Review Preview: Savoy

Record to date: 1–2 

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Savoy, where chef Peter Hoffman has been doing haute barnyard cuisine since long before you could find it on every street corner.

The Skinny: The Times has reviewed Savoy twice. In 1993, Bryan Miller awarded no stars:

Savoy is a baffling restaurant. It is a seductive little place on a shadowy corner of SoHo, with a brick hearth, folkloric knickknacks and a determined husband-wife team in charge. Yet the food is as uneven as the craggy cobblestone streets around it.

The two-and-a-half-year-old Savoy is the creation of Peter Hoffman, the chef, and his wife, Susan Rosenfeld, who runs the front of the house and makes pastries… This neighborly setting is not the kind of place where you want to discuss your divorce settlement unless you don’t mind unsolicited advice from everyone else in the room.

Bryan Miller, it should be noted, was a much harder grader than any of his successors. Ruth Reichl, on the other hand, was much more generous. Despite significant caveats, she awarded two stars in 1995:

Savoy may very well not be for you. There is something resolutely unprofessional about a place that revels in its unevenness, refusing to do the same thing twice. The service can be slow and the chef’s experiments sometimes fail. But if you have an adventurous spirit, you will discover a sense of fun that is missing in most modern restaurants. Eating at Savoy you get the feeling that the people who run it like food, like themselves and like what they are doing.

The restaurant was remodeled in 2002, leading to this Diner’s Journal update from William Grimes:

A restaurant as tiny as the Savoy doesn’t seem as if it could subdivide, but it has. After nearly 13 years the restaurant has shed its Garbo-like image of secrecy, transforming the ground floor into a modern-looking cafe with diner overtones. The upstairs bar has been moved downstairs, the entrance to the restaurant has been shifted northward to the corner of Prince and Crosby Streets, and huge windows now make the Savoy’s interior almost shockingly visible to the outside world. The upstairs remains old-fashioned and intimate. The brick fireplace survives intact.

Peter Hoffman, the Savoy’s chef and owner, sticks with the same cooking philosophy that has won the Savoy a loyal following over the years, shopping the greenmarkets for local produce and pushing organic foods whenever possible. The makeover now gives him two formats: an all-day cafe menu and a more formal menu in the upstairs dining room.

We have visited the current version of Savoy twice, in November 2006 and three months ago, rating it at at two stars on both occasions. It is precisely the kind of earnest, family-run restaurant that Frank Bruni loves. The chef has since opened Back Forty, a more casual place, in the East Village. Except for that, he has kept his eye on the ball, and we doubt that Bruni would see any point in demoting it to one star.

The trifecta is an outside possibility, but we strongly believe that three-star restaurants don’t hide in plain sight. If a twenty-year-old place that everyone knows about is one of the top 20-odd restaurants in the city, we doubt that Bruni would be the first to notice.

Re-reviews need a raison d’être. Obviously a rating change is reason enough in itself—and, to be honest, most of Bruni’s re-reviews do bring a change of rating. But in this case, given that Savoy hasn’t been reviewed in 14 years, the opportunity to give a shout-out might be all the reason Bruni needs.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will re-affirm two stars for Savoy.

The Bread Bar at Tabla

Bread Bar is the oddly named casual sibling to chef Floyd Cardoz’s fine-dining Indian restaurant, Tabla.

I say “oddly named” because bread isn’t any more prominently featured here than at any other Indian restaurant. It’s a small section at the end of the two-page menu. If you didn’t know otherwise, you’d think it’s a bar that serves bread with your cocktails, and that’s not what Bread Bar is at all.

In the fine print (a/k/a/ the website), Bread Bar bills itself as “home-style Indian cuisine,” but of the four dishes we tried, none would be encountered in the typical Indian restaurant. There are traditional dishes on the menu, like Tandoori Lamb, Chicken Tikka, and Naan, but most of the items—at least as described—seem just as novel as the upstairs fine dining restaurant.

Tabla is the the quietest member of Danny Meyer’s restaurant brood. It’s not as well known as Union Square Cafe, for which the company is named; nor Eleven Madison Park, for which Frank Bruni has such a shine; nor The Modern, where chef Gabriel Kreuther just won a James Beard award; nor Shake Shack, so adored by the burger mavens; nor the perennially booked Gramercy Tavern.

But we have no reason to doubt Floyd Cardoz is just as talented as those other chefs. We awarded three stars when we dined there three years ago, the same as Ruth Reichl in the Times a decade ago. Tabla still serves a prix fixe menu, and at $59 it’s actually $5 cheaper than it was in 2006. The Bread Bar a different restaurant, for all intents and purposes, but its only Times write-up was a 2002 rave from Eric Asimov in $25 & Under. If the paper has mentioned Bread Bar since then, I seem to have missed it.

The space is typical of the casual “front rooms” attached to fine dining restaurants. Reservations aren’t taken, and the atmosphere is very much a bar that serves food. The dishes are served family style—meaning they come out as they’re ready—and the server recommended sharing, which we did.

The à la carte menu has 6–7 choices in each of five categories: Cold ($6–15), Hot ($9–15), Vegetables ($4–24), Fish & Shellfish ($16–38), and Meat ($18–23). There are two tasting menus ($54 or $89). Breads and chutneys are $4–10 each.

Some of the prices are tough to comprehend. In the Creamed Spinach Samosa ($15), and the only other ingredients are garlic, chickpeas, and radishes. The server said that it was just a single samosa, and she was at a loss to explain why it would be the most expensive hot appetizer. Why is the most expensive seafood dish the soft-shell crabs at $38, when lobster is only $23? I’m sure there are reasons, but not that we could make out from the menu.

Family-style menus tend to induce over-ordering, but we resisted that. Two of the small plates and two of the larger ones were more than we could finish, especially as the entrée portions were ample.

It’s also hard to tell what counts as an appetizer, and what’s just a side dish. Onion Rings ($10; above left) flaked in chickpea batter were perfect, but a bit odd to eat on their own. A Sunny Side Spiced Up Egg ($13; above right) worked beautifully as a starter. My girlfriend was skeptical of the dish, but the egg contrasted nicely with arugula, applewood smoked bacon, and gingered chicken livers.

Incidentally, all of Danny Meyer’s restaurants are offering a special “egg” dish during the spring, with $2 from each sale going to City Harvest. The Feedbag’s Josh Ozersky tried them all on a single evening, demonstrating that even his legendary appetite had its limits. But this is a great dish, and it’s a pity that it will come off the menu on June 20.

The Berkshire Country Pork Pan Roast ($18; above left), marinated with apple cider, cinammon, and mustard seeds, was the better of the two entrées. The pork was tender, the seasoning well judged.

A Pulled Lamb & Mustard-Mashed Potato “Naanini,” or “street sandwich” ($23; above right) seemed far too carb-heavy. The potatoes seemed to be there, not so much for flavor, but merely as a binder to hold the lamb together. The lamb was pretty good, though. It was an enormous portion, probably 50 percent larger than it needed to be. Imagine eating three pieces of quiche at one sitting.

This is a Danny Meyer restaurant, and naturally the service is first-rate. Some of the prices seemed dear to us, but with judicious ordering you can put together a fine, inexpensive casual meal.

Bread Bar at Tabla (11 Madison Avenue at 25th Street, Flatiron District)

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

Review Recap: Flex Mussels and (not) Harbour

Yesterday, the food section editors led us to expect a double-review of Flex Mussels and Harbour. We weren’t the only ones misled: Eater.com’s Ballpark Frank featured a poll on the predicted star rating for both restaurants.

It turns out lame-duck Frank reviewed only the lesser restaurant, Flex Mussels, awarding the expected one star:

Restaurants benefit from having a clear identity and making a claim that dozens of other restaurants aren’t already making. In Flex’s case, that’s mussel mania.

And restaurants do well to give diners a clear path to a meal that’s relatively economical while also filling. That’s where Flex and its spotlighted fare really deliver, in that a hillock of the mussels, coupled with plenty of broth-soaked bread, makes for a sizable dinner without a sizable check…

You can drink relatively affordably at Flex, too. The succinct but appealing wine list, which supplements a terrific international array of beers, has few bottles over $75 and many under $50.

In the usual “yes, but…” style, Frank goes on to list Flex Mussels’ faults:

The rest of the menu isn’t priced quite as gently or coherently…appetizers of $16 (a mix of fried calamari, shrimp and oysters) and $17 (two crab cakes) seem just a tad exorbitant…

I also wish this Flex were as orderly, with service as smooth. At its busiest, the bottleneck of human traffic around the host station is impenetrable, and your table can become a lonely colony to which food is exported fitfully.

* * * *

Almost as soon as we posted our two-star prediction for Harbour, we were buffeted by misgivings. Frank bailed us out by relegating the restaurant to Dining Briefs, a treatment usually accorded restaurants not deemed worthy of a starred review. Surprisingly, he seemed to like the place. As we expected, he found one dish “overworked and busy,” but in its favor:

There’s nonetheless some arresting food and impressive cooking at Harbour, and on that night it included an appetizer of thick, smoky, intense clam chowder ($9); a gorgeously textured, dreamily rich entree of Arctic char ($24); and a broad, shallow plate of butterscotch pudding ($8) with — a kooky touch — popcorn scattered across, and embedded in, its surface

The prices, including a four-course prix fixe of $45, are reasonable, considering the formality of the service, the generous breadbasket, the amuse-bouche. And that mindfulness of tough times extends to an affordable, respectable wine list. You can sail these seas on the winds of a fine white Burgundy.

So why no full review? We suspect he harbours doubts [pun intended] about the restaurant’s future and didn’t want to invest three visits in a place that might not last. As almost every critic has done (including us), he mentions Harbour’s “strangely desolate location.”

That should be no obstacle to success, though. Someone had to be the first to open a fine-dining restaurant in TriBeCa, on the Lower East Side, or in the Meatpacking District. I’m not saying Harbour will be it, but sooner or later some restaurant will turn Hudson Square into a destination.

Review Preview: Flex Mussels and Harbour

Record to date: 0–2

I used to think I had a feel for what Frank Bruni was going to do, but we’re oh-fer-two since Review Preview launched a fortnight ago. With a double-review coming up, we’ve got the chance either to level-up or to dig ourselves an even deeper hole. Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Flex Mussels on the Upper East Side and Harbour in Hudson Square.

The Skinny: The general rule with double-reviews of new restaurants (not before reviewed in the Times), is that Bruni must not think either one is especially important. He has never given three stars in a double-review, unless he was upgrading a restaurant previously reviewed. That’s not the case here, so we start with two stars as a ceiling for both of these places.

Flex Mussels hasn’t been on our radar. It has been open for at least six months, but none of the other star-bestowing critics have reviewed it. We’d entirely forgotten (or never noticed) reviews in the New Yorker, Village Voice, and the Insatiable Critic until we looked them up just moments ago.

Bruni doesn’t usually review restaurants in out-of-the-way places only to trash them, and for him Flex Mussels, at 82nd and Lex, is a major detour. At the same time, most of his two-star awards go to places that are already very well known, which Flex Mussels is not. That leaves one star as the most likely case here.

With Harbour, we have a bit more to go on, as we had dinner there just this past weekend. Although we gave two stars to our meal, some of the dishes seemed over-wrought. Frank Bruni is liable to call them “fussy,” a word we abhor in this context, because of his over-use of it. My girlfriend said, “Frank Bruni is not going to like this food.” In Harbour’s favor, Adam Platt awarded two stars in New York and Restaurant Girl three in the Daily News. Platt’s rating is often a good predictor of what Bruni will do.

The folks at Flex Mussels probably won’t mind a one-star review—they could probably use the exposure—but for Harbour one star could be devastating. That has never stopped Bruni before, but Harbour is one of those places he could have skipped reviewing altogether. We’re not at all sure about this, but our guess is that if he’s bothering to review Harbour, he finds it at least modestly promising.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will award one star to Flex Mussels and two stars to Harbour.

Boqueria

Note: This is a review under chef Seamus Mullen, who left the restaurant in July 2010. Marc Vidal is his replacement.

*

Boqueria is one of those insanely busy restaurants that can make its own rules without impairing the demand for its product—in this case, Spanish tapas. Since it opened three years ago in the Flatiron District, the tiny space has been perpetually packed. A second Boqueria opened in Soho, and apparently it’s just as busy.

So Boqueria doesn’t take reservations and forces all of its patrons to sit on bar stools, many at communal tables where the adjacent party is just inches away.

When I arrived at 6:15 p.m. on a Friday night, I snagged one of the few vacant bar tables, but it was missing a stool. Could this be rectified when my girlfriend arrived?

The hostess shrugged. “If we have one,” she said. Otherwise, we’d be advised to cram ourselves onto the banquette side by side.

It turned out that a spare stool was hidden in the coat-check room. Disaster averted. At the very least, her fall-back suggestion would have been awfully cramped, as we observed at other tables not so lucky.

Boqueria can get away with this, as the waves of eager diners just keep coming and coming, as they’ve done since Frank Bruni awarded the unassuming place two stars in November 2006.

The concise menu offers just north of a dozen tapas ($5–12), just three entrées ($17–29), a broad selection of cheeses ($5–6) and a half-dozen cured meats, called Embutidos ($5–6 each). There’s a list of daily specials (mercifully, in print), often including suckling pig, though alas not when we visited.

I was too hungry to wait, so I started with a plate of three Embutidos—the Serrano ham, the spiced pork sausage, and the Catalan hard pork sausage, paired with a Spanish cider practically as alcoholic as a dry martini. The meats were all good, but probably would have worked better as a shared order.

After my girlfriend arrived, we started with the seared octopus ($9) and the seared lamb ($8), both served on skewers (above left). An order of Croquetas ($10; not pictured) offered lightly breaded, creamy helpings of mushroom, salt cod, and suckling pig. Surprisingly, the mushroom croquetas tasted best, whereas the pig had almost no discernable flavor at all.

Paella ($29; above right) is the only item above $20, but it’s still a good deal, as the portion is massive. The two of us finished all of the seafood, but left quite a bit of the rice behind. I found the rice over-cooked. Two huge langoustines were plated lazily on top, and not properly integrated into the dish. The clams were perfectly done.

For a place this busy, the server was reasonably attentive. Then again, turning tables is the name of the game. After we got up to leave, it took all of ten milliseconds for another party to grab our table.

I was less impressed with Boqueria than I’d expected to be. The food was mostly good, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. I’d love to return for one of the trademark pork entrées that folks rave about, but you never know when they’re on the menu.

Boqueria (53 West 19th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, Flatiron District)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: no stars
Overall: *

Harbour

Note: Harbour closed in December 2009.

*

We’re in a year of seafood restaurants. This season has brought us The John Dory in Southwest Chelsea, Fishtail by David Burke on the Upper East Side, Marea on Central Park South, and now Harbour in Hudson Square.

Among these, Harbour may have the toughest path to glory, as it doesn’t have the benefit of a well known chef, and it’s in a neighborhood not previously hospitable to fine dining. There’s no reason diners shouldn’t make the voyage here, only steps away from Soho, TriBeCa, and the West Village. But while Husdon Square is adjacent to those three neighborhoods, it’s not in any of them, and therein lies the rub.

Undaunted by the geography, the owners of Harbour have taken a big risk here, with a fit-out rumored to have cost $4 million. Like nearby Lure Fishbar, the space resembles a luxury liner, although the transformation here is even more stunning. The walls and tables are fashioned from polished teakwood, with sleek faux portholes every few feet.

The chef, Joe Isidori, labored for years in near-anonymity in Donald Trump’s empire before earning a Michelin star last year at the Las Vegas restaurant DJT (those being the Donald’s initials).

When the recession hit, Isidori could have dialed down his ambition here to fish & chips and crab rolls, but he stuck to his guns. Though no dish except lobster is above $30, he serves two amuse courses, three kinds of home-made bread, and a plate of petits-fours that is better than most of the city’s three-star places. The service brigade is polished, with many sauces applied table-side. We didn’t order whole fish, but the one served at another table was filleted expertly before our eyes.

There are signs Harbour catching on: by the time we finished our dinner on Saturday evening, there wasn’t a spare berth to be had in the dining room (though the large bar area still had a ways to go). Critical reaction so far is mostly positive, with three stars from Restaurant Girl in the Post and two from the perennially clueless Adam Platt in New York, who doesn’t think anyone wants to eat this way any more. The Times drops anchor tomorrow.

We loved the Pea Soup amuse with Greek yogurt and a yuzu emulsion. The house-made breads were terrific, including an unusual yogurt dipping sauce in lieu of butter.

The appetizers didn’t quite live up to their billing, though I can respect the thought that went into them. Claim Chowder ($9; above left) is made with a blizzard of ingredients, including leeks, chinese bacon, celery root, yuzu, red bean vinegar, baby turnips, thumbelina carrots, celery, fingerling potatoes, tomato confit, yellow curry oil, and that’s only a partial list. The namesake clams are supposedly in there too, but they get lost in the shuffle.

Kampachi crudo ($14; above right) was a little less busy, with kampachi and shrimp on a sheet of serrano ham, but I found the dish bland.

The entrées were a bit more exciting. Shrimp ($28; above left) were plump and juicy, with an accompaniment of miso, garlic chives, wheatberries & ramps. Even better bang for the buck came from terrific Soft-Shell Crabs ($20; above right) with a soft poached egg. You could argue that both dishes, like the clam chowder before them, had a few more ingredients than they needed.

A side of Cauliflower Gratin ($6; below left) was just about perfect. Here too, Isidori doesn’t take the easy way out, but the mixture of cauliflower and raisins was a memorable one.

The dessert amuse (above center) was a simple but wonderfully refreshing pineapple sorbet with a dash of lemon soda poured tableside. The petits-fours (above right) were world-class, including the raspberry chocolate macaroons in the foreground and sea salt caramels in the back.

The wine list is priced in line with the menu. We had no trouble reeling in a Trimbach Reserve Pinot Gris at $40 that paired well with the food. As noted, some of the items we tried seemed a bit over-thought, but in a year when most chefs are playing it safe, we enjoyed finding a restaurant that takes a few chances. We’d be happy to hop on board Chef Isidori’s next cruise.

Harbour (290 Hudson Street between Spring & Dominick Streets, Hudson Square)

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

City Hall

The TriBeCa restaurant City Hall has been quietly turning out reliable food for just over a decade. In the Times, Ruth Reichl awarded two stars in January 1999. It’s located in a gorgeous landmarked 1863 cast iron building not far from the real City Hall. The renovation—a wide, comfortable room decorated with life-size vintage photos—is still fresh and elegant.

You don’t hear much about City Hall. The restaurant doesn’t get its name in the press. The menu seems to offer the same “steakhouse-plus” cuisine it die when Reichl reviewed it. My sense is that it attracts more of a lunch crowd, partly due to its location. On a recent Thursday evening, it was less than half full.

We started with a small tomato soup as amuse-bouche and moved onto the bone-in double-cut Delmonico for two ($82) with a side of hand-cut fries ($9).

The beef was dry-aged prime, and tasted like it, but didn’t quite have the flavor intensity or the rich char of the better ribeyes in town.

Service was more friendly, and the ambiance more pleasant than most steakhouses. The deep wine list has won awards, and on a cursory glance looked well worth exploring. However, we weren’t in a wine mood, and did well by the respectable beer selection (two Saratogas, $7 each).

City Hall seems, in short, like a restaurant you can count on, but not one worth traveling for.

City Hall (131 Duane St. between Church & West Broadway, TriBeCa)

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