ambiance: A comfortable bi-level restaurant with two bars

Rating: ★

Brasserie Cognac East

Sometimes, you can just tell that a new restaurant fulfills a neighborhood’s long-felt need. That’s my reaction at Brasserie Cognac East on the Upper East Side French, which was packed to the gills on a random summer Tuesday.

Classic French cuisine has been on the upswing the last few years, as I and many others have noted. Still, the swish of the scythe was so devastating in the 1990s and early aughts that the arrival of another such establishment is welcome.

More, please.

Cognac East is the second of the family. Its older sister opened in West Midtown in 2008, as Brasserie Cognac de Monsieur Ballon. The fictitious M. Ballon, it seems, has been kicked to the curb. The chef, Florian V. Hugo (the Les Misérables author’s descendant), clearly knows his French cuisine. When it’s right, it’s very right.

Both restaurants are built for volume: there are 100 tightly-packed seats at Cognac East, on two levels. The space (formerly the Italian restaurant Lumi) is loud, and not the most charming. Internet reviews suggest the service can be uneven. That was my experience, too, at the original Brasserie Cognac. I had a terrific vol au vent on opening night, but a meal about six months later that I’d rather forget.

This must all, of course, be placed in the context of a mid-priced menu, with most entrées below $30 and most appetizers in the mid-teens — higher than Sel et Poivre, lower than Orsay, both nearby. If I lived in the area, Cognac would be in my regular rotation.

 

We loved the cheese puffs (above left) that started the meal. A tomato-y lobster bisque (above right) was really good.

 

The tuna tarte flambé (above left) is an unusual dish, but it works. The version we were served was spiced with wasabi, which is probably not in Escoffier’s cookbook. There is no mention of wasabi on the Internet menu, so perhaps that has been phased out.

The shoestring fries (above right) were crunchy and salty, exactly as they ought to be.

 

Steak tartare (above left) was disappointing, as an overdose of pepper completely smothered the over-sauced beef. But all was forgiven with a perfect scallop (above right) with mushrooms and a squash purée.

 

The cheese soufflé (above left), made with emmenthal, gruyère and parmesan, was one of the evening’s highlights, a must for soufflé connoisseurs. The side salad it comes with (above right) doesn’t add much to the dish.

  

If the desserts we sampled are any guide, your last memories will be good ones. Our favorite was the coconut shell (above left), with bitter chocolate, coconut sorbet, exotic fruit salad, and passion fruit sauce. Or try the rose macaron (above center) with litchies, fresh raspberries, rose cream and berry sauce. The floating island (above right) with poached meringue with caramel and vanilla crème anglaise was okay, but I have had better versions of this dish.

Full disclosure: we dined at the publicist’s invitation, sat in the corner booth, and got Cognac East’s best. The throngs packing the dining room are evidence enough that the neighborhood wants such a place. I hope the chef and his team can give it to them.

Brasserie Cognac East (963 Lexington Ave. at 70th Street, Upper East Side)

Atera

You could hardly blame owner Jodi Richard if she’d given up after Compose quickly failed in 2010–11.

The concept was always a tough sell: a foraged modernist $120 prix fixe-only tasting menu served around a 12-seat dining counter, served by a chef with impeccable credentials but no record of success.

Despite favorable reviews in other outlets, The Times could not be bothered to review it, sending Julia Moskin for a Dining Brief, no doubt while Sam Sifton snored his way through three visits to La Petite Maison.

Richard didn’t give up. She lured Matthew Lightner to New York, chef of the acclaimed Portland restaurant Castagna, closed for a renovation that stretched to nearly six months, and re-opened as Atera.

It had to have been a risk for Lightner: this city sometimes chews up and spits out chefs imported from elsewhere. Just ask Miguel Sanchez Romera.

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Per Se: Luxury Cars and Four Stars

After a deeply enjoyable lunch at Per Se recently, I started thinking about what it means to be a four-star restaurant.

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Most of us can’t afford a Rolls Royce, a Jaguar, or a Maserati. Yet, most of us respect those cars. They captivate us. If offered a free ride in a Rolls, wouldn’t we all jump at the chance?

Not so with four-star restaurants. There’s a large sub-culture that finds these bastions of luxury actively worse — who wouldn’t care to visit them, even if they were free, and who certainly don’t find the stratospheric sticker prices remotely worthwhile.

Luxury restaurants coddle you. Some diners are stubbornly resistant to coddling. It’s not just that they’re willing to pay less, in exchange for the same food with worse service. They actually prefer it that way. Frank Bruni captured the ethos of the new generation in his first review of Momofuku Ssäm Bar:

Ssam Bar answers the desires of a generation of savvy, adventurous diners with little appetite for starchy rituals and stratospheric prices.

They want great food, but they want it to feel more accessible, less effete.

These comments captured the false dichotomy. If you don’t join them, you’re un-savvy and effete. Good service is a “starchy ritual,” a religious ceremony repeated endlessly for no logical purpose.

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