Adour

[Rockwell Group]

Note: Adour closed in November 2012. A succession of executive chefs was not able to reclaim a lost Michelin star, or apparently, lost business.

*

My girlfriend and I thought it was near tragic when Alain Ducasse at the Essex House closed. It was the site of perhaps the best meal we have had in New York. When Ducasse announced that he was moving to the St. Regis, site of the former four-star Lespinasse, in a new restaurant called Adour, we hoped the magic would be moving with him.

Alas, the magic is nowhere to be found. Adour is a bore. A really crashing bore.

I don’t think three-star food has to be innovative: I find real pleasure in classics done well. But the menu here is downright soporific: one yawn after another. There’s no excitement on the plate at all. And if no longer priced in the stratosphere, as it was at the Essex House, the food at Adour is still very expensive. For entrées priced in the $40s, one expects at least some indication of the creative spark that earned Ducasse all of those Michelin stars.

The menu is printed on stiff boards glued into an upholstered cardboard folder. It is obviously not easily changeable. It makes Adour feel like a crass hotel restaurant. The subtle message it sends is: “The food isn’t changing anytime soon.” It is almost all in English. It apparently hasn’t occurred to Monsieur Ducasse that patrons at his restaurant might want, you know, French food.

Is this Ducasse’s way of saying “Screw you, New York”? Or, in his eagerness to pander—to give Americans what he thinks we want—has he forgotten to give us what he’s actually good at? We asked one of the servers what had happened to the great menu served at the Essex House. “It was time to move on,” he said.

To “move on” to this?

We certainly expected dialed-down luxury, given a price point about 50% lower than the Essex House. But there isn’t even an amuse-bouche here. If you order a cheese course ($22), there’s no cart, just a plate of four cheeses deposited on your table.

The wine service shines, though. The menu, after all, is supposedly designed to go well with wine, though I am not sure what that means. The list has plenty of compelling choices at decent prices, including multiple bottles of red under $50. We selected a 1996 Bricco Boschi Barolo at $105, which the staff decanted for us. I also liked the bread service, which came with a wonderful soft olive butter.

 
Sweetbread “Meunière”, Egg Purse (left); Foie Gras Tapioca Ravioli (right)

Sweetbreads with wild mushrooms ($24) were simply grilled, but I appreciated the egg purse in the center of the plate, which made a rich, runny mess. My girlfriend’s Foie Gras Tapioca Ravioli ($23) were dull. The taste of foie can always be counted on for luxury by default, but the dish made no attempt to offer any contrast.

 
Venison Medallions (left); Roasted Colorado Rack of Lamb (right)

Both Venison ($42) and Rack of Lamb ($48) were left basically to fend for themselves, with token vegetables offering little to amuse the palate. My girlfriend said that the side of risotto that came with her lamb was more interesting than the lamb itself.

 
Pear Clafoutis (left); Gala Apple Soufflé (right)

Neither dessert captured our imagination either, though at $14 apiece we didn’t feel cheated. The plates of petits-fours were generous, though we were full and didn’t touch them.

At Adour, the service team is no longer all French, as they were at the Essex House. Most of them seem capable, though we observed some minor snafus that no doubt will be worked out as the restaurant gets its legs. When we arrived, we appreciated that we were given ample time to peruse the wine list and enjoy our champagne. The restaurant wasn’t full, and the table appeared to be ours for as long as we wanted it.

The David Rockwell-designed space is comfortable and gorgeous. It could easily be one of the city’s most serene spots to enjoy a meal. But the food doesn’t live up to it. We can only hope Ducasse will take this milquetoast menu back into his laboratory, and return with some real excitement.

Adour (2 E. 55th Street at Fifth Avenue in the St. Regis Hotel, East Midtown)

Food: *½
Service: ***
Ambiance: ***
Overall: **

The Stanton Social

OpenTable.com has a list of the Top 10 Booked Restaurants in New York. For a long time, the Stanton Social was on that list. It isn’t any longer, but I’m sure it’s not far off the pace. I almost pinched myself a few weeks ago, when I saw a 7:00 p.m. two-top on a Friday evening, and grabbed it.

If there’s a popularity checklist in the restaurant industry, the Stanton Social ticks all of the boxes. Its inexpensive tapas-style menu covers all the popular cuisines. Check. Kobe beef and foie gras are on hand to contribute an haute cuisine flourish or two. Check. Lower East Side vibe. Check. Eye-popping AvroKO décor. Check. An ear-thumping sound track. Check.

I arrived early, so I headed upstairs to try a few of the house cocktails. Black Magic ($10), a simple mixture of Guinness and Brut Champagne, was a complete failure. The bartender later admitted he hates it too: “Guinness and champagne can be good friends outside of work, but they don’t belong together at work.”

The Social Tea ($12), with Stoli Citros, green tea and orange-honey marmelade was appealing in a generically sweet way. But the best of the three I tried was the bartender’s recommendation, the Blood Orange Jalapeño Margarita ($12), with a house tequila that marinates in jalapeño peppers for about two weeks.

The menu, as noted, is entirely tapas-style: “Rather than offering individual starters and main courses, The Stanton Social serves dishes that are designed for sharing and are brought to the table steadily and continuously throughout the meal.”

Awarding one star in the Times, Frank Bruni commended chef Chris Santos’s “determination to find readily divisible finger food where no chef has found it before.”

Our server advised 5–6 dishes as being about right for two people. That was pretty reasonable advice. We chose five (out of a menu offering nearly fifty), including all three that she recommended. While we waited for our food, the kitchen brought out crisp bread with chipotle garlic butter (above right). We would easily have eaten more than one slice apiece, had there been more.

 
Duck Confit Empanadas and Potato & Goat Cheese Pierogies (left); French Onion Soup Dumplings (right)

It’s safe to assume that the kitchen’s greatest hits are mostly pre-assembled, as our first two plates came out after only five minutes or so. We loved Duck Confit Empanadas ($9), which had a nice tang, the blood orange dipping sauce offering a sweet-sour contrast. Potato and Goat Cheese Pierogies ($8) were less interesting, and my girlfriend (who’s half-Polish) felt that these deep-fried dumpling-like creatures weren’t pierogies at all. [Sorry about the washed-out photo.]

We also wondered why, on a menu designed for sharing, the kitchen would send out three empanadas and three pierogies. Most of the parties at the Stanton Social are even numbers of people. Would it have been that hard to create dishes in twos or fours, rather than threes?

French Onion Soup Dumplings ($11) admirably show off the chef’s talent for going where sharable plates have never gone before. Served in an escargot dish, there are six dumplings, each on a skewer with its own crouton, a hot onion soup center, and Gruyère slathered on top. Even more admirably, there are six of them.

 
Kobe Beef Sliders and Fries (left); Braised Short Rib Soft Tacos (right)

Kobe Beef Sliders are one of the few dishes not designed for sharing: they’re $7 apiece, and a wonderful tender gooey mess. The server recommended a bowl of fries ($6) to go with them. They were hot and not greasy, but over-salted. Beef Short Rib Soft Tacos ($19) weren’t very flavorful, and seemed somewhat “flat” compared to everything else we tasted. Once again, there were three of them—an odd design in more ways than one.

Tapas-style restaurants usually send out plates when the kitchen is ready, no matter what the customer may want. I don’t know if we got lucky, or if the Stanton Social is more enlightened, but the pace of our meal was just about right. Plates were delivered, cleared, and delivered anew on schedule, without us having to deal with mountains of food we weren’t ready to eat.

Of course, that “schedule” needs to be construed in the terms of a restaurant designed to turn over the tables quickly, and where no food item is meant to be lingered over: we were in and out in under 75 minutes. Given the din of the sound system, we weren’t eager to spend any more time there than necessary.

Although we snagged a 7:00 p.m. table, no one should conclude that the Stanton Social is losing its popularity: the place was packed. The small-plates format is still a winning one, and there are many clever choices to tempt you. If one or two are less successful, you’ll still have several others to enjoy. A larger group could very well try most of the menu.

We weren’t quite impressed enough, however, to endure again the crowds, the noise, and the difficulty of getting a reservation.

The Stanton Social (90 Stanton Street between Orchard & Ludlow Streets, Lower East Side)

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

The Payoff: Le Cirque

Yesterday, Frank Bruni awarded the expected three stars to Le Cirque. Even so, he made no attempt to conceal his disdain for the classic luxury that this restaurant has always represented:

At Le Cirque you will indeed eat too much food…at a sometimes ludicrous expense.

But that has long been the way of certain restaurants, which exist to be absurd, to speak not to our better angels but to our inner Trumps, making us feel pampered and reckless and even a little omnipotent, if only for two hours and three courses with a coda of petits fours.

And while I’m not calling for the spread of these establishments…, I’m charged with noting when one of them fulfills its chosen mission with classic panache. Le Cirque now does.

Has a NYT critic ever called a restaurant “absurd”, noting he’s not keen to see any more like it, while awarding three stars?

What’s absurd is that Frank Bruni would describe the restaurant in those terms, when all Le Cirque is doing is what it has always done, which in the past the Times has considered a three or four-star experience. The only thing that has changed is the critic.

Both Eater and New York Journal considered the trifecta a sure thing this week. We both win just $1 on our hypothetical bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$63.50		$79.67
Gain/Loss	+1.00		+1.00
Total	$64.50		$80.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	29–13		30–12

Rolling the Dice: Le Cirque

Every week, we take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We track our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni re-reviews one of the city’s few remaining grand dames of French glory, Le Cirque. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 9-1
One Star: 8-1
Two Stars: 5-1
Three Stars: EVEN √√
Four Stars: 25,000-1

The Skinny: Our view is the same as Eater’s: any outcome except three stars would be extremely surprising. Let’s roll out the BruniTrends^®:

This is the fourth time Bruni has re-visited one of his own past reviews—his first review of Le Cirque was just over eighteen months ago. In each prior case (Eleven Madison Park, Craftsteak, Alto), the result was an upgrade. Indeed, most of Bruni’s re-reviews—even when the prior review was by another critic—have resulted in a change of rating.

No one has suggested that Le Cirque has gotten worse over the last eighteen months, and there is quite a bit of evidence that it has gotten better. As Adam Platt noted in his year-end round-up for New York, “perhaps the most impressive kitchen overhaul of all has taken place at Le Cirque, where Sirio Maccioni’s latest chef, Christophe Bellanca, has expanded the pricey, formerly stolid menu to include a whole variety of sophisticated, radically pricey new treats.”

We also rated Le Cirque three stars when we visited late last year.

If this review turns out as we are predicting, other BruniTrends^® will need to be re-calibrated. In over 3½ years on the job, Bruni has never yet awarded three or four stars to a classically luxurious French restaurant, unless he was re-affirming (or reducing) a prior critic’s rating. One could safely have assumed that it was not a format that interested him. After tomorrow, we may no longer be able to make such assumptions.

To the best of my recollection, this is the first time Eater has set even-money odds on any outcome, and I believe it is also the largest gap between the most likely and second-most likely outcomes. There are good reasons for this: everything points to three stars this week.

The Bet: We are betting that Frank Bruni will award three stars to Le Cirque.

Veritas

 

Note: This is a review under chef Ed Cotton. Click here for a review under the current chef, Sam Hazen.

Ten years ago, Park. B. Smith figured out that if he opened one bottle a day from his massive wine collection, it would take 119 years to drink it all. It was that scary thought that led him to open Veritas, the lovely 65-seat wine-themed restaurant in the Flatiron District.

Acclaim came quickly, with a three-star rating from Ruth Reichl in the Times, and much later a Michelin star. Veritas has hummed along quietly, less publicized than showier restaurants, but still doing a brisk business. In October, founding chef Scott Bryan left suddenly, “with no destination decided.” Ed Cotton, who was to have opened Bar Boulud for Daniel Boulud, replaced him.

As it was a decade ago, wine is the story at Veritas. Even then—when it was far less common—Veritas’ wine list was available online. It is divided into two sections, a smaller and less expensive “market list,” and the longer “reserve list.” The large volume is one of the heftiest in New York; you could get lost in it for hours. There are bottles under $60 and bottles over $10,000. We chose the 1998 Le Crau de ma Mère ($115) from the reserve list. It’s a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Park B. Smith’s favorite French wine.

While we were ordering, we couldn’t help overhearing the spectacle at the next table. An elderly solo diner was presented with his bill, $999, which had to have been mostly wine. And the bottle on his table, which must have cost $800, was still half full. The gentleman, clearly a Veritas regular, left without settling his bill (he was short of cash), telling the staff that he would be back for dinner the next evening. The wine he left over was, we are sure, shared and enjoyed by the restaurant staff.

The menu is $82 prix fixe, with tasting menus available at $110 (five-course) or $135 (seven-course). There are ten appetizers, eight entrées, and six desserts.

 

The amuse-bouche (above left) was house-cured salmon with a small vegetable medley. My girlfriend and I both started with the Wild Game Bolognese (above right) with butternut squash, wild chestnuts, and house-made cavatelli.

 

I enjoyed the Red Wine Braised Short-Ribs (above left), though they were slightly stringy. My girlfriend adored the Slow Baked Loch Duart Salmon (above right).

 

Finally, there was a terrific Banana Cream Tart (above left), while my girlfriend had the Chocolate Caramel Torte (above right).

Petits-fours

Service was smooth, alert, friendly and professional. Our wine was, of course, decanted for us, a practice that too many fine restaurants have abandoned.

The cuisine at Veritas might be described as safe and traditional, but everything we tried was beautifully assembled, impeccably prepared, and just complex enough to be interesting.

The wine’s the show at Veritas, but it’s served in a serene setting, with food more than good enough to deserve admiration and praise.

Veritas (43 E. 20th St. between Broadway & Park Avenue South, Flatiron District)

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