The Breslin

I visited The Breslin alone about a month ago. I felt it was a two-star restaurant at the time, but hadn’t sampled enough of the menu to form a definite impression. Now I can correct that (and Sam Sifton’s wrong-headed one-spot).

I wrote about the background of The Breslin in an earlier review, so I’ll get right to the food.

 

The Terrine Board (above left) is excellent—the components being guinea hen, rustic pork, rabbit & prune, liverwurst, and head cheese. I wonder why there is no option for a solo diner? It comes in two sizes ($25 or $42), and even the smaller one, which we had, is too large for one person.

A whole trout ($32; above right) was exquisite, its pink flesh moist and tender. We also had the lamb burger and fries once again (the photo is in my earlier review), which was as good as before.

The wine list is a tad expensive, with too few bottles under $50. However, the 2007 Domaine des Martinelles at $55 was wonderful. The list describes it as “the rustic side of Crozes-Hermitage: meat-driven, earthy, funky, and amazingly yummy.” It arrived at the table properly chilled. Even restaurants much more expensive than The Breslin often serve red wine at room temperature.

I don’t know how Chef April Bloomfield divides her time between The Breslin and her other restaurant, The Spotted Pig. She was in the Breslin kitchen the night we were there, apparently (as far as we could tell) looking at every plate that went out.

The space is noisier than I’d like, and I wish they took reservations. The dining room hasn’t been full either time I visited (the packed bar is another story entirely). Perhaps it would even help business to get with the program, and join OpenTable. But I love April Bloomfield’s food too much to subtract points for that, so The Breslin gets two stars from us.

The Breslin (16 W. 29th Street between Broadway & Fifth Avenue, West Midtown)

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

Sookk

 

Sookk came to my attention a month or two ago, when I noticed that eGullet’s Fat Guy had pronounced it the best Thai restaurant in the city—better than most people’s favorite, SriPraPhai in Woodside, Queens. A guy in the Eater comments had the same opinion—but so far, they’re the only ones.

I shy away from proclaiming the “Best…” anything, even in dining genres where I believe I have sampled all or most of the plausible candidates. So I would never make such a claim about Thai food, which I have only a few times a year.

Based on my experience, limited though it may be, I thought that Sookk was above average, and certainly worth a visit. if you don’t mind a trip to 103rd & Broadway. According to my twitter feed, the Columbia students love this place, and I can see why. The prix fixe lunch is just $7. Our dinner for two was just $60, and that included a bottle of sparkling wine that might have been $60 all by itself in some restaurants. Certainly, in terms of value per dollar, it’s hard to beat this place.

But I found the food too mild. Several dishes carried the warning that they came with the extra-spicy special house sauce. We were cautioned to add it sparingly, as they would not be returnable if we went too far. After the appetizer failed to register, I unloaded all of the available sauce into the entrée, and still couldn’t find much heat to speak of.

Having said that, the food was carefully prepared, attractively presented, and mostly enjoyable. I certainly would not hesitate to return. I just find it hard to believe that it’s the city’s best.

 

The Assorted Golden Fritters ($7; above left) was our favorite dish, with an assortment of crispy chicken, shrimp dumplings, shitake spring rolls, blanketed shrimps, and sesame tofu. There wasn’t the slightest hint of grease, and a sweet chili sauce supplied just the right amount of heat. Even the tofu—and I am not a tofu guy—was wonderful.

A so-called Fiery Thai Beef Tartare ($5; above right) wasn’t very fiery at all. It’s hard to tell from the photo (which I shot after I’d spoiled the kitchen’s careful plating), but there’s a black rice cake underneath that heaping pile of seasoned beef. It’s actually a witty combination, as the rice cake somewhat resembled a hamburger patty—thus, the dish was reversing the usual order of the ingredients. For five bucks, the beef was obviously not aged prime, but I cannot fault it in a five-dollar dish.

 

Much of the menu consists proteins, to which you add your choice of accompaniments. Duck in Green Curry ($14; above left) was insipid and forgettable.

Thai Paella ($15; above right) was on a separately printed list, alleged to be the “weekly specials,” although the sheet was so dog-eared it could have dated from the Bush Administration. An abundant helping of rice was slightly on the greasy side; finding the seafood (shrimp, scallops, mussels) required a small fishing expedition. The secret sauce, as I mentioned, didn’t add much. Perhaps they ought to leave Paella to the Spanish.

The small space is inexpensively but attractively decorated in multi-colored fabrics. Tables are close together, but when families enter with strollers, the staff make room. They were about 80 percent full on a Saturday evening: we arrived without a reservation and were seated immediately. Service was a bit slow, but we were in no hurry and didn’t mind. 

If I sound a bit negative, perhaps it is only because we came in with high expectations. With the various combinations of proteins and broths, there are probably a hundred different dishes here, of which we sampled only a few. (I am fully prepared for someone to write in the comments, “You ordered wrong.”) Still, this should not take away from Sookk’s many charms. If you are looking for better-than-average neighborhood Thai cuisine, you’ll enjoy Sookk; we certainly did.

Sookk (2686 Broadway between 102nd & 103rd Streets, Upper West Side)

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

iPad Wine Tablets at South Gate

Last week, South Gate restaurant replaced its paper wine lists with iPads. It struck me as a gimmick to get the critics back to a restaurant they largely ignored—out of kindness, I suspect—when it opened two years ago.

This is the fourth electronic wine list I’ve seen. The old Aureole had one. It was so difficult to use that we just gave up, and asked the sommelier for assistance. Adour has a wine list projected onto the counter at the bar, though at the tables it relies on paper. I found the electronic version finicky, and as I’d done at Aureole, gave up and asked for the printed version.

SD26 is the only other New York restaurant that currently dispenses with paper entirely. As I noted after my visit:

I quickly figured out the user interface, but found it frustrating. On a traditional wine list, I can flip through the pages quickly, getting an instant sense of its breadth and depth. A small screen that shows only a few bottles at a time is disorienting. You have no idea what you’re not seeing. It’s probably a lot, given an inventory of 1,000 bottles. Response time isn’t bad, but turning a page is a lot faster.

The iPad wine list at South Gate has much the same problem. The user interface is pretty easy to figure out, but you have to dig through several layers of menus to get to a list of bottles. Along the way, you have several decisions to make:

• Bottle, glass, cocktail, small format, large format, or beer? [I choose bottle]
• White, red, sparkling, or dessert? [I choose red]
• A particular grape, a particular country, or “all red”? [I choose country]
• Which country (out of 14)? [I choose United States]
• Which Grape (out of 4)? [I choose Merlot]

After all that, I find that South Gate has only one United States Merlot, and I later discover that there are only five U.S. bottles overall. So this is clearly not the strength of the list, which it has taken me a bit of searching to find out. On a printed list, you’d quickly see at a glance that the largest selection is French.

Response time for any given menu option ranges from one to four seconds, which doesn’t sound bad, but the minutes add up quickly, while you’re still not sure how big the list is, or how much you’re missing. Fortunately for me—but not for the restaurant—the place wasn’t busy, and the server let me hold onto the iPad for about 45 minutes, so I had plenty of time to browse. This wouldn’t work at a busy place, unless they’re prepared to invest in a lot of iPads.

Eventually, someone will develop the killer wine list app that beats paper, but it hasn’t happened yet.

*

Kerry Heffernan, the original chef at Eleven Madison Park, has been at South Gate since it opened. The Tony Chi-designed room has no charm; it could be a soulless hotel dining room anywhere.

The city’s most expensive non-Japanese restaurant, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, was once in the same building, so you don’t expect it to be cheap. And it isn’t. Practically all of the entrées are north of $30. Even the three-course pre-theater menu feels expensive, at $49.

A more gently priced bar menu was introduced recently (though, as at most places, you can get the full menu at the bar, too). I wasn’t hungry, so I sampled just one item.

Try to imagine Fried Macaroni & Cheese ($12). Does your mental picture agree at all with the photo on the left? I thought not.

A confused runner dropped the dish in front of another patron. He was sure he hadn’t ordered it, and handed it off to me. I thought it must be a mistake, but I couldn’t find a server and didn’t want the dish to get cold.

I had eaten four out of the five little fritters before the server returned, and assured me that this was, indeed, the fried macaroni & cheese. I didn’t taste much macaroni, but the dish wasn’t bad. I’m not sure that five bites are worth $12, but when the roast chicken is $30, I suppose it is not out of line.

A glass of wine and a bar snack were all I had, but I must have spent an hour there, as the server seemed in no hurry to…you know, serve. It’s not much of an improvement over my first visit, when the place was new. Inexplicably, I gave South Gate one star. I am not sure why. Nothing I saw here makes me want to return.

South Gate (154 Central Park South between 6th & 7th Avenues, West Midtown)

Review Recap: Aquavit

Yesterday, Sam Sifton demoted Aquavit from three stars down to two:

Aquavit is now 23. It has been in this location since 2005, when it moved east from the Rockefeller Townhouses, across Fifth Avenue. . . .

Gone are the fireworks of the Samuelsson era, the high-wire act of matching Scandinavian food to French technique and the flavors of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. (Ruth Reichl of The New York Times awarded the restaurant three stars in 1995. William Grimes did so again in 2001; in 1988, before Mr. Samuelsson’s arrival, the restaurant was given two stars by Bryan Miller.)

Aquavit’s dining room can be somewhat lonely these days, only a little more than half full at peak hours. There is a sour scent to some of the passageways, the sort that flowers cannot battle.

But Mr. Jernmark has moved the menu toward a quiet, seasonal intensity that is well worth investigating.

This was an unsurprising outcome for a restaurant no one ever seems to talk about any more.

We certainly do not assume that Sam Sifton is reading this blog, but we note that, for several weeks running, there has not been a “terrific” or a “delicious” in his reviews. Now he needs to drop the overwrought literary references:

It has been a Swedish summer here in New York. There seem to be Stieg Larsson novels on every fourth lap on the D train choogling over the Manhattan Bridge, on every third iPad glowing in the dark of the jitney driving east on the Long Island Expressway toward Montauk.

Remind me: the D train and the iPad have what to do with Aquavit?

Can Someone Please Explain Todd English To Me?

Today’s Times announces next week’s opening of Ça Va, a French brasserie in the Times Square Intercontinental Hotel. Todd English is the nominal chef, but after the photo-op he’ll hand over the reins to his “longtime lieutenant,” Victor LaPlaca.

I really struggle to comprehend the Todd English phenomenon. He attaches his name to one mediocrity after another, but people with money put his name on restaurants all over the place. Why? He is not the only chef who widely syndicates and over-extends his personal brand, but I can’t think of anyone who has done it so often, with so little actual excellence.

I mean, there is a very real possibility that a Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Mario Batali restaurant will disappoint, but you can at least point to multiple things they’ve done that are superb. What has English done that comes anywhere close to that, especially in New York?

English’s page on chefdb.com lists thirty-four restaurants that he has opened since the success that launched his empire, Olives in Boston, which opened in 1989. That includes five New York properties, not one of which attracted any significant acclaim.

Whatever value English adds, it certainly can’t be in the kitchen. No one who opens nearly two restaurants a year could be doing anything more than fly by, drop a bit of pixie dust, and move on to the next one. It’s hard to see the value in that, when even his best work is so unimpressive.

So, if you’re looking to open a restaurant in New York, why would you hand your money to Todd English?

Rabbit in the Moon

Note: Rabbit in the Moon was sold in March 2011, and is now called The State Room.

*

Rabbit in the Moon is the latest gastropub that hopes to fetishize British food, traditionally the least admired European cuisine.

Like most British pubs, the name of the place is superficially meaningless. It’s supposedly dervied from “an old Chinese fable in which only those who are truly in love can see a rabbit in the moon.”

If we’ve got Rusty Knots and Spotted Pigs, then why not a Rabbit in the Moon?

The chef, Brian Bieler, has worked all over town, at places like Compass, Cafe Luxembourg, Bouley Upstairs, and The Mott. The owners come from STK and the Pink Elephant. They’re not exactly culinary royalty.

Despite that, they are apparently trying to cultivate airs of faux exclusivity. The townhouse it occupies is bedecked in fake ivy, naturally with no sign that would give away any useful information, like the name.

The bi-level space is cozy like an English country inn, with dark wood tables, plush easy chairs, a fireplace, and bars on two levels.

The owners have adopted a much-maligned “no shorts” rule, an odd marketing strategy for 90-degree days in Greenwich Village. A server confirmed the policy’s existence, but couldn’t explain why. The restaurant is not formal in any sense. Jeans and t-shirts are welcome; just not shorts.

Business was brisk, but not full, on a Friday evening. Perhaps the owners should drop their pretended exclusivity, and concentrate on attracting customers.

Ironically, service was over-the-top friendly—practically Danny Meyer-esque. It was if they were eager to demonstrate that, no matter what you read on Eater.com, We Are Nice People Here.

The staff gave me my choice of table; I picked a quiet two-top in a secluded nook at the front of the restaurant, with a window looking out on West 8th Street. Sit here if you can.

The menu is mostly Continental bistro classics, and not terribly expensive, for what you get. Appetizers are $8–18, entrées $17–30. Sides are $7, but unnecessary, as every entrée comes with a vegetable.

 

I asked the server for recommendations, and he suggested mostly the less expensive items. So I started with the Smoked Spanish Mackerel & Trout Salad ($12; above left). A crispy deep-fried hen-egg was on top: puncture it, and you’ve got instant salad dressing.

The name of the entrée, Fish & Chips ($17; above right), might well have come in quotes, as the “fish” consisted of tempura cod, baby squid, shrimp & octopus, with house-made tartar sauce and excellent fries.

There’s nothing revelatory here, or anything close to that, but it’s perfectly enjoyable pub food. If the owners would stop worrying about people in shorts, they just might build a following.

Rabbit in the Moon (47 W. 8th St. between 5th & 6th Avenues, Greenwich Village)

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

Why April Bloomfield Rocks

  

The other day, I was browsing the online menus of several West Village restaurants, trying decide which one to visit for dinner. Their unrelenting sameness depressed me. It’s not that I’ve tired of the classics, only that I doubted they’d be done really well.

Then I decided on The Spotted Pig, and I remembered why the chef, April Bloomfield, really rocks. Her menu—particularly the list of daily specials—is packed with dishes that don’t resemble anyone else’s. She isn’t serving kidneys on toast because there is great demand for them, but because this is her food.

I started with an order of Shito Peppers ($5), lightly fried and dusted with sea salt, each one packing a different heat intensity, depending on how many seeds remained inside. It was just a five-dollar bar snack, but full of flavor, and not duplicated in any other pub I know of.

Then I had a Butter Cup Squash Salad ($15; right) with golden chard and sorrel—a simple, impeccably prepared salad. Who else is serving one with these ingredients?

That’s why April Bloomfield Rocks.

The service here was excellent, as always, bearing in mind that it’s basically a gussied-up pub. But there are a lot of staff here—surely enough for a two-star restaurant, despite the superficially casual box they’re squeezed into.

One minor complaint: I was seated against the back wall, with the daily specials—there are always more than a half-dozen of them—written on the mirror behind me. Given that the menu is reprinted daily, why must it omit so many items, especially as there are so many seats, like the one I was in, where the mirror can’t easily be seen?

The Pig was the least crowded I’ve ever seen it. Don’t cry for April and her business partner, Ken Friedman: the place was full by 6:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening. But it was the first time I’ve been there that it actually took a full hour to seat every table.

The Spotted Pig (314 W. 11 Street at Greenwich Street, West Village)

Review Recap: Má Pêche

Today, Sam Sifton drops the expected two-spot on David Chang’s midtown transplant, Má Pêche:

Má Pêche is the first Momofuku restaurant truly suitable for dining with those the Internet calls the olds. (Though like some of its forebears, it takes no reservations.) Eating there is a little like visiting your formerly bohemian artist friend, whom you haven’t seen since he signed with Deitch and bought a double loft in TriBeCa.

The restaurant opened slowly over the course of this spring, not serving dinner for months, gaining its footing, figuring itself out. Now there is even a pre-theater menu. . . .

The food is not quite as precise and magical as it often is in the downtown restaurants, but it is recognizably Changish and strong: big flavors tied together with herbs and acids.

This is a good recovery for a restaurant that stumbled out of the gate, and picked up some decidedly un-Changian mixed reviews. The staff at Eater.com HQ, who are more plugged into the Momoverse than the chef’s own mother, reported that over the last month or so, “Chang has personally been in the kitchen almost constantly with executive chef Tien Ho and that the little tweaks made to the menu have paid off.”

I wonder if Sifton was duped:

Service at the restaurant is of an extremely high standard masked by a casual mien, as is the norm in Mr. Chang’s shops. Cory Lane, who runs the service program for all of them, and Colin Alevras, the antic beverage director, who came to the restaurant from DBGB, patrol Má Pêche with grace and good humor, seeing around corners, anticipating needs. (What, you didn’t realize you wanted to drink some coriander-ish Leipziger beer with your steak and sausage?) Their staff members follow their leads.

Eater says that Sifton was recognized at least five times (I told you they’re plugged in). Maybe, just maybe, the average customer doesn’t get that level of service. I certainly didn’t. The chef who claims his service is more “democratic,” in fact separates his customers into the “somebodies” and the “nobodies,” just like everyone else in this business.

Sifton tweaks Chang’s nose for not serving dessert—a decision that, like the no-reservation policy, I believe is destined to be reversed. It made sense at the perpetually-packed Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where Chang wants to cycle people in and out of their bar stools as quickly as possible—service be damned. If the restaurant is seldom full (as seems to be the case here), they might as well allow guests to linger, and make a bit more revenue per check.

Sifton wonders whether Chang “was aiming for a place at the highest level of the mainstream,” rather than what Má Pêche is now: “a very good restaurant for a Midtown business lunch, a celebratory steak dinner or a drink and some snacks after work.” We’ll find out.

In our view, the main reason for Má Pêche’s faults is that David Chang is stubborn.

Taureau

One-dish restaurants are all the rage, so why not all-fondue, all-the-time? As of three months ago, you can have it at Taureau in the East Village.

When we say “all-fondue,” we’re not kidding. To paraphrase W. S. Gilbert: fondue for starter, fondue for entrée, fondue for dessert—to have it supposed that you care for nothing but fondue, and that you would consider yourself insulted if anything but fondue were offered to you—how would you like that?

Well, you might expect fondue’s charms to wane over the course of a meal, but chef Didier Pawlicki mines enough from the theme to keep it exciting—at least for one visit. I cannot imagine it becoming anyone’s neighborhood go-to place, but for occasions ranging from romantic twosomes to large parties, it is already a hit. There’s nothing like cooking raw meat in a shared pot of boiling oil to bring people closer.

Like the same chef’s La Sirène, it’s the barest slip of a space, seating only 38. Each table has a built-in convection burner, leaving very little room to spare.

It is also BYOB, and at least for now, cash-only. If you don’t know the policy or forget the wine at home (as I did), the liquor store and Citibank are only a few blocks away.

The most straightforward ordering strategy is to choose one of two prix fixes, at either $37 or $57 per person, with a minimum of two. (Practically everything served here requires at least two people.) Either way, you get cheese fondue to start, meat fondue as the main course, and chocolate fondue for dessert. There’s still a dizzying array of choices (more offered at the higher price)—which cheese? what kind of oil? what chocolate? You could certainly eat here half-a-dozen times without exhausting the menu.

All of this (and a lot more) is available à la carte, although if you order three courses it will cost you considerably more than the prix fixe. We ordered the $57 menu, which comes with enough food to sate almost anyone.

We started with Perigord Cheese & Truffle Mushroom fondue, which comes with a choice of four “sides” for dipping. We chose the white asparagus, hot chorizo, slab bacon, and fingerling potatoes. It also includes a forgettable green salad and croutons, also for dipping. (The lower-priced prix fixe offers only the salad and croutons.)

The melted cheese itself was rich and luscious. The bacon was the best side dish, and the potatoes also worked well. The asparagus didn’t really pair with the cheese, while the chorizo (cold and clammy) simply wasn’t that good.

For the main course, there’s a choice of oils—we chose peanut—plus four house-made dipping sauces. Our prix fixe came with two meats: we chose pork tenderloin and filet mignon. You can probably guess the drill: dip the meat into the oil, where it cooks in about twenty seconds. Dip in sauce, and repeat. Simple pleasures.

The main course comes once again with the same forgettable green salad, which the chef might want to consider omitting. We didn’t touch it the second time.

Dessert is similar: your choice of chocolate, with a tray of fruits for dipping, and on the side, bowls of shredded coconut, almonds, and walnuts. It’s a can’t-miss dish, but we especially liked the frozen bananas (above, foreground).

The service team consists of the chef himself and two very busy servers, who manage to keep things moving briskly. It helps that the kitchen has very little actual cooking to do. The whole production takes around two hours, though you might spend the first twenty minutes of that just puzzling over the unfamiliar menu.

Pawlicki’s mission here may not be complicated, but he does it very well, and in New York he has the idea all to himself. It’s not food you can eat every day—it’s too rich and too monotonic for that—but it’s loads of fun and thoroughly worthwhile.

Taureau (127 E. Seventh St., West of Avenue A, East Village)

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

L’Artusi

Note: Founding chef Gabe Thompson left L’Artusi (and the group’s other restaurants) in October 2015.

*

Gabe Thompson and Joe Campanale are on a roll, with a string of West Village hits that began with dell’anima in 2007, L’Artusi in 2008, and Anfora in 2010.

The restaurants (Anfora is technically a wine bar) have distinctive personalities, but Thompson’s solid rustic Italian cuisine and Campanale’s compelling wine lists knit the three projects together.

Two of them are on the same block, and the third is just five minutes away, but somehow they haven’t over-saturated the market: dell’anima, the most established of the three, is perpetually packed, and Anfora is quickly getting there. L’Artusi moved a bit more slowly out of the gate (an unfavorable one-spot from Frank Bruni cannot have helped), but by 9:00 p.m. last Friday night it was full.

Like dell’anima, L’Artusi has plenty of seats for bar dining, but the space is more than twice the size, and not quite as charming. As it filled up, we found the noise increasingly unpleasant, as sound ricocheted off of the room’s hard surfaces. By the time we left, a normal conversation was almost impossible.

At all three Thompson/Campanale places, there is not a hint of attitude, as could easily be the case for a clutch of restaurants this successful. The host offered to seat me alone. I chose to wait at the bar, and later the tab was transferred to the table without my asking. Our server, however, tried to upsell an unwanted side dish, and was a bit inattentive as the evening went on.

The menu is in six categories: crudi, vegetable starters, pastas, fish, meats, and side dishes. Pastas dominate, with nine choices. There are half-a-dozen or fewer entries under the other headings. Most starters are under $15, pastas under $20, and entrées generally under $25.

Campanale’s wine list is remarkable for its length and variety. He’s not the first to put each region of Italy on its own page, and with its own map, but he may be the first to include separate maps showing the location of each producer. Presented in a thick red leather volume, it is one of the prettiest wine lists in town.

As he does at his other places, Campanale offers wines all over the price spectrum, including bottles with age on them that don’t cost half a paycheck, such as the 1995 Cerbaiona Rosso ($58; above right) that we had.

Escolar ($14; above left) from the crudo menu was draped with avocado, basil, and chilies. There is always a danger that such assertive ingredients will overwhelm the fish, but that didn’t happen here. The flavors were bright, crisp, and in balance. We followed that with octopus ($15; above right) that was perhaps as tender as we have ever encountered.

By the way, we had that octopus as an appetizer, but it is listed on the fish section of the menu, where most of the items are entrées. The server sent everything out in the right order, but I have to think some diners have been led astray.

I don’t know how the house-made tagliatelle bolognese bianco ($18; above left) was prepared, but the richly-flavored, flat noodles were in double layers—green one one side, white on the other: a wonderful dish. I wouldn’t call the Dayboat Halibut ($28; above right) a dud, but I found the tomato sauce a shade too assertive, especially for so delicate a fish.

Messrs. Thompson and Campanale have found their niche in a series of casual places, where the food and wine lists are superior to the surroundings. Part of me wants to see them ply their craft on a grander stage. Perhaps that’s not what they aspire to—never mind whether this is the right economic climate in which to try. The restaurants they’ve built are so welcoming, the food and libations so well thought out, that I tolerate their occasional discomforts.

L’Artusi (228 W. 10th Street between Bleecker & Hudson Streets, West Village)

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