Falai

Note: Falai closed in August 2011. The chef, Iacopo Falai, cited changes in the neighborhood, implying that the upscale clientele the restaurant catered to was no longer coming to the Lower East Side. The space is now Pig and Khao.

*

It’s a sad consequence of Frank Bruni’s blatant Italian bias, that when he delivers a rave review of an Italian restaurant, I promptly ignore it. Of course, sometimes I’ve been to those restaurants already, and sometimes I go for other reasons. But I’d never choose an Italian place on his recommendation.

So it was with Falai, which received the deuce from Frankie two-stars in June 2005. Duly noted and ignored. Then, about a month ago, we walked into Falai Panetteria when a reservation at another place fell through. We were surprised at how good it was, which made us think that perhaps the mother ship deserved Frank’s deuce after all.

The chef at both places (and a third in Soho, to which we haven’t been) is Iacopo Falai, a former Le Cirque pastry chef. Here, at his main restaurant, he serves a focused Italian menu of just five appetizers ($12–16), seven pastas ($13–19), and six entrées ($25–27). The small semi-open kitchen probably can’t accommodate any more.

The all-white décor would be tough on the eyes if the lights were turned up, but the staff wisely keeps them dim. The narrow-but-deep room is a typical Lower East Side storefront. The floor tile looks at first as if it could be original, but then you notice that it embed’s Falai’s logo (above right). The staff all dress smartly, imparting an upscale vibe that makes the place feel like it belongs elsewhere.

Fortunately for Falai, diners don’t seem to mind visiting a fancy restaurant that is across the street from a pawn shop. On a Saturday evening, women were wearing their high heels and fancy summer dresses. At 8:00 p.m., the dining room was empty, as most diners had chosen to sit in the outdoor garden out back. But by 9:00 the room was mostly full. 

The white interior gave my camera fits. Shots with flash looked like nuclear winter, so I shot in ambient light, which played havoc with contrast and color balance. The amuse-bouche (right) was much better than the photo shows. I believe it was yogurt and roe with a pea-shoot broth poured table-side.

Of our appetizers, we were most impressed with Pici ($18; above left), with egg-less pasta, Italian cinnamon sausage, Brussels sprouts, and pecorino cheese. It was both an unusual and an intensely flavored dish. Gnudi ($16; above right) were an excellent rendition of a classic, with ricotta cheese, baby spinach.

Branzino wrapped in zucchini ($26; above left) was the more impressive entrée. It tasted as lovely as it looked. In contrast, Peking duck breast, or Anatra ($27; above right) was pedestrian. The skin had neither the crispness nor the spicy taste of traditional Peking duck, and the little dollops of ingredients scattered on the plate weren’t properly integrated into the dish. It’s a pity that the most expensive item on the menu is also the least interesting.

Pre-dessert was a tiny panna cotta (above left). We don’t normally order a dessert, but as it’s Chef Falai’s speciality we couldn’t resist. Profiteroles ($10; above right) were terrific.

To drink, we had a 2003 Copertino from the Puglia region of Italy ($52), with which we were perfectly satisfied. Service throughout the evening was attentive and polished.

Falai (68 Clinton Street between Rivington & Stanton Streets, Lower East Side)

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

Review Preview: Monkey Bar

Record to date: 6–2

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Monkey Bar, Graydon Carter’s midtown cafeteria for celebrities and wannabes.

The Skinny: The two relevant data points are Carter’s downtown restaurant, the Waverly Inn (one star; January 2007) and the imitation a few blocks away, Charles (goose egg, April 2009). In both reviews, Bruni wrote hilariously as his alias, Frannie von Furstinshow. Without that conceit, the reviews were entirely pointless.

Would he pull that stunt again, a mere two months later? No one has suggested there is actually important cooking being committed at the Monkey Bar. It’s a place where Graydon Carter decides who is A–List, who is B, and who is Nobody. Even Restaurant Girl was banished to Siberia. Don’t they know who she IS?

Not long ago, the restaurant disconnected its reservation line: too many nobodies were calling for not enough seats. You can e-mail for one of the few reservations not claimed by Carter’s friends, but if you’re not Barry Diller or Madonna, you’re probably not getting in. If you do, you’ll get the sorriest real-estate, and you’ll probably be over-paying for mediocre food.

Of course, mediocrity never stopped Frank from giving one star in the past, and it wouldn’t surprise us if he does again. But Monkey Bar, even more than the Waverly Inn, feels like a cynical exercise in crass showmanship, and we think Bruni will penalize it accordingly.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will give no stars to the Monkey Bar

DBGB

Chef Daniel Boulud is gradually working his way down the formality ladder. His five New York restaurants, in order of opening, are Daniel, Café Boulud, DB Bistro Moderne, Bar Boulud, and now DBGB—each more casual than its predecessor.

This is sensible positioning on Boulud’s part. Each of his five NYC properties fills a distinct niche, but all of them retain an essential French soul. In that respect, he parts company with fellow four-star chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who puts his name to a much wider variety of concepts, many of which have little to do with the cuisine he is famous for.

Not that DBGB is a classical French restaurant—it serves hamburgers and hot dogs, after all—but the core of the menu is French, and it’s a sensibly edited document. It doesn’t try to be all things to all people—as David Bouley tried and failed last year at Secession.

And Boulud knows how to roll out a restaurant. Industry glitterati were all a-twitter at the opening, fawning over the chef’s beer and sausages, admiring the row of cooking pots dotted along the walls, all donated by famous chefs. Beneath its rustic pretensions is a business model that, according to the Times, needs to gross $4.5 million per year to be profitable.

None of this is resentment. Actually, it’s admiration. Boulud could teach the rest of the industry how to open a restaurant. Even at his most casual place, the kitchen runs smoothly. The serving staff are attentive and friendly. They take reservations, check parcels, and transfer the bar tab to the table. It’s nice to know that at least some of David Chang’s antics aren’t being copied by everyone.

The menu is a slave to fashion in at least some respects, with many sections that blur the traditional lines between appetizers and entrées, a system that encourages sharing, and at times over-ordering. We had about the right quantity of food, but it was far too monotonous, and our stomachs felt weighed down at the end of the evening. We may well have chosen the wrong mix of items, and in that respect neither the menu nor our server offered much guidance.

About that menu: there are cold appetizers ($7–17), fruits de mer ($30, 60, 90), hot appetizers ($8–16), charcuterie (a subset of the Bar Boulud menu; $7–12); sausages ($9–15); a section labeled tête aux pieds, which I interpret loosely as “head and feet” ($9–12), entrées ($16–26), three different burgers ($14–19), and side dishes ($6).

Despite all of those categories, the menu manages to avoid the appearance of rambling. The largest section is the sausages, with 14 choices. Along with the tête aux pieds, it’s somewhat confusingly captioned “To Share,” although the section also includes the DBGB Dog ($9), which is just a standard hot dog, albeit with house-made sautéed onions and relish.

We ordered one hot appetizer, two sausages, and one of the tête aux pieds, all to share. This may have been the wrong way to appreciate the menu, but our server either encouraged, or at least did not discourage us from doing this. The kitchen sent out the items one at a time, and at a good pace.

We loved the Octopus à la Plancha ($12; above left), an ample portion lightly cooked, exactly as it should be. Our next item was supposed to be the Toscane ($11; above right). We are not sure if we got the right thing, as it was in a sub-section of the menu captioned “spicy,” and we found nothnig spicy or Tuscan about it. This was the one part of the evening when we could not flag down a server, so we decided to just eat what we had been given. The sausages here tasted like dressed-up breakfast—which is to say, not bad but not wonderful either.

Our next item, the Tunisienne ($15; above left) lived up to its billing. A spicy lamb & mint merguez gave way to a punchy braised spinach with chickpeas. Other sausages caught my eye, such as the Toulouse (pork & duck gizzard with cassoulet beans) and the Boudin Basque (spicy blood and pig’s head), but those will have to wait until another day.

The Pied de Cochon, or pig’s foot ($13; above right) needs to come with a Surgeon General’s warning. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but this thing is huge. Even to share, it was probably excessive. Meat from the pig’s foot appeared to have been smoked, braised, then wrapped in a log and deep fried. There were a few small pieces of bone that apparently remained by mistake, though it is hard to say for sure, as I have nothing to compare it to. The dish was intense, but in the end a bit cloying.

A side order of fries (photo above; $6) was a tad on the mushy side.

There’s a wine list, naturally, but we ordered from the long list of beers, which pair well with such fat-laden food.

DBGB is a noisy restaurant. There are a few booths in alcoves that seem to offer a bit of seclusion, but they’re available only for larger parties. Most diners, even VIPs, are seated in the larger central section, where the packed tables and exposed hard surfaces are tough on the ears. Despite the raucous atmosphere, servers are dressed smartly, and we saw at least three managers prowling the floor and checking on customers’ wants. Except for one brief stretch when we could get no one’s attention to ask about our Tuscan sausage, it seemed there was always a server, a runner, or a manager stopping by—even if you couldn’t quite hear them.

There is much more here, and if the restaurant were on my way home I’d visit a lot more frequently, but I feel full just thinking about all of that fattening food. I’d still like to come back for the “Piggie” (a 6 oz. burger topped with Daisy May’s pulled pork), but I think I need to diet first.

DBGB (299 Bowery at E. 1st Street, East Village)

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

Review Recap: Aldea

Today, Frank Bruni awards the expected two stars to Aldea:

The cooking is precious, lusty, ultramodern, rustic and a host of other adjectives that don’t normally squeeze together but find themselves in a tight, mostly happy clutch here. Although Aldea has a clean, sleek and relatively spare look, it has a much more complex taste.

One minute you’re nibbling on crisp pig’s ears. The next you’re carefully maneuvering your spoon under a translucent, quivering orb of concentrated mushroom broth — one of those liquid ravioli that the Spanish alchemist Ferran Adrià made famous — in an avant-garde consommé.

The entree in front of you is a go-for-broke hillock of rice with duck cracklings and black olives. The entree in front of your companion is a refined, butter-soft fillet of wild bass that has been poached in a technique similar to sous vide and tucked under a billowing nimbus made from Arbois and air.

For dessert there are doughnuts (though they’re labeled “little dreams”). But there is also “chocolate in textures,” a dark tableau that seems as ready for exhibition as for ingestion.

I more-or-less agree with all of this, although I could have done without the pejorative “precious.” One could easily imagine Aldea earning the third star eventually, an outcome Bruni himself anticpates: “…there’s plenty to eat, whether you’re hungry for something delicate or blunt. It establishes Aldea as a restaurant worth trying, and Mr. Mendes as a chef worth keeping an eye on.”

*

In Critic’s Notebook, Bruni has a look at the latest trends in pizza:

I believe by and large that Neapolitan pies — if they can avoid soupiness, as they did at Motorino — are the most appealing. Yet the pan pizzas at Veloce Pizzeria, which opened in the East Village a month and a half ago, pleased me every bit as much. Sara Jenkins, the chef who supervises their production, said she isn’t sure whether to call them Sicilian or grandma style. Whatever their proper tag, these denser, richer, square pies were superb. The nicely charred crust — with a dough of potato, durum and fine zero-zero flour — was firm enough to support a generous measure of toppings. Its extra-crisp edges had the salty, zingy flavor and texture of a frico. And the toppings were first-rate, the mushroom pizza showcasing a bevy of hen-of-the-woods.

I believe that firmer, less runny cheese works better most of the time, and yet the Pugliese pie at Motorino, which uses wet-centered burrata, was a masterpiece, the burrata lending the pie an opulence and creaminess.

Crisp crusts, it turns out, aren’t so difficult: most places I visited had mastered that much. But crusts that are crisp without being dry — that have some give and suppleness — are an altogether trickier matter. That’s where Lucali, for example, fell down, though the ratio of mozzarella to tomatoes on its plain pie was faultless, and the tomatoes had a beautiful, round flavor.

This is Bruni at his best. Had he been doing this, instead of reviewing high-end restaurants, the last five years would have been much happier for Times readers—and, we get the sense, for Bruni as well.

Review Preview: Aldea

Record to date: 5–2

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Aldea, George Mendes’s lovely new Portuguese spot in the Flatiron District.

The Skinny: Everybody loves Aldea. We loved Aldea, giving it 2½ stars. Among the other star-bestowing critics, Restaurant Girl and Bloomberg’s Ryan Sutton both awarded three. Alan Richman has a rave in GQ, published earlier today. He doesn’t do stars, but in review that compares Mendes to Alain Ducasse, there’s little doubt about where he stands.

The misanthropic Adam Platt awarded a more circumspect two stars in New York, as is his wont, adding that “If the menu were slightly larger, we’d add another.”

Bruni has never panned a place that all of the other critics liked, so we figure that Aldea is a shoo-in for at least two stars. (Remember, if you’re a neophyte at this, that two stars is a compliment, even though it’s only half of the way to the top rank of four stars.)

Could Aldea get three stars from Frank Bruni? Aldea is a good deal better than at least half-a-dozen places that have received that honor from him, so it’s a distinct possibility. If it were Italian, you could pencil in the third star right now. As it is merely Portuguese, he’ll be grading on a different curve, and we suspect it will fall a hair short. Adam Platt’s ratings tend to correlate with Bruni’s, and Platt gave an enthusiastic deuce.

The Prediction: We wouldn’t mind being wrong, but we believe that Frank Bruni will award two stars to Aldea.

Review Recap: Bar Artisanal

Today, Frank Bruni very strangely gets Bar Artisanal right, yet all wrong, in awarding one star:

With the new restaurant Bar Artisanal, positioned and presented as a casual spinoff of Artisanal, Mr. Brennan has made the journey all the way downtown, to TriBeCa, and his cheese, of course, has traveled with him. Much of it is exhibited at a counter not entirely unlike Artisanal’s, but since that’s old hat for him, it’s not the striking part. What’s more arresting, amusing and in many crucial instances rewarding is the way cheese recurs across Bar Artisanal’s menu, dotting and flecking it, like dill or caraway in a wedge of havarti…

Take away the cheese and what’s left is a calculating, somewhat cynical operation, connected to the Hilton Garden Inn, that’s not all that reflective of Mr. Brennan, who guides but doesn’t actually own it. Bar Artisanal pillages and repackages current trends with astonishing thoroughness, commanding attention for that alone. If restaurants could be preserved in amber and tucked away for future students of gustatory anthropology, this might be the one to save and label, “New York City, circa 2010.”

We are struck by this, because although Bar Artisanal does indeed bow to trends, they are the very trends that Bruni has worshipped and adored during his five-year tenure. We are not even convinced that it is true. The cheese course alone makes Bar Artisanal a destination restaurant, since only one other restaurant in town (sister establishment Artisanal) offers anything like this variety, at anything approaching this price point.

And for all that, he calls out only one dish for outright criticism:

…a few out-and-out duds, the overpopulated “duck” pissaladière — with duck gizzard, duck confit, duck liver and a duck egg — foremost among them…

Funnily enough, we had that dish ourselves a week or two ago and considered it excellent. Having lambasted the restaurant for being enslaved to fashion, the one dish he pans is among those being served nowhere else.

We predicted and agree with Bruni’s one-star rating. But in the Times system, one star is supposed to mean “good.” Here, Bruni’s text suggests “Not So Good,” which is all wrong.

*

In Dining Briefs, Ligaya Mishan channels her inner Restaurant Girl in a review of Public Fare at the Delacorte Theater:

Roasted baby carrots spar in a lively mix of pickled versus peppery… Among the sandwiches, the organic chicken salad ($6.50) pulls rank with the gratifying crunch of green beans, celery and radish, and a fillip of chili pepper… The big disappointment is the B.L.T. ($7). Mine was over-mayoed and under-tomatoed; the pallid slices of tomato, more outer edge than juicy center, were no match for the brash hickory-smoked bacon.