First Look: Teqa

Teqa is a new tacos-and-tequila place on the western edge of Kips Bay. Someone with talent is doing their P.R., as the restaurant managed the rare feat of getting the chef’s photo into Florence Fabricant’s weekly New York Times column, Off the Menu.

That chef is Lisa Schoen, who has worked as a Food Network stylist and as the private chef for Saturday Night Live, the Rosie O’Donnell Show, and for New York Yankees star Derek Jeter. She also appeared on the Food Network competition show Chopped. This is her first restaurant, as far as I can tell.

The owner is Derek Axelrod, who has worked as head of product placement for his family’s company, French Connection apparel. The website says that he “built a number of restaurants,” without naming them. The site is not shy about getting to the point: if Teqa succeeds, it will be “expanded to other locations,” that is, cloned.

The dining room is attractive, with dark wood tables, dim lighting, and a spacious bar with 100 tequilas on display. (The illustration, above left, is a concept rendering from the website; the actual space looks a bit different.) Mercifully, the sound track is quiet enough to allow a conversation without having to yell.

I don’t usually visit restaurants on the first night of service, as I’d rather give them time to work out the kinks. But I had a craving for this type of food, and I figured that tacos and guacamole were fairly low-risk bets. There were minor service glitches that I won’t even bother to mention. Teqa was running well, for an opening night.

An initial reaction is that such a nice space could offer more than just appetizers, tacos, salads, and sandwiches. Not that there’s anything wrong with the food I sampled, which was very good for the price, but I think a broader menu would work well here.

Another reaction is that the kitchen can afford to amp up the heat. Two kinds of “Guac & Chips” ($11) are offered: “Mellow or MEGA-WATT.” I ordered the latter, which I found pleasantly spicy. But those who expect a three-alarm fire from the words “mega-watt” might be a bit disappointed.

I had the same issue with a Spicy Cucumber Margarita ($11), which didn’t live up to its billing. When I pointed this out, the bartender made an extra-spicy version of their oddly named “Tommy’s Margarita” ($9), which was much more like it. I am not really sure what accounts for the $2 price difference between the two.

A side order of fries (sent out as a comp; normally $8) was an unexpected delight. They had all the heat that was missing from the other dishes. A visit for the fries alone would be well worth it.

There are eight kinds of tacos, served on house-made soft tortillas (except for the so-called “Old School,” which comes in a hard shell). They cost $13 for three, but you can’t mix and match. I had the Guiness Braised Short Rib tacos, with roasted corn, frizzled leeks, Cojita cheese, and an unspecified “Teqa sauce.” It’s an excellent creation, but in keeping with the evening’s theme, a shade under-seasoned.

I’ll emphasize again that it was the first night of service, and seasoning could very well be adjusted in the coming weeks as the kitchen gets into its routine.

As of today, the front page of the website is a blog entry showing photos of all the celebrities that attended the restaurant’s opening party. That’s the wrong strategy. Diners who chase celebrities have the attention span of a flea: it won’t be long before they move to the Next Big Thing. Long-term success depends on attracting customers who care about the food, not those who care about the Big Names who supposedly have dined there.

On this showing, the food at Teqa is worth showcasing. For someone who hasn’t run a restaurant before, Chef Schoen seems to have her act together. If you’re in the Murray Hill or Kips Bay area, it’s well worth dropping in.

Teqa (447 Third Avenue between 30th & 31st Streets, Kips Bay)

David Burke Kitchen

David Burke, the playful chef who serves cheesecake lollipops and lobster “steaks,” has taken his act to the James Hotel in Soho. His new restaurant, David Burke Kitchen, occupies a charmless basement that could double as a fallout shelter.

“It’s a challenge to make a basement attractive,” he told the Times. I’ll say.

They’ve done their best to gussy it up. There’s a long, handsome bar, widely-spaced bare wood tables, and a fully exposed kitchen. If you’re sufficiently distracted, you might not notice that the space has only tiny slivers for windows, at ceiling level.

Burke has done business with this hotel chain before: their Chicago branch hosts his steak place, David Burke Primehouse. So why did they offer him, and why did he accept, the hotel’s worst space?

The reasons could be related to Burke’s apparent willingness to franchise himself all over the place, whether it’s David Burke at Bloomingdales, the now-closed Hawaiian Tropic Zone (practically a strip club without the lapdances), or a bowling alley. If you pay enough for his celebrity, then you can put the restaurant into whatever godawful space you choose.

Or maybe David Burke Kitchen is meant to be a more serious effort, like David Burke Townhouse (the former David Burke & Donatella) and Fishtail on the Upper East Side. Despite their unevenness, those places are real David Burke restaurants, not just consulting engagements. On the right day, they can be very good.

The menu is full of Burke’s trademark whimsy: Ants on a Log; a pretzle crab cake; prawn sauce made in a duck press. Most of these dishes may even be good, but can it last after he moves onto the next project? He was ever-present in the dining room last Friday night—at least looking the part of a working chef, though I had no illusions that he was actually doing anything but schmooze.

Prices are lower than at his Upper East Side places, but not cheap, with appetizers $12–17, entrées $22–45, and side dishes $7. There was no amuse bouche, but bread service was impressive for a downtown restaurant, with three kinds of bread (I had the cranberry walnut), and what appeared to be house-made butter.

Bison Tartare ($14; below left) was wonderful, topped with egg salad and smoked tomatoes, with fingerling potato crisps on the side.

There is a rabbit in the restaurant’s logo, and an ever-changing rabbit dish has been on every menu I’ve seen. The version I had ($28; above right) crossed the line from inventive to bizarre. Rabbit medallions were stuffed with chorizo sausage, with two King Crab claws on top, a soupy risotto on the bottom, and at least two sauces. The individual components weren’t bad, but it looked and tasted like an entrée designed by committee.

I dined at the bar, where the server was knowledgeable and attentive. The two cocktails I had were well made, if on the expensive side: the Rabbit Hunter ($14) with bourbon, ginger beer, fresh mint, and lime; and The Border ($15), with tequila, mezcal blanco, ginger, agave, and a slice of beef jerky on a spear.

As I’ve noted before, hotel restaurants are lower-risk projects than stand-alone ones, as the hotel subsidizes the space, and its guests provide a captive audience. It’s an open question whether David Burke Kitchen has staying power with fickle downtown diners, especially if Burke himself doesn’t stick around to keep his whimsical menu from running off the rails.

David Burke Kitchen (27 Grand Street at Sixth Avenue, in the James Hotel, Soho)

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

Junoon

I wouldn’t call two a trend, and perhaps it’s only a coincidence that two upscale Indian restaurants have opened within the last two months: Hemant Mathur’s Tulsi; and from Salaam Bombay alumnus Vikas Khanna, Junoon, which means passion.

The space at Junoon is much larger than at Tulsi, with a comfortable bar and lounge area bigger than many whole restaurants. There is talent behind the cocktail menu, and a minor addiction to egg whites, featured in three of eight items. I especially liked the Agave Thyme (Reposado Tequila, muddled pomegranate, thyme, egg white, and white peppercorn).

The menu is on the expensive side for Indian cuisine, with entrées from $22–36 (most above $25). It is neither as clever nor as well executed as at Tulsi or Tamarind, but the elegant room and polished service offer sufficient compensation, if you want an unhurried experience where the ambiance is as important as the food itself.

The amuse bouche, as I recall, was a bite-size potato pancake. We shared the wonderful Hyderabadi Pathar Paneer ($12) appetizer, consisting of four small slices of house-made cheese in a turmeric (ginger), mint, and lime sauce.

Among the entrées, a braised lamb shank ($26) with onion, tomato, and yogurt, was the better choice. A Cornish Hen ($24), made in the tandoori oven, was over-cooked and dry. The kitchen sent out an extra entrée, a chicken curry, which was much better, but by this time it was more than we could eat, especially after we’d overdone it on the addictive Naan.

The 250-bottle wine list covers a wide range, priced from $38 to $1,800, with many in three figures but plenty below $50. For a 2006 Haut Bages Averous ($55), the sommelier rolled out a cart and put on a decanting show as if I’d ordered a 1962 Lafite Rothschild. He appeared to be doing it at every table. You may call it pretentious, but hardly anyone in town goes through the full ritual any more, and someone might as well do it. So why not here?

There were petits fours at the end—not memorable in themselves, but you don’t find them in Indian restaurants very often.

The restaurant was fairly quiet on a Sunday evening, traditionally a slow night. I have no idea how they’re doing on the other days, but they do have a large space to fill. I suspect the rent is stratospheric, and I don’t know how many of these places the market can support. The service and ambiance are memorable; the food a shade less so.

Junoon (27 W. 24th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, Flatiron District)

Food: *½
Service: ***
Ambaince: ***
Overall: **

Ai Fiori

The career of chef Michael White is at an inflection point. He reached heights that few chefs even dream of, with a trio of haute Italian restaurants carrying nine New York Times stars and five Michelin stars between them.

But his partnership with the restaurateur Chris Cannon hit the skids late last year and dissolved in January, with Cannon taking the two restaurants that pre-dated his association with White (Alto and Convivio), while White and his investor Ahmass Fakahany took the others.

White now lacks the solid front-of-house organization that Cannon supplied, while he plans new restaurants at a frenetic pace. We liked Osteria Morini, the final restaurant that White opened with Cannon’s assistance, but some critics have complained of inconsistency there.

In November, just two months after Morini, came Ai Fiori (“Among the Flowers”) in the Setai Fifth Avenue hotel. It’s another in the haute Italian genre shared by all of his restaurants except the casual Morini. The food is impressive, but to maintain it as a three-star establishment may require more attention than he is now capable of.

It’s a lovely, elegant, romantic space, although some critics will complain that it’s a generic hotel dining room that could be anywhere—as they did at the other Setai restaurant in New York, SHO Shaun Hergatt. Don’t listen to them! Ai Fiori is the most beautiful new restaurant built since the Great Recession.

You can order à la carte or, the better bet, four courses for $79. This turns out to be a remarkable deal: individually, the starters range from $14–27, pastas $18–25 (not counting a $55 truffle-studded outlier), mains $32–49, and desserts $13–14. Nearly all are orderable on the prix fixe without supplements.

The cuisine purports to be that of the Italian and French riviera, but you wouldn’t guess that by looking at the menu, or for that matter the room. The connection to the riviera is so tenuous as to be practically non-existent.

The amuse bouche, a warm sunchoke soup (above left), was an excellent start. My friend loved the fluke crudo (above right) with sea urchin, lemon oil, and sturgeon caviar.

Mare e Monte (below left) is one of the more original dishes, an alternating stack of diver scallops, celery root, and black truffles, with bone marrow and thyme, served inside of a hollowed-out bone. It’s an instant classic.

Oddly for a Michael White menu, the pasta and risotto section of the menu lists just six items. Risotto (above right) with escargots, parsley, parmigiano, garlic chips, and cotecchino was good but unmemorable. My friend thought the Trofie Nero (below left), squid-ink pasta tossed with shellfish, was the better choice.

The butter-poached lobster (above right) deserves the praise heaped upon it in just about every Ai Fiori review that I’ve read. Normally $37 if ordered on its own, it’s available on the prix fixe without a supplment: remarkable.

White hired pastry chef Robert Truitt away from Corton. His work here is less impressive. Baba al Rhum (above left) tasted stale not very rummy. However, my friend loved the chocolate sformato cake (above right) with its molten core. The kitchen sent out an extra dessert (below left), the description of which I didn’t note, and the meal ended with a plate of petits fours (below right).

The wine list runs to 43 pages, and you can do some serious wallet damage, but there are also plenty of reasonable choices in the $40s and $50s. We took the sommelier’s recommendation for an $82 Gewurtztreminer and weren’t disappointed.

The bar is one of the more comfortable, civilized places for a drink in midtown, and well worth a visit in its own right. Eben Freeman (formerly of the now-departed Tailor) is responsible for the cocktails, which are expertly made, as you’d expect, but lack the whimsy that he’s capable of.

On a Friday evening, the space appeared to be around 2/3rds full. Reservations at Ai Fiori have generally been available at just about any time: it is not the immediate hit that Marea was. I suspect that’s a product of too many high-end Italian places opening in a short time span, and perhaps some Michael White fatigue. The location, at Fifth Avenue and 36th Street, is something of a dead zone, and the restaurant’s presence is not obvious from the street. (You enter the hotel and then up a spiral staircase to reach it.)

My meal here was probably the best I’ve had at any of White’s restaurants. To produce at this level consistently, White will need competent deputies who can operate it on his behalf.

Ai Fiori (400 Fifth Avenue at 36th Street, in the Setai Hotel, East Midtown)

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

Lyon

Note: Owner–partner François Lapatie left Lyon in June 2012, and the restaurant closed later that year. The space is now Cole’s Greenwich Village.

*

Can French cuisine regain the dominant position it once held in New Yorkers’ hearts and dreams? Perhaps the route is from the bottom up.

Lyon Bouchon Moderne is a step in the right direction, a casual bistro from the restaurateur François Lapatie, formerly of the Michelin-starred, and now closed, La Goulue.

Perched on a heavily trafficked West Village intersection, Lyon is beautifully decorated in the authentic fashion. But hard tabletops and mirrored walls turn the long, narrow space into an echo chamber: for much of the evening, I couldn’t hear my companion without cupping my hand over my ear.

Termed a bouchon, the Lyonnais term for a meat-centric bistro, Lyon’s menu is studded with carnivore bait, like boudin noir, bacon-wrapped loup de mer, a green salad with bacon, and so forth. Prices are modest, with appetizers $10–14, entrées mostly in the $20s (a Niman Ranch strip steak au poivre at $45 is an outlier), side dishes $6–8, desserts mostly $9–10.

The wine list fits on a single page, and as you’d expect, is dominated by reds. There are more bottles at $75 and above than I think a restaurant in Lyon’s price range can justify, but there are enough choices below $50 to satisfy the casual diners that a place like this presumably attracts.

There’s an emphasis on Beaujolais, with eight bottles in a separately captioned section of the list, but I found a 2006 Domaine Les Côtes de la Roche Saint-Amour ($49) too shallow and bitter for its age.

With the food, I can’t find any fault at all. Pieds de Porc ($22; below left) was impeccable: two plump cakes with pig trotters and foie gras, a light coating of mustard, and a stew of green lentils and sherry vinegar. This is a dish I dream about.

My companion had the Pintade ($27; above right), a breast of guinea fowl, root vegetables, and thyme. I sampled a bit of the fowl, which was plump and tender.

Among the pro critics, Sam Sifton of the Times (who awarded one star) and Steve Cuozzo of the Post (who awarded two) are in broad agreement, finding Lyon very good at its best, but also uneven. [Due to their differences in interpretation of the star system, Sifton’s one and Cuozzo’s two are essentially the same thing.] We may have fortuitously avoided the clunkers, or maybe Lyon is getting better, as Cuozzo suggests.

Because Sifton is an incompetent buffoon, he insisted that Lyon needs “An entree that every third person in the restaurant orders,” a new index to success that I’ve not encountered in any other review. I realize that a dish made from pig parts will never be the people’s choice, but the trotters fit the bill for me.

Lyon was nearly full on a Thursday evening; service was as attentive as it needed to be. The loudness of the room would make me hesitant to return with anyone whom I wanted to converse with. Dinner at the bar, some night after work, is the more prudent course.

Lyon (118 Greenwich Avenue at W. 13th Street, West Village)

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

The Burger at Fatty Johnson's

Fatty Johnson’s is a pop-up restaurant [now closed] from Zak Pelaccio of Fatty Crab / Fatty ’Cue fame. The cartoon figure in the logo might be Samuel Johnson—I am not sure. When Pelaccio explained his idea to the Times, he didn’t really clear it up.

It replaces his goat-centric restaurant Cabrito until he figures out what to do with the space, which he told the Times will offer “a slightly more grown-up menu and service style.” The bartenders at FJ are sticking with that story, saying that renovations will begin around March 1. It will still be “Fatty something.”

According to the website, the menu changes daily. Several of the dishes are what Pelaccio called “ham centric,” as if that were a surprise. The other night, he was offering a mean-looking cassoulet (I mean that as a compliment), perhaps suggestive of the more Frenchified cooking style that he has in mind for the permanent restaurant that will be coming next.

I had come for the cheeseburger, which Robert Sietsema of the Village Voice loved so much. There are options with ham and a fried egg on top, but I didn’t think a burger needed all that help.

My favorite burgers have a thicker patty than Fatty Johnson’s, but this one isn’t bad at all. It had a nice, crunchy crust and a faintly smoky flavor. The staff said that it has a 70/30 beef/fat ratio, which is more fat than most burgers. But then, this is a fatty joint, after all.

The fries, or rather, fried confit potatoes, were too greasy and not crunchy enough for my taste, although that didn’t stop me from finishing them.

The burger is a trifle expensive for what you get. It’s $14 by itself. The ham and egg, if you go that route, can punch it up to $18. Neither option includes the fries, which are an extra $7. In contrast, the Minetta Burger at Minetta Tavern—a better product at a better restaurant—is $16 and it includes the fries.

Fatty Johnson’s is a bare-bones space right now, as a pop-up is meant to be. It was close to empty at 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday evening, but the staff said that it normally fills up after 8:00. A number of well known “guest bartenders” have been featured. Nobody famous was on duty when I visited, but we had a good dialogue about cocktails, as the expression goes.

Fatty Johnson’s (50 Carmine St. between Bedford & Bleecker Sts., West Village)

What Happens When

Note: What Happens When closed in June 2011, after five months. It had intended to remain open for nine months, but could no longer continue after it lost its liquor license. With sufficient effort it probably could have been reinstated, but for a restaurant that had planned to close anyway in October it wasn’t worth the expense.

*

Just one word . . . pop-up. It seems to be the latest restaurant trendlet. Exactly where the term originated is beyond google’s capacity to answer, but you don’t find many references before 2010.

The notion of a “pop-up restaurant” is somewhat elastic. It can take many different forms. The one clear requirement is planned extinction: these places aren’t meant to last. Some exist for just a night or two.

Then, there’s John Fraser’s new pop-up, What Happens When — though he prefers the term “temporary restaurant installation” — which he insists will die after nine months, if not sooner.

Fraser is best known as chef of the Michelin-starred Dovetail on the Upper West Side, which is still doing fine. My two meals there (here, here) were slightly meh, although I liked his work at Compass.

So what is Fraser doing in a restaurant that he’ll kill after nine months? As he told Frank Bruni:

He was wondering what it might be like to have a restaurant he could fool around with and walk away from when, less than three months ago, he happened upon the SoHo space, on Cleveland Place, where Le Jardin Bistro had just closed. The landlord was willing to write an eight-month lease, beginning in December, with a likelihood of several month-by-month renewals until the building, mostly vacant, can be redeveloped.

What Happens When is not so much a pop-up, as a string of them. Once a month, the menu, the décor, and the soundtrack will be tossed out and re-done. The current version looks just as temporary as it was meant to be, but it’s nicer and more polished than many restaurants I could name that don’t have sell-by dates.

Part of the funding is coming from Kickstarter, a creative arts seed money site. This is an unusual approach, as restaurants, pop-up or otherwise, are practically always treated as profit-seeking ventures. It makes you wonder what would be possible, if the culinary arts were more often funded like the rest of the arts, with donated money?

Mind you, he’s not giving the food away. The menu is $58 prix fixe. After three cocktails ($13 each) and coffee ($5), the bill came to $102 before tax and tip. That’s a fair price for food that would have a good shot at three New York Times stars if the restaurant were permanent. Of course, if the restaurant survives for the full nine months, he’ll need to come up with eight more menus as good as this one.

Fraser has a graphic artist, an interior designer, and a composer on his team, for what he calls “an ever-changing culinary, visual, and sound experience.”

Your eyes may glaze over when you see all of the hand-doodled drawings explaining the “inspiration” for what’s called “Menu No. 1”: blue cold conflict expectation ice intensity reflection tension Winter.

There’s a faintly wintry feel to the current menu, but if there is any reflection or tension in the offerings, the connection entirely eluded me.

The menu is brief (just four appetizers and five entrées), and so are the wine and cocktail lists, also suffixed with “No. 1.” The current cocktail list offers three creations, all named for characters in Hamlet: Polonius (gin, mandarin orange juice, sweet & dry vermouth), Ophelia (photo below; vodka, dry vermouth, pickling liquid), and Laertes (rum, allspice, lime, honey). Again, how these related to the “inspiration” wasn’t quite clear, but they did pair well with the food.

The meal began with a trio of amuses bouches (above right): from right to left, a bracing pea soup, an onion dip with croutons and pickled ramps, and “ants on a log,” served with a champagne cocktail.

The bread service (above left) is wonderful here, as it always is at Fraser’s restaurants: a warm garlic–olive oil roll with a hint of cheese and black pepper.

The appetizer (above right), referred to as “potato skins” on the menu, is much more elaborate than that. Hollowed-out fingerling potato skins join forces with pickled sausage, sorrel, and a wheat beer fondue.

I was comped an excellent spiced foie gras and rabbit terrine (above left). (It’s not listed on the menu, and I didn’t see it at any other tables.)

The guinea hen entrée (above right) had many supporting players, and I can’t do justice to all of them. I especially liked the buckwheat crèpe (left side of the plate). The breast of guinea hen itself was just a shade less tender than it should have been, but the conception of the dish was first-rate.

Desserts came around on a cart, a startlingly old-school idea at an anything-but-old restaurant. The menu doesn’t credit a separate pastry chef, and the desserts (three of them, I think) didn’t quite have as much inspiration as the savory courses. I had the rice pudding, which was just fine, but you could have it anywhere.

There are some obvious compromises at What Happens When. Fraser told Frank Bruni that it cost about $100,000 to build, as opposed to over $2 million at Dovetail. The chairs supposedly came from eBay, though I’d take them any day over the backless bar stools that you have to endure at the Momofuku restaurants.

He certainly hasn’t skimped on service. I saw a small platoon of chefs behind the half-open kitchen window, and there are certainly enough servers for the 65-seat room. The tables have small silverware drawers, and you’re encouraged to lay the table yourself, but after the first course the staff replaced the silverware, as they would at any other restaurant.

Reservations are accepted through the nascent Urbanspoon online site, instead of the more established (but far more expensive) OpenTable. Availability most days is typical of a hit restaurant in New York City: 5:30 or after 10:00. If What Happens When wasn’t temporary, you’d have to ask if that could last? At a restaurant that is expected to be gone in nine months, the question doesn’t matter.

Why nine months? Fraser told Bruni that even if the building remained available, What Happens Next wouldn’t continue: beyond that, it would become another permanent restaurant, negating the whole point of a venture that you can play with, and then dispose of. But if it works, it’s hard to believe that someone else, if not Fraser himself, will try the same thing again.

The current menu will be in place until February 25.

What Happens Next (25 Cleveland Place between Kenmare & Spring Streets, Soho)