MPD

Note: MPD closed in 2012. The space is now Bubby’s High Line.

*

Here is one big hint that the new restaurant MPD probably wasn’t built for guys like me: I thought the name stood for Meatpacking District.

Florence Fabricant of the Times set me straight: it’s Mon Petit Déjeuner, which is French for my breakfast. The restaurant does not currently serve breakfast (the website indicates it eventually will), and how many of its likely patrons knew that anyway?

Perhaps the name is meant to be taken ironically. After a night of club-hopping, regulars will feel like breakfast, and MPD will be there for them.

MPD’s backers, Derek and Daniel Koch, are known mainly as nightlife mavens. They also have an investment from the Ginza Project, the Russians behind Mari Vanna. A French bistro might not be what you expected from this crew.

MPD is a much better restaurant than it needs to be. It won’t put Pastis out of business, although perhaps it deserves to. It serves solid bistro fare in a pretty room that that, unlike many in the area, doesn’t seem over-built. Service is civilized. You can carry on a conversation, you won’t be sitting in your neighbor’s lap, and you won’t be overrun with tourists.

Those things are all worth cheering about.

Prices are in a wide range, but a shade on the high side, with appetizers $9–19 (caviar service, $215), entrées $19–38, and sides $7–9.

I am assuming the bread basket was outsourced, but the dinner rolls were just fine, served with a plate of olive oil, into which the restaurant’s name had been “drawn” (see photo).

Both dishes I tried were what you want French bistro food to be: hearty, flavorful, solidly prepared. I loved the pork confit ($14; above left) with pickled cauliflower—nothing complicated, but the pork was nicely done. Crab Cakes Benedict ($27; above right) were offered as a special; perhaps another pun on the breakfast theme. I don’t remember seeing that before as a dinner entrée. I would be happy to have it again.

At 6:30 p.m. on a Friday evening, the restaurant was practically empty, except for the small bar up front. There were only three or four parties seated by the time I left, but it was clearly a very early hour for the area. Service was attentive, but it is not difficult to look after the only customer in the restaurant. There were a lot of staff on the floor; presumably, the “party” gets started much later on.

In a neighborhood where restaurants tend to be more functional than useful, MPD is a worthy addition. You’re not likely to find me there to sweat off a hangover. As a drop-in place after work, I’d be happy to add it to my rotation.

MPD (73 Gansevoort Street at Washington Street, Meatpacking District)

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

Donatella

Note: We weren’t impressed with Donatella, and neither was anyone else. The place closed in January 2014. The space is now Heartwood.

*

Donatella and DBar are the latest creations of Donatella Arpaia, the restaurateur and chef wannabe. The former is a pizzeria, the latter a cocktail bar. A passageway (not open to the public) connects the two, so that the same pizza can be served in both places.

Ms. Arpaia first came to notice in 1998, when she gave up her law practice and invested her whole trust fund to open the restaurant Bellini. Five years later, she supplied the financial backing for the hugely successful David Burke & Donatella on the Upper East Side. There followed a series of restaurants with the chef Michael Psilakis—in each case, Ms. Arpaia running the dining room while leaving the cooking to others more qualified.

Over the last couple of years, her partnerships with Messrs. Burke and Psilakis dissolved, and at Mia Dona (formerly a Psilakis collaboration) she took over the kitchen herself. In the Times, Sam Sifton knocked the former two-star restaurant down to zero, calling it “exactly the sort of decent, middlebrow, red-sauce Italian restaurant you’d relish if you found it in a town near the town where you grew up in the suburbs of New York.”

Ms. Arpaia, no longer content to be a restaurateur or a cook, is now a brand. Her proven inexhaustible talent is naming restaurants after herself: David Burke & you-know, Dona, Mia Dona, DBar, and Donatella. She is wonderful to look at, and in case you didn’t know, there’s a magazine featuring 45 glossy photos (and not much else) across just 15 pages. If there’s such a thing as over-exposure, Ms. Arpaia doesn’t seem to think she has reached it.

At Donatella, she imported a gold-clad word-burning oven from Naples. To ensure that the customers wouldn’t be in doubt about the name of the restaurant, she added “Donatella” in big white letters on the outside of it. That’s probably as much as you’ll see of her, unless one of the employees sends an alert that a big-whig is in the house, in which case she’ll rush over to blow the critic an air-kiss. We weren’t graced with her presence—not that we expected to be.

Ms. Arpaia’s absence wouldn’t matter if the staff running the place were on top of things. We found, instead, that drink orders weren’t taken, silverware had to be asked for, and at least one of the bathrooms didn’t have soap.

In addition to pizza, there’s a range of salumi ($9–10), antipasti ($12–15), fritti (9–12), insalate ($10–13), pastas ($15–18), and griglieria ($23–24). There’s only three or four items in each category, which at least suggests that the menu has been edited down to what the kitchen can do well.

Indeed, that proved to be the case. I liked the Arancini ($9; above left), rice balls with peas and sausage. The Zuppa di Cozze ($12; above right) did not have much of the tomato stew that was the basis for calling it a soup, but my son thought the mussels were excellent.

Ultimately, Donatella must deliver on its signature item, the pizza, and this wasn’t the case. There are seven kinds ($12–20) starting with a basic Marinara and building up to more complicated creations. The name of the most expensive one won’t surprise you: Donatella, with Piennolo del Vesuvio Tomatoes, Stracciatella, Rocket, and Basil.

They come in one size that is too much for one person, unless you have a very large appetite.

We shared the Enzo ($16), with smoked mozzarella, pecorino, sausage, and rapini (i.e., broccoli rabe). The crust was too floppy, the sausage tasted store-bought, and the broccoli was too over-powering. It was sloppily sliced into four unevenly-shaped pieces, which were two fewer than it needed. I did like the slightly musky flavor of burnt wood, but it was not enough to make this pizza worth trying again.

Donatella (184 Eighth Avenue between 19th & 20th Streets, Chelsea)

Bar Basque

Note: Bar Basque closed in April 2012: yet another Jeffrey Chodorow place that folded after a brief, undistinguished run. At some point, you’d think the guy would stop wasting his money.

*

For a Thursday evening dinner with out-of-town friends whom I hadn’t seen in a year, I took a grave risk: I booked a Jeffrey Chodorow restaurant, sight unseen, which has (as yet) been reviewed by no one.

Bar Basque’s concept intrigued me. Basque cuisine is not exactly over-represented in Manhattan, and the chef, Yuhi Fujinaga, has worked at some serious places, including Eighty One, Alain Ducasse, Lespinasse—and of course, in Spain. But this is a Chodorow restaurant, so you know it will be weighed down with gimmicks, the service will be terrible, and in all likelihood it’ll be irrelevant or closed within a couple of years.

I took a shot anyway, and my predictions were right on most counts. The food wasn’t bad (nor was it great); the concept is weighed down with gimmicks, and the service is terrible. For the record, the Chod himself was in attendance, entertaining guests at a six-top.

Bar Basque is in the Eventi Hotel, which is home to another Chodorow gimmick-fest, FoodParc—basically, a shopping mall food court with the mall omitted—which the Village Voice has already slammed with a scathing review.

Both FoodParc and Bar Basque were designed by futurist Syd Mead, who is supposed to have “called science fiction ‘reality ahead of schedule’.” He is best known for such films as Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Mead’s all-red vision of the future looks like it could have been designed ten years ago. Given the crimson overload at The Lambs Club and and Nuela, both recently opened, Bar Basque is like the third girl showing up to party in the same dress.

More importantly, what does it have to do with the Basque theme? Answer: nothing. If this restaurant fails (as most Chodorow restaurants do), he can quickly substitute the cuisine of some other nation, and re-open with the same, equally irrelevant décor.

Even the name, Bar Basque, seems passé. A couple of years ago, every other restaurant was Bar This or Bar That, even without being bars in the strictest sense. “Bar Basque” is so 2008. Then again, look across Chodorow’s portfolio, past and present: Hudson Cafeteria wasn’t a cafeteria; Kobe Club wasn’t a club; Tanuki Tavern isn’t a tavern.

The service was Chodorrific, meaning not great. I arrived five minutes early; naturally, the hostess would not seat me, even though (at 6:00 p.m.) the restaurant was practically empty, and at no point in the evening would it be full. I ordered a cocktail, and just moments later my friends (who do not drink) arrived. Naturally (this being a Chodorow place) they would not transfer it to the table. That would make too much sense.

About that cocktail, by the way: there’s a Gin & Tonic section of the menu, offering half-a-dozen versions of the classic with different gins, a multiplicity of tonics, and various additives. I can’t really complain, since I’m a G&T guy from the dark ages, but it isn’t exactly a fashionable drink, so I couldn’t help but laugh to see a cocktail menu with six of them. The server pours tonic water from a screw-top bottle on top of gin already in the glass, so I cannot say they are being carefully measured and mixed.

We were seated and menus arrived. They’re in folders nearly big enough to be cheap bathmats. You can’t open them comfortably without knocking something over. We were still studying them, and the server arrived, intent on upselling us into Pintxos (tapas) to start. No menu for these had been supplied, but the server knew which ones we ought to have (hint: the most expensive), and “I’d be happy to put in an order right away.” We demured. Having checked the website afterwards, it appears she was trying to add another sixty bucks to the bill.

When we placed our order a few minutes later, she seemed quite dismayed: “So, you’ve decided not to order the Pinxtos?” Negatory.

Upselling quite this brazen is not a characteristic of New York restaurants, in general. It has to be carefully taught—in this case, at the University of Chod, where the first required course is how to upsell, deny seating to incomplete parties, and refuse to transfer the bar tab—all mandatory subjects in the practicum before graduation. Successful students are guaranteed placement in one Choddy restaurant or another.

Bread service came after a delay, but at least it was fresh.

All of this, mind you, was in the first fifteen minutes, whereupon we were feeling foul about Bar Basque, no matter how good the food might be. While we waited for our food, I narrated for my out-of-town friends the legend of the Man Named Chod, all of his failed restaurants, and how there is invariably something crass about them, even when the food is successful.

The menu is on the expensive side. Sharing plates come in a wide range, $4–34 (the high end being the Iberian ham); appetizers $12–19; entrées $28–39; side dishes $7–9. More than half of the twenty entrées are in a sub-section captioned “From the Grill,” a distinction that (one quickly learns) means they come with no accompaniments, and you will need a side dish if you want more than just protein on a plate.

I started with the Crispy Farm Egg ($12; above left), with olive oil crushed potatoes, peppers, Serrano ham, and cheese broth. It is hard to go wrong with a runny egg and Serrano ham, although I thought the egg was slightly over-cooked.

The restaurant plans to feature the menus of guest chefs every other month. Through the end of October, Daniel Garcia of Zortziko in Bilbao, Spain, is on hand. His entire six-course meal is $89 (it’s a special insert to the menu), but the components are also available à la carte. I couldn’t resist trying the Squab Five Ways (above right), although it will be offered for only another week. The breast was very good (a bit like duck in miniature), but the other four ways were forgettable, particularly a mousse (right-hand edge of the photo) that was served without anything to spread it on. I believe the squab was supposed to be $32, but I didn’t realize until I got home that it was left off the bill. I am fairly certain that it was not a deliberate comp.

I didn’t photograph or taste my friends’ choices, which they found underwhelming: beet salad, monkfish, cod, a side of grilled vegetables.

The main dining room is on a terrace with a retractable roof (it was closed on this occasion) and a view onto a courtyard, with a jumbotron screen that displays soothing graphics having nothing at all to do with, really, anything. But that terrace is actually a very nice place, with tables widely spaced, and mercifully free of the overbearing all-read décor inside. If the whole restaurant had been designed with the same taste, it might have been a lot better than it is.

Perhaps I’ll return in a couple of years, on a nice summer day, when the roof is open. By then, Bar Basque will probably be Swedish. Or something.

Bar Basque (839 Sixth Avenue at 29th Street, in the Eventi Hotel, Chelsea)

Food: Satisfactory
Service: Chodorrific
Ambiance: Ten Years Too Late
Overall: Satisfactory

Aux Anciens Canadiens

Note: This is the third and final restaurant review from our recent trip to Quebec City. See previous reviews of Initiale and Restaurant le Saint-Amour.

*

We were on a mission to try some Poutine, probably Quebec’s best known dish, consisting of french fries topped with cheese curd and brown gravy. It is much better than it sounds. The guide on our walking tour recommended a fast-food restaurant, which was crowded and had all the ambiance of a McDonald’s. That wasn’t for us.

We had about given up, when we stumbled on Aux Anciens Canadiens, a bastion of traditional Québécois cuisine occupying an old home built in 1675–6. One of the city’s oldest buildings, it has been a restaurant since 1966. The interior, with its thick stone walls and low ceilings, retains much of its old charm. It seems to be constantly full, and we were lucky enough to get a table on about 45 minutes’ notice.

Here (above) you see the Poutine, at CA$14 probably triple or quadruple what you’d pay in a fast food joint, but certainly well worth it in these surroundings.

We were somewhat at a loss to choose from the entrées, so we ordered the Québec Tasting Platter to share (CA$32; above), which included a bit of everything: Quebec meat pie, Lac St-Jean meat pie, meat and pig’s knuckle ragout, salt pork grillades, and baked beans—most of it very good. The various meats included the likes of bison, elk, venison, and caribou. Obviously, in these preparations one could not really tell them apart.

This was more than enough food for two people, especially after the poutine. Even without that, you’d need the appetite of a lumberjack to finish a plate this size. Service was attentive, and nobody minded that both of our orders were to share.

I don’t know Quebec City well enough to know how many restaurants serve food in this style, and I don’t know Quebec well enough to know whether its citizens ever really ate this way. Is this authenticity, or Quebec for tourists? All I know is: it was fun, it was good, and you should go.

Aux Anciens Canadiens (34, rue Saint-Louis, Quebec City))

Highlands

The British are coming! Actually, they’re already here. Despite a complete lack of perceptible demand, restaurants featuring the cuisine of Great Britain have landed in New York, and they keep on coming.

Highlands, which took over the space vacated by the dessert bar p*ong, is full whenever I walk by. On a Friday evening at 6:00 p.m., all the bar stools were already taken, and the tables soon followed. After just a year in business, the same team has opened a larger place, Mary Queen of Scotts, in the old Allen & Delancey space on the Lower East Side.

I’ve a great fondness for Scotland, born of a work assignment earlier this decade when I spent six months in the country, practically full-time. I have no great fondness for their best known dishes, such as haggis, finnan haddie, or cullen skink, though I don’t mind them either. But a love of single-malt scotch has been with me since my time there.

I was surprised that haggis, Scotland’s most famous recipe, was relegated to the role of a recited special—perhaps to give the server the pleasure of seeing patrons’ faces when they learn that it contains a sheep’s heart, liver, and lungs. I might have ordered this, but we like to share, and my friend wouldn’t touch it.

The rest of the menu is more tame, though with its Shepherd’s pie and prawn cocktail, it doesn’t pander either. Entrées are mostly under $25 and appetizers mostly under $15, though I cannot call it inexpensive, as the space is basically a crowded pub—with bare wooden tables that wobble, and a noise level slightly louder than I’d like.

A cauliflower risotto ($10; above left) was a bit tame. We wondered if the veal cheek terrine ($10; above right) had other unmentionables. I didn’t mind it, but the taste was a bit rough.

The kitchen comped a mid-course (left) that we could not make out, even after the runner described it twice. [Update: A message board participant told me this was “Devils on Horseback.”] As far as we could make out, it was fish wrapped in bacon, topped in a sauce that could have been maple syrup—but probably wasn’t! It was slightly cloying, the kind of thing you wanted quickly to wash down with a gulp of beer.

As an entree, Pork Belly ($24; below left) seemed to us an error of conception. Most restaurants serve pork belly in smaller portions, either as an appetizer, or as part of a larger dish. A brick-sized hunk of it needs something else for textural contrast, or it needs much more of the fat to be rendered out.

Perhaps it was a cop-out to order Beef Wellington ($28; above right), but we were quite pleased with it. The puff pastry was thin, and not at all heavy. The menu doesn’t say which cut of beef was used, but it was tender and not over-cooked. This was the best dish of the evening.

The Times never reviewed Highlands, but it received one star apiece from Adam Platt in New York and Ryan Sutton in Bloomberg. Those assessments seem to me about right. There are some land mines on the menu, but also some very good cooking, and many of these dishes aren’t exactly commonplace in New York. I do think they’ll need to pick up their game, just a hair, in the larger Mary Queen of Scots space.

Highlands (150 W. 10th St. near Waverley Pl., West Village)

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

Manzo

I had no desire at all to visit Eataly, the new Batali–Bastianich Italian food hall that offers the charm of a shopping mall with the crowds of an airline terminal the day before Thanksgiving. There are six or seven themed dining spaces, none of which take reservations, and where waits of 45 minutes or more are already legion.

There is also one real restaurant, Manzo (meaning “beef”), which takes reservations and offers something approximating a civilized experience. Reviews have been uniformly positive (e.g., a rare three stars from Adam Platt), so I decided to brave the crowds and try the place.

Manzo is expensive, and in line with those at the same team’s Babbo—the chef, Michael Toscano came from there. But Babbo, at least, is a nice-looking place. Manzo looks thrown together, with insufficient visual or aural separation from the rest of Eataly. Crude posters, advertising the owners’ new cooking school, adorn the walls.

It’s not that I mind eating in a supermarket. It’s that I mind paying $250 for dinner while doing so. For all that, the food at Manzo is extremely good—indeed, better than the last time I ate at Babbo. It ought to be easy to erect a real wall with a door (in lieu of the current makeshift screen), to set Manzo apart. Then, get rid of the crass posters, and they’d have themselves a great restaurant. Instead, what they have is an annoying one.

The staff wisely distributes the wine list first. I was already forewarned of the potential for rip-offs, and when I opened it up to Barolos in three figures, I figured I was about to get bent over the table. Dig a little deeper, and there are plenty of reasonable bottles below $65, or even below $50. The San Polo Brunello 2004 ($63) was an excellent foil to Manzo’s meat-centric menu.

Eataly has its own bakery, so it is no surprise that the bread was freshly baked, but the staff forgot to deliver the olive oil to go with it.

Appetizers were excellent: Crispy Sweetbreads ($15; above left); Top Round Carne Cruda ($17; above right), or the equivalent of steak tartare with a soft-boiled egg surrounded by rich, Piemontese beef.

We asked to share the Agnolotti del Plin ($23; above left), and the kitchen divided the order without prompting. It was a simple dish, but executed beautifully.

For a purportedly beef-centric restaurant, we longed for more choices among the secondi. There is a ribeye for two ($95), but we wanted to try different things. Tagliata ($35; above right) is a fairly lean cut of meat, and it needed more excitement than to be just simply roasted, as it was here.

The Veal Chop Smoked in Hay ($45; above right) is the dish several critics have raved about, and with good reason: it’s a huge, double-cut truncheon-sized specimen: juicy, smokey, and full of flavor. Braised greens with cannellini beans and pancetta ($10; above left) was also very good.

The dining room is not large, but a restaurant in this price range needed more than just two servers on duty. The host and two sommeliers filled in on their behalf, but still, it was sometimes difficult to get their attention.

Manzo is expensive, but not out of line for the quality of the food. The service will improve as the staff matures. What will not improve—at least, not anytime soon—is the terrible space. For $250, I want to enjoy dinner in peace, and I don’t want ads for Lidia Bastianich’s cooking school staring down at me. I might consider returning to Manzo—after they remodel.

Manzo (in Eataly, 200 Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, Flatiron District)

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

Eataly

After dinner at Manzo the other night, we wandered around Eataly for a little while.

The crowds have been ridiculous. The space is the size of an airplane hangar; yet, it is not big enough. On Sunday, security closed Eataly to new customers, due to over-crowding. The line to get in at the 23rd Street entrance was wrapped around the block, onto Fifth Avenue.

Eataly is half supermarket, half restaurant. It is divided into half-a-dozen or more themed departments, where you can buy food of a particular kind (e.g., vegetables) or order food of that same kind. The layout is surprisingly slapdash, with poor wayfinding and cardboard signs that look like they were thrown together.

There are several sit-down restaurants, though only Manzo takes reservations. Seating is demarcated with crude stanchions, as would be used in an airport. Other parts of the enterprise have counters where you stand and eat, while both shoppers and servers try to dodge one another, hoping to avoid collisions that could range from the disastrous to the merely embarrassing.

Many of the prices are ridiculous, like Pat LaFreida chickens for $23, and white truffles for $3,300 a pound (that’s three thousand, three hundred). Squid ink pasta was the rare bargain, just six dollars for a dinner-sized portion that serves two—a terrific deal, bearing in mind that very few places in town even sell the stuff. But for the most part, the food sold at Eataly is at an outrageous premium to what you could easily obtain elsewhere.

Photos are available after the jump.

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Primehouse New York

Note: Primehouse New York closed in September 2012 after a five-year run.

*

I had an evening meeting earlier this week in the vicinity of Primehouse New York, so I decided to drop in. The economy and my waistline being what they are, I ordered two appetizers.

Primehouse is a “Steakhouse Plus” — a restaurant that does steaks superbly, but where the non-steak items are far more than just afterthoughts. Both of my appetizers were preparations I don’t recall seeing in any other restaurant.

A rich Filet Mignon Carpaccio ($16; above right) comes draped in a pickled fennel salad, with foie gras “croutons” hiding underneath.

I considered omitting the photo of “Bacon & Egg” ($14; above right), as it really doesn’t do the dish justice. There is a double-cut log of pork belly and a soft-boiled egg deep-fried in panko crust in a pool of grits. Trust me: the dish is much, much better than my lame photo of it.

Steak prices remain on the high side, with most in the high $40s or low $50s, but I assume the aging program remains top-notch, as it was before. The steaks I observed at other tables had a wonderful sear and a uniform medium-rare finish.

Primehouse seems to be doing just fine — the bar is usually close to full, the dining room somewhere between half and three-quarters — but it doesn’t get as much attention as the better known brands. I rank it in the top tier of NYC steakhouses.

Primehouse New York (381 Park Avenue South at 27th Street, Gramercy)

Lowcountry

Note: This is a review under the opening chef, Will Sullivan. As of January 2012, the chef is Oliver Gilt, formerly of Commerce and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

*

When I heard a restaurant called Lowcountry was opening in the former Bar Blanc space, I thought it was some kind of Belgian–Dutch hybrid concept.

Actually, no: it’s just good ol’ fashioned Southern cookin’ . . . bourbon ’n’ grits, black-eyed peas, apples, pecans ’n’ ham.

Bar Blanc opened here in late 2007 with the chef, César Ramirez, who now has two Michelin stars at Brooklyn Fare. I wasn’t really sold on Bar Blanc. Frank Bruni gave it two stars, but the neighborhood never embraced it.

After Ramirez left, the owners, Didier Palange and Kiwan Standen, tried to make the space more casual, renaming it Bar Blanc Bistro and toning down the stark all-blanc interior. That didn’t work. Starting over again was the better course, and that is what they have now done.

The space runs the risk of looking like Southern kitsch: I am not sure what green filing cabinets and stacks of old record albums have to do with it. But the totally redone space is at least comfortable and attractive, even if the exposed brick surfaces make it awfully loud.

Prices are a marked contrast too: no more $36 entrées. Here, the bar snacks are $3–14, salads and small plates $7–15, large plates $19–23, side dishes $6. Except for the snacks, there are no more than five items in any category. It is always a relief to see that, as you know you’re getting the handful of things the chef knows he can do well.

And “do them well” is exactly what the chef, North Carolina import Will Sullivan, does.

Shrimp and Grits ($14; above left) with Andouille Sausage and tomato is exactly as it should be. Fried Chicken & Cheddar Biscuit ($14; above right) with Benton’s country ham gravy is awfully heavy for an appetizer, but I had no complaints with the preparation.

Corn Meal Dusted Catfish ($19; above left) with Carolina red rice and “Chow Chow” remoulade is a simple dish, but the kitchen knows how to handle a deep fryer: it was impeccably done. The Bourbon Cider Glazed Pork Chop ($21; above right) was a shade too sweet for my taste, but the pork was tender and the sweet potato purée was flawless.

I felt like I’d been hit with a calorie bomb, but the food is well executed, and you cannot complain about the prices. Even the cocktails are reasonable, clocking in at $10–12. Beers go as low as $6. I didn’t see a wine list, but I probably wouldn’t order wine with this food anyway.

The restaurant was mostly full on a Saturday evening, with both tables and the bar doing good business. Service was friendly, if a bit confused at times; however, the place is still new, and they deserve time to work out the kinks. Somewhat bucking the trend for unambitious places, Lowcountry takes reservations. Good for them; I probably would not have gone, if it did not.

If the owners were looking for a casual place that would attract a neighborhood crowd, and that did not depend on selling $30+ entrées to destination diners, I think they have it.

Lowcountry (142 W. 10th Street between 6th & 7th Avenues, West Village)

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

The Hurricane Club

Note: The wind blew Hurricane Club out of town. It closed in late 2013, having been previously re-branded Hurricane Steak and Sushi. General Assembly, a “market-driven grill” (yawn) from the same owners, replaced it in 2014. This too quickly failed. Next up in the space is the transfer of Park Avenue [Season] from its original address, where they owners lost their lease.

*

Resistance is futile. That was my immediate reaction to The Hurricane Club, the new Polynesian-themed restaurant from the Quality Meats/Park Avenue Autumn team.

It is pointless to wish it were something else, to wonder why, or to belittle the concept. Just submit to its charms, or don’t go.

Apparently, these places were once popular in Manhattan. Sometimes called “tiki bars,” one of them even had three stars. By the 1990s, the genre once exemplified by Trader Vic’s at the Plaza, was practically dead.

This year, restaurateurs are banking on a revival, with three tiki joints set to open. Hurricane Club is probably the most elaborate of these.

To call it “Polynesian” isn’t quite accurate. It’s about as authentic as Fantasy Island, lacking only for Ricardo Montalbán and Hervé Villachaize screaming, “The plane! The plane!”

There is a protective gauze over all of the windows, and the doors are covered top-to-bottom, so that nobody outside can catch a glimpse of the space. Once inside, it’s an AvroKO playland, a South Pacific dreamscape that would make Club Med jealous.

The enormous 250-seat space has 20-foot ceilings, about six dining rooms and lounges, and a wrap-around bar with a life-size Buddha draped in pearls.

It’s hard to tell if you’re in a restaurant or on a cruise ship. Servers are dapper in their all-white, crisply pressed dinner jackets. Cocktail waitresses sport barely-there thin black dresses.

The cocktail list in ten categories is so long that you order by number. I practically never order frozen drinks, but here…why not? The #37 (left; $11) with cucumber and mint was pretty good. Most of the choices are $12 or less, which these days is pretty reasonable.

The liquor program goes well beyond cliché, with a list of about a hundred rums: they don’t come cheap, with prices ranging from $39 to $1,999. The five-page wine list emphasizes the Pacific Rim. It was hard to find bargains there, either.

In the lounge and at the tables, there’s a gimmicky “Pu Pu” menu, listing a dozen items—all finger food, $12 each, with 3 or 4 pieces. With the little pencils provided, you’re to write down how many of each thing you want; or, you can just order the Pu Pu Platter ($28/$58) and get a large sampler.

I didn’t bother to write anything down, and just asked the server for an order of the Peking Duck Tea Sandwiches ($3; below left), which tasted exactly as you would imagine.

The two-page dinner menu offers items in seven categories, none labeled “appetizer” or “entrée.” The starter-like substances are $9–17, the mains (or apparent mains) $17–44. Yes, that is a wide range. Portions seem to be very large, and there is a danger of over-ordering.

Rice Paper Shrimp Rolls ($14; above right) spent too little time in the deep fryer, and came out slightly mushy.

The server correctly advised that Crispy Peking Pig ($44; above), although listed as a single entrée, would be more than enough for two people. Basically, it’s a pig prepared in the style of Peking Duck, with the traditional accompaniments and pork buns to wrap it with. This was the best suckling pig preparation we have had in quite a while, but it came out not quite warm enough.

The pig is listed in its own box, a feat of menu engineering designed to make it Hurricane Club’s most often-ordered dish. Based on our observations, it seemed to have worked: we saw orders of the pig flying out of the kitchen. It is not a bad deal for two or three people, but if you order much else you’re liable to leave part of it unfinished—as we did.

Of course, to claim that this is the cuisine of any recognizable Polynesian nation is nonsense, but it is a very good dish, and who cares where it comes from? Chef Craig Koketsu (Quality Meats, Park Avenue [name your season]) is a proven talent, who will probably get more right than wrong.

The attentive service is excellent, bringing an air of seriousness to a place that could easily devolve into a tourist trap. Despite the hokey concept, there appears to be a legitimate attempt to do it right—whatever that might mean for a tiki bar (I am frankly not sure).

Hurricane Club won’t be for everybody. We suspect it will attract a lot of big groups, tour buses, families taking in a matinée, and so forth. There certainly are questions whether quality can be maintained in a 250-seat place: those soggy shrimp rolls are an early warning sign. Inevitably, some meals will seem mass-produced.

If you buy into the concept, just get on the boat, and enjoy the ride for what it is. There is some fun to be had.

Hurricane Club (360 Park Avenue South at 26th Street, Gramercy/Flatiron)

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