Le Relais de Venise

Le Relais de Venise “L’Entrecôte” garnered a bit of press—only a little—when it opened last summer in East Midtown— oddly enough, on the same block as the Four Seasons. The few reviews it got told of a “meh” steak in a “meh” sauce, and that was that.

Then Sam Sifton shocked us all by choosing the place for his fourth review, pronouncing it “terrific,” and awarding one star.

The concept at L’Entrecôte is simple enough. There is only one order: salad and steak frites for $24. Across the street, at the Four Seasons, you can’t even get an appetizer for that.

Desserts are extra, but not exorbitant, at around $5–7 each. A glass of the house Bordeaux is just $5.75. None of that is expensive by Manhattan standards, where at most top steakhouses the steak alone is around $40—more at some places.

Still, even if you skip dessert (as I did) and drink just one glass of the wine, you’ll approach $40 with tax and tip. There are plenty of cheap eats at that price, and when only one item is served, it ought to be great. It is not.

What’s served here is better called “nourishment” than cuisine. As Sifton noted, you could be out in twenty minutes, and there is no reason to linger any longer. The space is cavernous, and neither warm nor especially inviting. I wonder how often they’ll fill it?

Despite all that space, there is no coat check.

The menu announces, “Today, trimmed Entrecôte Steak [i.e. rib steak] ‘Porte Maillo’ with its famous sauce, French fries and Green salad with walnuts.” I love that word Today, as if you could get something different tomorrow. You can’t.

A waitress dressed in a French maid’s uniform asks if you’ll have your steak blue, rare, medium, or well. I choose rare, and she writes a big “R” in magic marker on the white mat that covers the table. With so little to keep track of, do they really need an aide memoire?

That house wine arrives. It is certainly not over-priced, at $5.75. But one glass of it will be enough.

The salad (below left) comes within minutes— fast enough to make me suspect a bunch of them are made up in advance. After a few bites of the soggy lettuce, my fears are confirmed.

In contrast, the steak seems to be prepared to order. The waitress serves about half of it onto your plate, and ladles on the sauce. The other half is left on a warming tray at a serving station nearby. When you’ve finished your first helping, she’ll bring over the tray and serve the rest. It’s a gimmick, as the portion is not so large that it would get cold if it were all served at once.

The meat, as you’d expect, is not the best, but it is certainly edible, and cooked correctly to the rare I had asked for. The fries are decent. The sauce is a secret, but the consensus is that it includes chicken livers, mustard, and pepper. I thought I tasted mushrooms, too. It is good enough to conceal the fact that the beef is nothing special.

The servers are plenty attentive. You could argue that the place is over-staffed, given how little is expected of them. The restaurant fulfills its modest aims acceptably, but I’m sure you can find more interesting ways to spend $40.

Le Relais de Venise (590 Lexington Avenue at 52nd Street, East Midtown)

Food: Acceptable
Service: Decent
Ambiance: Acceptable
Overall: Satisfactory

When a Cru Becomes a Vin de Pays

Update: Sure enough, and as we suspected, Cru’s strategy for re-making itself failed. We take no pleasure in this; it was just so obviously desperate. Cru closed in the summer of 2010. Its replacement is Lotus of Siam.

*

Cru, one of the few unabashedly old-school restaurants to have opened within the last five years, has finally decided how to replace Chef Shea Gallante, who left in June.

The Times reports that Todd Macdonald is the new chef. He had been with the restaurant in 2004, when it opened, but left two years ago to join a catering firm. Robert Bohr, one of the owners, said, “We wanted food that was easier, simpler, faster, cheaper and definitely tastier, which is what we think Todd will do.”

He added that they’ll consider remodeling after the new year, “to make the place less fancy.” In the meantime, prices on what is probably the city’s best wine list have been slashed by 30 percent across the board.

When we visited in last year, we noted that Cru was one of the few restaurants that actually got fancier. Servers’ all-black uniforms were replaced with suits; an à la carte menu was replaced with an $84 prix fixe, and the tasting menu nearly doubled in price, from $65 to $125.

This is by no means a crazy strategy. Eleven Madison Park did the same, and its reward was four stars from Frank Bruni. Just try getting a last-minute reservation these days. But at Cru, for whatever reason, that strategy did not survive the recession.

We understand why Cru has decided to go downscale. The reasons are obvious enough to not require explanation.

At the same time, we have our doubts. Even with a 30 percent discount, Cru’s wine list has hundreds of bottles with three and four-digit prices. Most people willing to spend that kind of money want food of a certain quality.

If you can afford a $400 Bordeaux, do you really care if the entrées are five bucks cheaper?

Review Recap: Le Relais de Venise

Sam Sifton has been the New York Times restaurant critic for just four weeks, and already he is full of surprises. We have correctly predicted his rating just once—and that was for the rather obvious Marea.

We did not believe that this restaurant would get one star, based on the “meh” reviews we’ve read elsewhere. But we are glad that when Sifton gives a star, the restaurant is actually good—a contrast from the Frank Bruni era.

LE RELAIS DE VENISE L’ENTRECÔTE is a mouthful of a restaurant that opened a few months ago in a canyon at Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, convenient mostly to hotel guests and hamsters on the Midtown professional wheel. It has no real menu to speak of. There is only salad and steak frites. Some wine to drink and a dessert after. Women in French maid outfits serve the stuff as if they were characters in an early Preston Sturges film. And you know what? It’s terrific.

We still don’t quite understand why a restaurant that serves only one salad and one entrée required a review to itself.

Record to date: 71–28 (71%)

The Burger at Bar Blanc Bistro

Note: Bar Blanc Bistro has closed. The space is now the Southern-themed restaurant Lowcountry.

*

When we last visited Bar Blanc, we found a washed-out all-blanc space helmed by a former Bouley chef, with a $75 tasting menu and a $32 suckling pig entrée. At those prices, Bar Blanc needed to be more than just a neighborhood place.

Frank Bruni drank the kool-aid, awarding two stars in early 2008. We found it uneven (that pig was stringy and bitter) and over-priced, awarding just one. It seems the customers agreed with us.

Bar Blanc wisely re-tooled. The severe all-blanc space was toned down and made more welcoming. The original chef departed, and was replaced by Sebastiaan Zijp (ironically also a former Bouley employee), who dialed down the menu to a level the West Village could support. To signal the revised ambitions, the space was renamed Bar Blanc Bistro.

Except for a strip steak, all of the entrées are now under $30. Pork appears in several dishes; the chef breaks down whole animals himself. You can order the full menu at the bar, though there is a separate menu of bar snacks, including the obligatory signature burger for $15. On Mondays, you can get a dinner of moules frites with beer for just $18. On Sundays, there’s a $35 prix fixe. Wines are half-price during happy hour.

In other words, there’s a sincere attempt to make this a neighborhood go-to place, but the cuisine is thoughtful enough, and the space welcoming enough, for a low-key date or a business dinner.

Josh Ozersky’s final act as editor of the Feedbag (other than navel-gazing) was a visit to Bar Blanc Bistro, where he sampled the whole menu, liking all of it except the beef. Ozersky has it out for the Piedmontese Beef the restaurant features: “as I expected, the hamburger is awful.”

Being the perverse soul I am, I thought I’d try the one thing Ozersky hated—that burger. No, it is not awful—you knew that, right?

Piedmontese Beef has a luscious taste, remarkable given that it doesn’t rely on high fat content. But I suppose when you’re eating a burger doused in melted Vermont cheddar and bone marrow–bordelaise mayo, who cares how fatty the beef is?

A more serious complaint is the height–width ratio. If this baby were any taller, it would be a meatball. At these proportions, it was difficult to handle. When I was finished, half the bun was still in my hand.

I wouldn’t order that burger again, but I came away much more inclined to return to the restaurant than when Bar Blanc was serving $30 entrées. There’s still much more fun to be had here.

Bar Blanc Bistro (142 W. 10th St. between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Village)

Review Preview: Le Relais de Venise

Tomorrow, Sam Sifton reviews the utterly irrelevant Le Relais de Venise. The utterly disgusted Eater oddsmakers have declined to establish a betting line.

Nevertheless, we forecast zero stars, because: A) No one yet has said this place is especially good. B) If you give one star to a place that actually has some decent food (i.e., Imperial Palace), where else is there to go, but down?

Vong Bites the Dust

Update: The space will become the third NYC branch of Wolfgang’s Steakhouse. Clever man, that Wolfgang.

*

Eater.com reports that Vong will close on Saturday.

General consensus was perhaps embodied in Frank Bruni’s takedown three years ago, when he knocked the restaurant down from three stars to one. It was certainly no longer relevant to the food community. A discussion thread on Mouthfuls.com hadn’t seen a post in 5½ years.

The closure means that I no longer have to fret over my three-star review, posted in 2005. I’ve become a tougher grader over the years. Though I am sure I would still enjoy that meal if I had it today, I probably woudn’t give it three stars any more. And if reports like Bruni’s can believe, even that meal was better than Vong could regularly deliver these days.

After Saturday, Vong is no more.

Jo's

Note:  This is a review of Jo’s under chef Colin Kruzik, who was fired in June 2010. Chef Andrew Pressler eventually replaced him. Click here for a review of the food under Chef Pressler. The restaurant closed in May 2013.

*

Out of failure comes a second chance. Most restaurants we’re visiting these days are in spaces formerly occupied by other restaurants.

That’s the story at Jo’s, which opened in May in the former Tasting Room space. The earlier failure there was one of the sadder stories we’ve seen. Colin Alevras had a cult hit in the East Village, but it didn’t scale up to a NoLIta space that was triple the size.

Jo’s has humbler ambitions. The website describes it as “casual, neighborhood dining at great prices.” The food is better than we expected, but unlike the Tasting Room, Jo’s isn’t a destination, and apparently doesn’t aspire to be.

If you remember the Tasting Room, the new space won’t make you forget it. A couple of partitions, some modest wall hangings, and a new bartop have been added, but the Tasting Room’s old sliding barn door and exposed brick walls remain.

With $9 cocktails, $4–6 beers, wines by the glass mostly $9–11, and a happy hour every night from 5–8pm, there is a clear emphasis on the bar trade. So far it seems to be working, as we found the space full on a Friday evening. We were delighted by those cocktail prices until we tasted a couple of them. We found them far too sweet and syruppy.

The dining room was not full, but if a few of those bar patrons can be persuaded to stick around, they’ll find it worth their while. Appetizers are mostly $9–12, entrées $15–25. Several of the entrées are listed with two prices, “old school” or “à la carte” (sans vegetables) for $5 less. Side dishes, not coincidentally, are $5 apiece.

Chef Colin Kruzik (a veteran of James, Maremma, Nobu 57, and Bouley) works in a solid American comfort-food idiom. We encountered nothing adventurous, but within its narrow ambitions, enjoyed all of it.

A selection of Cured Meats ($11) was just fine, but we were even more impressed with Crispy Pork Ribs ($11), in a garlic glaze with shiso and peanuts. The meat fell off the bone, and the sauce was just right. I would go back just for those.

Is chicken the acid test for a competent chef? If it is, then this chef passed. I loved the Free Range Chicken ($19) with wilted baby spinach. Shell Steak au poivre ($25) was at the level you would expect of a good neighborhood place.

Service was attentive and polished, but we would have liked a place to hang our coats and bags, as there was little room for them in our booth. We thought the food came out at a reasonable pace, but the concerned kitchen comped a bowl of excellent gougères (photo above) while we waited.

It’s hard to walk in here without remembering the Tasting Room, but Jo’s is probably a better fit for the space. We sampled only a few dishes, but we’ll bet that the chef who made that chicken can nail the rest of the menu too.

Jo’s (264 Elizabeth Street, south of Houston Street, NoLIta)

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