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.

Click to read more ...

Le Jardin Bistro

How did I miss this it? A French bistro as cute as Le Jardin was on Cleveland Place for 15 years, and I never noticed.

It closed in 2010 to make way for John Fraser’s pop-up What Happens When, followed by The Cleveland, which tried out three chefs in two years and finally closed after a dispute with the landlord.

Meanwhile, Le Jardin’s original owner, Israel Katz, found a business partner and re-opened Le Jardin in an old townhouse on Avenue C, or perhaps I should say, “Rue C.”

A lovelier spot for a rustic French bistro would be difficult to imagine. On the ground floor, there’s a bar and an enclosed patio. Most of the seating is up a flight of stairs, where there’s a spectacular bi-level dining room with an open kitchen, distressed brick walls, and a functional fireplace, which was roaring the evening we went. Past a set of French doors, there’s an enclosed candle-lit garden, which is open all year.

If you’re looking for the ultimate charming third-date spot, put Le Jardin at the top of the list.

The menu is taken from the French bistro playbook. There is nothing original, but if you love this cuisine, you will want to order all of it. Prices are so modest, you could stay all night and have dinner twice. Appetizers are $5–12, mains $14–22. For dessert, cheeses are $4 each, sweets $9.

The all-French wine list offers nine choices by the glass, fourteen modestly-priced bottles ($42–69), and and ten “cru & back vintages” soaring up to $750 for a 1989 second-growth St. Julien. We were happy to order at the expensive end of the regular list, a 2009 Hautes-Côtes de Nuits ($69).

Click to read more ...

The Prime Rib Feast at The Breslin

It’s never too soon to re-visit The Breslin, one of two April Bloomfield restaurants with a Michelin star — The Spotted Pig is the other — and both criminally under-rated by the Paper of Record, at one star apiece.

The Breslin has been with us for five years, and the value proposition isn’t much changed. It’s a full-on cholesterol assault, but you’ll love it all the same. Sam Sifton had a point when he implied it would kill you to eat here too often. So would Peter Luger, but no one’s making you drop in every night.

There’s a robust market for the so-called “large format feast,” which started to appear all over town at about the time The Breslin did. There are four of them here, all for eight to twelve guests: prime rib ($95 per person), roasted duck ($65), whole suckling pig ($85) and lamb curry ($80).

Order one of these, and you’ll be seated at the dining room’s large central table, facing the open kitchen, where you can oogle the chefs, and the rest of the guests can oogle you as the food comes out. A group of us visited recently for the rib. (Click on the photo, above left, for a larger image of the menu.)

Click to read more ...

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.)

Click to read more ...

Calle Dão

Cuba once had the largest Chinese ex-pat population in Latin America. Havana’s El Bario Chino (its Chinatown) occupied 44 square blocks in 1870, though today it is restricted to a portion of Calle Cuchillo (“Knife Street”).

Chinese–Cubans predictably migrated to New York, where Chelsea and the Upper West Side became home to “dozens of greasy spoons, unique in that they served Chinese food and Cuban food in separate measure, side by side.” That era has long since passed. More recently, Jeffrey Chodorow’s Asia de Cuba was a clubby, upscale riff on the same idea. The New York outpost closed in 2011, but it soldiers on in London.

I haven’t seen much evidence that New Yorkers mourned the loss. But Naples native Marco Britti fell in love with Cuban–Chinese fusion cuisine when he lived in Havana. He is betting that the city will welcome its re-introduction. To carry out the concept, he hired chef Humberto Guallpa, who was executive chef at Vandaag for its final year in business, from 2011–12. (Britti also owns Favela Cubana, a more straightforward Cuban restaurant in Greenwich Village.)

Welcome to Calle Dão, a fusion restaurant with a fusion name: “knife” in Mandarin, “street” in Spanish. It’s located on one of those forlorn midtown streets where you’d have no reason to go without an appointment, but I suspect they do good lunch business here. Dinner could pick up if the concept catches on.

But will it? There’s no rule that necessarily limits chefs to the cuisine they grew up with. Yet, when an Italian (Britti) and an Ecuadoran (Guallpa) are charged with reproducing the cultures of China and Cuba, you fear that something will be lost in translation. The dark room feels like the Epcot version of Havana. It’s comfortable enough, but the authenticity seems faked.

I never experienced the greasy-spoon version of Cuban–Chinese fusion, but the elements of both cultures are plainly evident, with chopsticks and silverware at every place setting. You’ll certainly pay more than in Havana, with appetizers and ceviches $8–12, entrées $13–32 (most over $25), and side dishes $8.

Click to read more ...