Monkey Bar

The business cards at Monkey Bar say in small print, “Est. 1936.” Yeah, sure it was. The space in the Hotel Elysée is that old, but nothing has lasted there except the Simian-themed décor.

To give only the recent history: the Glaziers of steakhouse fame (Michael Jordan’s, Strip House) acquired the Monkey Bar in 1994 and hired the restaurant starchitect David Rockwell to give it a plush makeover. There was a succession of chefs, including John Schenk, Kurt Gutenbrunner, Patricia Yeo, Chris Cheung. At one time, Monkey Bar was one of the toughest doors in town.

Somewhere along the line, the Glaziers turned it into a steakhouse. By then anyone could get in, including me. I recall having a pretty good steak there in the 1990s or early 2000s: after all, good beef was one thing the Glaziers had in abundance. By 2008, it had fallen on hard times. Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter acquired the space and closed it for restoration, installing a spectacular Edward Sorel mural in the dining room.

Carter’s idea was to create a midtown version of what he’d already achieved in Greenwich Village, at the Waverly Inn: a restaurant masquerading as a club for publishing and advertising industry moguls, celebrities, and the well connected. By July 2009, The Times reported that Carter spent 20 minutes a day, 7 days a week, laying out the seating chart of the two restaurants:

Although hardly any critics have reviewed the Monkey Bar yet — and the first chef was fired — prime reservations are already nearly impossible for anyone other than the famous or well connected…

For a while, there was a phone number people could call to reach a reservationist. No more.

“We were getting 1,000 calls a day,” said Mr. Klein in an interview at the bar at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, next to a property he owns, the City Club Hotel. “It’s hard on the phone to say, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have a place for you.’ It’s easier by e-mail. People get upset on the phone.”

So now there is an e-mail address…although 90 percent of reservations are made through the partners — that is, by people who know them or have some connection and reach them directly.

The one thing it lacked was food worth paying for. Within five weeks of opening, Carter fired the chef, Elliot Ketley, replacing him with culinary legend Larry Forgione, who was there only as a consultant until a permanent chef could be found. Forgione was on hand when Frank Bruni awarded a weak star, finding a menu strewn with “many mishaps.” That accomplished, Forgione gave way to Josh Moulton.

It turns out that there’s a limit to the number of people who will sign up for expensive, mediocre cuisine, and Monkey Bar had surpassed it. Before long, it was on OpenTable and reservable any day, any time, at short notice. Lunch service was dropped in the dining room.

Give Carter credit for recognizing that he’d run the restaurant into a ditch, and needed a full-scale talent make-over. To fix the place, he brought in the restaurant equivalent of the 1927 Yankees: managing partner and front-office genius Ken Friedman (The Spotted Pig, The Breslin, The John Dory), chef Damon Wise (Craft, Colicchio & Sons), sommelier and GM Belinda Chang (The Modern), and cocktail whiz Julie Reiner (Flatiron Lounge, Clover Club).

The question is how long Carter can keep this team together. Wise admits that he plans to open a downtown restaurant in 2012. The Monkey Bar is in essence a stop-gap for him until that space is ready, though he insists he will remain executive chef here. Reiner is only consulting, and Friedman has places all over town, which leaves only Chang with a full-time commitment to the restaurant.

For now, though, let’s enjoy what they have accomplished, which in a few short weeks is something remarkable, given what they started with.

Chang’s wine list is just a few pages long. Reprinted daily, it comes in a cardboard folder with the leaves stapled together. About equally balanced between the United States and France, I assume it is a work in progress. You won’t find much below $50, whether red or white, but if you’re willing to spend a bit more, there are some older Bordeaux worth a look.

Perhaps the 2001 Château La Vieille Cure was a hold-over from prior management. At $80, it qualifies as a bargain on this list. Chang has stocked the place with proper Bordeaux glasses, but not decanters, and a wine this old really ought to be decanted. After a while, it opened up beautifully, and was well worth the price.

Wise’s menu is a complete departure from the brasserie food that Monkey Bar was serving a couple of years ago, with a fairly close stylistic resemblance to Colicchio & Sons, his last stop after many years previously at Craft. It’s priced for the midtown corporate crowd, with appetizers and pastas mostly $19–23, entrées mostly $29–36. There are a few outliers, like the ubiquitous côte de boeuf for two ($135) and pasta with truffles ($55): this is a Graydon Carter restaurant, after all.

But with an excellent bread service, an amuse bouche, and petits fours at the end, you are getting your money’s worth. In the early days, the menu is promising. If the execution isn’t quite perfect, it’s certainly miles ahead of Colicchio & Sons, in a far nicer room.

The amuse bouche (above left) was a small cup of celery root soup with diced apples. To start, we shared the Braised Pork Belly ($21; above right) with crispy deep-fried oysters and kimchee, a well conceived but slightly cloying dish.

Both entrées were impressive productions, though verging on the edge of over-worked. Halibut ($31; above left) was a lovely dish, served with heart of palm, chorizo, squid, and oyster velouté. Long Island Duck ($32; above right) came with salsify, black mission figs, and oyster mushrooms. The breast was a shade on the greasy side, and would have benefited from being cut in thicker slices. These are the kinds of adjustments I expect will be made in the coming weeks.

There is apparently not a full-time pastry chef on duty, but that didn’t stop the kitchen from turning out wonderful, sugar-coated beignets (above left) and petits fours, including the insouciently named “monkey balls” (above right).

Without Graydon Carter’s rolodex to rely on, Monkey Bar now needs to earn business the way most new restaurants do: by attracting repeat customers. As of last week, it had its work cut-out for it, although the publicity cycle was only just beginning. I made a last-minute reservation on Friday evening and changed it twice, all without any trouble. The dining room was about half full, although the bar was doing brisk business.

Service was smooth and assured. If you think of Monkey Bar as a two-week-old restaurant, this is a strong start. If you think of it as a place Graydon Carter has been tinkering with for three years, then you wonder if the latest move is just desperation. If Belinda Chang sticks around and Damon Wise’s downtown restaurant is delayed a little longer, Monkey Bar might just grow into something special.

Monkey Bar (60 E. 54th St. between Madison & Park Avenues, East Midtown)

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

Gastroarte

Note: Gastroarte “closed for renovations” in September 2012. The chef, Jesús Núñez, had already left the restaurant to open a similar place in the West Village called Barraca. The space, still under the same owners, and still Spanish, is now called Andanada 141.

*

I wrote last week about the Spanish moment we’re in: Gastroarte, Salinas, Tertulia, and the extravagant Romera, all open within the last year, and all with ambitious—or in Romera’s case, stratospheric—intentions.

They probably won’t all succeed, but it’s progress in a town that has too many Italian and New Brooklyn restaurants, and not enough of practically everything else.

Gastroarte opened in January 2011 as Graffit, named for the graffiti-clad walls and the chef Jesús Núñez’s artful platings. But a google search on Graffit most often returned another Manhattan restaurant, chef Jehangir Mehta’s Graffiti.

Mehta sued for copyright infringement and Núñez relented, renaming his restaurant Gastroarte. Good move. Even if the suit was baseless (as it almost certainly was), it was dumb to have two such similar names in one city, and Mehta got there first.

It took some chutzpah to put such a restaurant on the Upper West Side, near Lincoln Center, a neighborhood not known for rewarding culinary risk-takers. Of course, the city’s restaurant critics aren’t known for that either. Sam Sifton, Adam Platt, and Steve Cuozzo all gave it just one star apiece.

Those ratings aren’t irksome in themselves: I gave it 1½ stars early on, and frankly, I am not sure if I would have rounded up or down, had I been using a system without half-stars. What is irksome is the lack of respect for the chef’s art and the recognition of its potential, even if its execution, at first, was not consistently enjoyable.

Menu prices have risen: appetizers are now $14–21 (vs. $10–18 in January), entrées $29–32 (vs. $23–27). That’s a fairly substantial increase of around $8–10 per person (before dessert), in under a year. As before, a tapas menu is served only at the bar and at the front walk-in tables—an inexplicable blunder.

I assume Gastroarte is getting the customers to justify those higher prices. Fortunately, it deserves them. Nine months later, Gastroarte is a much more polished restaurant. The service is more reliable, plates arrive at the right temperature, and the balance of flavors seems more sure-handed.

The vegetable stew under “Not-your-average egg” ($17; above left) changes with the season (compare it to the photo last time I had it). This version is less colorful than before, but it remains a triumph. As it was before, the centerpiece is an egg yolk enclosed somehow, miraculously, inside of a cauliflower sphere. It rests on turnip prepared two ways, and underneath that, yogurt and Serrano ham.

Lamb cheeks ($30; above left) were in a stew of lentils, spiced cheese, and asparagus, with a slice of brioche. A cuboid of black rice ($29; above right) was topped with calamari, sobrasada, and snow peas, with a streaks of Idiazábal cheese and red tobiko as garnishes.

Núñez doesn’t splurge on ingredients, but the assembly of these dishes is impressive, and so are the flavors, which blend beautifully. Both of the central proteins, the lamb cheeks and the calamari, were just right.

The difference from January is that the plates are no longer just entrants in an art exhibit: they’re a pleasure to eat, as well. That’s based on a small sample of the menu (plus amuses bouches and petits fours), but Gastroarte today seems far more promising than Graffit did at the beginning of the year.

Early on a Friday evening, before the opera, the dining room was not quite full. I have no idea if the traffic dies, or picks up, after curtain time; however, the restaurant has managed to impose a rather substantial price increase, without any of the usual signs of desperation, so I assume it is not doing badly.

In the competitive Lincoln Center dining market, it’s difficult to remain relevant (just ask Picholine, now an OpenTable 1,000-point fixture), but perhaps Graffit is on its way to becoming essential.

Gastroarte (141 W. 69th St. between Broadway & Columbus Ave., Upper West Side)

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

Salinas

Spanish cuisine is enjoying a resurgence in New York, with newcomer Tertuila as perhaps the most successful example this fall. After two mediocre meals there (which I have not yet written about), I was eager to have another data point.

Enter Salinas, with chef Luis Bollo, whose much-admired Soho restaurant Meigas (which I never visited), closed in 2008, a victim of the Great Recession. Bollo decamped to Connecticut for a few years, waiting for the opportunity to return to Manhattan, which he did in July of this year. The Times didn’t review Salinas, but The Post’s Steve Cuozzo filed a rave, and Esquire’s John Mariani pronounced it one of the best new restaurants in America in 2011. New York’s Adam Platt had (predictably) the least reliable review, giving it two stars for the food, but minus one (for a total of one) for “ the pokey, vaguely suburban surroundings.”

I wonder which suburbs have restaurants like this? There’s a small bar up front, leading to two dining rooms with exposed brick and bare, dark-wood tables. The back room has a retractable roof, now closed for the season. Chairs and banquettes are in an understated, plush soft blue.

The menu is in four sections: tapas ($7–20), starters ($11–19), entrées ($24–44), and side dishes ($8–9). In most of those categories, there’s one or two items much more expensive than the others. For instance, all of the entrées are below $30, except for the porcella (roast suckling pig), which is $44.

The menu doesn’t really encourage you to build a meal from tapas alone, as there are only nine of them, several of which are just breads and charcuterie. But all the dishes we had, even the main courses, lent themselves to sharing.

Coles e Coliflor ($9; above left) is a dish that could convert even Brussels sprouts and cauliflower skeptics. They’re served deep fried, with citrus zest, mint yogurt, and pimentón de la vera, the spicy Spanish paprika that polka dots the top edge of the plate. (A second comped plate of this was sent out later.)

We also liked the Chorizo special ($14; above right), sliced thin, with a runny quail egg on top. Puncture the egg, and you have a late breakfast.

A short ribs special ($29; above left) was rather pedestrian. Served on the bone, it was a generic short rib entrée that you’ll find all over town. Pollo Otoñal ($26; above right) was considerably better, a grilled local organic chicken in a Granja bean and green onion sauce, Swiss chard, baby carrots, garlic, and lemon emulsion.

The room is dark, and on the loud side when it fills up. Service was fine once we were seated, but the hostess insisted I wait at the bar until my guest arrived. The sense they’re trying to attract a scene, rather than build a following, slightly undermines the accomplished cooking.

Salinas (136 Ninth Avenue between 18th & 19th Streets, Chelsea)

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

Jones Wood Foundry

Could the Upper East Side be the next bastion of hip restaurants? I admit it’s far-fetched, and we’re a long way from that happening, but the essential requirements are there. East of Third Avenue, real estate is inexpensive by Manhattan standards, making it attractive both for restaurants and the young, single, urban professionals they hope to attract.

Jones Wood Foundry, a gastropub that opened in February, has the same rough-and-tumble vibe as many an East Village or Williamsburg restaurant. Whether it’ll succeed is not for me to say, but a young crowd had packed the place by 8:00 p.m. on a Monday evening, and the pro reviews have been favorable (Cuozzo for the Post, Moskin for The Times, Sietsema for the Voice).

I’m assuming the customers are mainly locals, as most Manhattanites can’t escape the impression—although it is decidedly false—that the Upper East Side is the bastion of trust fund babies and and ladies who lunch. That may be true on Fifth and Park Avenues. Take the Lexington Avenue Subway uptown, and turn right as you leave the station, and you find a much more diverse community.

This section of the Upper East Side was once called Jones Wood: it was even a candidate location for what became Central Park. The building itself, dating from the late nineteenth century, was once a foundry that manufactured manhole covers, among other things. Descendants of the original occupants, the Eberhart Brothers, still own the building.

The chef, Jason Hicks, worked in New York at Aureole, La Goulue, and Orsay, but he’s a native of the Cotswolds region of England. He’s partnered here with Yves Jadot, who also runs the Petite Abeille chain and the excellent cocktail lounge, Raines Law Room.

The menu here may remind you of April Bloomfield’s places (Spotted Pig, Breslin), but it’s more of a full-on English pub, with heavy doses of Bangers & Mash ($17), Steak & Kidney Pie ($18), Mushy Peas ($7), Haddock & Chips ($22), and so on. There are also fall-back dishes for the less adventurous, like a DeBragga dry-aged burger for $18 (which I didn’t order, but looked wonderful), roast chicken ($22), or a Niman Ranch pork chop ($28).

Most appetizers are below $15, most entrées below $25, so you can get out of here easily for $50 a head before drinks. There’s an ample list of beers on tap or by the bottle and a pretty good wine list too, though no hard liquor is served. The wine-based cocktail list is by Meghan Dorman of Raines Law Room and the Lantern’s Keep.

Celery root and blue cheese soup ($7; above left) with croutons and crispy bacon was a perfect starter for autumn. But my friend Kelly thought that Sweet pea soup ($7; above right) was overpowered by olive oil. She also found jumbo lump citrus crab salad ($14; no photo), with avocado, roasted tomato, and frisée, just average.

There were four announced specials — why should this be necessary on a menu reprinted daily? — including Partridge ($42), “just shot this weekend in Scotland.” It was served deboned, on a rich root vegetable stew. The server warned us to be on the lookout for birdshot, but all I encountered was a stray bone the butcher’s knife had missed.

Kelly has a hypothesis that food with a narrative (i.e., “just shot in Scotland”) is never worth the tariff, and this dish bore that out. I haven’t ordered partridge before, so I have no idea how it is supposed to be. It tasted slightly gamey, as you’d expect, but it was also a bit tough. A domestic, farm-raised bird on the same bed of vegetables would have been twice as good, and would have cost half as much.

We concluded with an excellent milk chocolate and sea salt pie ($7; left) with Chantilly cream.

The three-room space is smartly decorated in distressed pub chic. There is a long bar in the front room, a banquet-length communal table in the middle, and a dining room in the back. It was not terribly loud, although the crowds did not arrive until the end of our meal. Service was fine for a restaurant on this level: an incorrect order was dropped off, but promptly replaced after we pointed it out.

We didn’t really love anything, and a couple of dishes seemed off-kilter. But I adore the menu, and given the reviews it has received, I suspect we ordered wrong, or caught the place on chef’s night off. Despite the tone of the review, I’d happily rush back, next time I am in the area.

Jones Wood Foundry (401 E. 76th St. between First & York Avenues, Upper East Side)

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

Café China

 

When you think about Chinese cuisine in Manhattan, excluding take-out, two pictures come to mind. The first is the expensive high-end places like Chin Chin, Shun Lee, and Mr. Chow, which get practically no love from the food community. Just mention them on Chowhound and wait for the sparks to fly. At the other extreme are the respected authentic places like Szechuan Gourmet and Oriental Garden, where décor is bare-bones or non-existent, the service hurried and even discombobulated.

Café China, which opened in Murray Hill in early September, looks like an attempt to bridge that gap. No one would call it ultra-fancy, but the narrow, deep space is soothing to look at: decked out in 1930s charm with antique chandeliers and sconces; comfortable banquettes and diner chairs; dark wood tables mostly without tablecloths; old Shanghai posters on the walls, painted powder blue; and understated Chinoiserie dappled around the room.

There are lacquer chopsticks (replaced after every course), but paper napkins; reservations are accepted. You could have a romantic meal or a business dinner here, without paying the extortionate prices (for often forgettable food) of a place like China Grill or Philippe. Heck, even the website feels comfortable.

It’s run by a husband-and-wife team from China, Xian Zhang and Yiming Wang, with a classically-trained Sichuan chef, Xiaofeng Liao, in the kitchen.

The menu doesn’t stint on heat, if you want it, and you’re welcome to test your stomach with the likes of beef tendon, diced rabbit, jellyfish, duck blood, “salivating” frog, and freshwater eel. Traditional take-out staples, like Double Cooked Pork and Kung Pao Chicken, are barely more than footnotes. Orange-Flavored Beef and General Tso’s Chicken are nowhere to be found.

It’s not a short menu, but it doesn’t extend to hundreds of items, as these places sometimes do. Most appetizers are less than $10. Entrées top out at $25, but there are many less than $20.

The two dishes I tried were in retrospect too similar, both swimming in a pool of hot bright-orange chili oil, but that’s my fault, not the restaurant’s. Both would probably have been better to share, but I was there alone.

Spicy Beef Tendon ($9; above left) with peppercorn and chili peppers was satisfying and sinus-clearing. The sheets of tendon had the consistency of taffy. Whole Tilapia in Spicy Miso Sauce ($22) was a messy and unsubtle pleasure. The fish was soft and came off the bone easily.

After that, a refreshing bowl of Lychee Sorbet (left), to get that intense chili taste out of my mouth, was practically mandatory.

You wouldn’t mind lingering in this pleasant spot, and with the space nowhere near full on a Monday evening, they would be happy to have you. Alas, there’s no liquor license yet, so there is little incentive to hang around. I assume that’ll be rectified eventually.

There are folks on the food boards that practically live on places like this. I’ll let them decide, in due time, where Café China ranks in the city’s Chinese pantheon. I will certainly go back.

Café China (13 E. 37th St. between Fifth & Madison Avenues, Murray Hill)

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

Sam Bahri’s Steakhouse

Note: Sam Bahri’s steakhouse closed in February 2012. It never caught on. The space is now El Toro Blanco.

*

Sam Bahri’s Steakhouse opened two months ago on a lightly-trafficked stretch of lower Sixth Avenue that hasn’t been kind to restaurants. Next door, 10 Downing has been struggling for years to attract a following.

Naming a restaurant after the owner can be an earnest way of introducing oneself to the community, or it may signal a vanity project. On a recent weeknight, the staff were gracious and welcoming, but I was their only customer at around 6:30 p.m. I saw no signs of Mr. Bahri.

The restaurant claims to be serving “classic American dishes with a subtle French flair.” Only two items on the menu could claim to be plausibly French: Foie Gras au Torchon and Coquilles St. Jacques, both appetizers. That is hardly enough to establish Gallic bona fides, on a menu that is otherwise generically American.

Despite the steakhouse hook, there are about a dozen non-steak entrées, ranging from $25–45: things like chicken, salmon, duck breast, sesame crusted tuna, and beef short ribs. As none of these are at all original, the only claim the restaurant could hope to make is preparing them better than other establishments in its neighborhood and price range.

Perhaps it does. So far, there are handful “reviews” on sites like Yelp, OpenTable, and Menupages, almost all four or five stars out of five. That may be suspicious, or maybe Sam Bahri’s is that good.

My only evidence is the Cowboy Ribeye, which might be the best $40 dry-aged prime steak in town. It’s thick, earthy, and has a firm crust.

You’ll note I didn’t say best, only best for $40. This one’s pretty good, but others are better. You’ll also pay $5, $10, or even $20 more.

I’ll admit curiosity about the double-cut duck breast bacon, but the menu said it’s for two, and even at $12 I didn’t want to put it to waste. So that’ll be for another day, assuming Sam Bahri’s Steakhouse sticks around.

It’s a pretty, pleasant place, but the Village has plenty of those, and it’s not as if there aren’t other steakhouses clamoring for attention.

Sam Bahri’s Steakhouse (257 Sixth Ave. between Bleecker & Houston, West Village)

Bye, Sam!

The tenure of New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton has ended. As of Monday, he took over as national editor, a position he’d had his eye on for some time. His departure is not a surprise. When Sifton was announced in the job, he already had a foot out the door:

For the record, it is our expectation that this will not be the end of Sam’s career as an editor/manager/entrepreneur/mentor. He has run two departments exceptionally well, and nobody would be surprised to see him running something in the future.

The guy who picked Sifton, former executive editor Bill Keller (who was also responsible for picking Bruni), practically admitted that Sifton hadn’t even applied for the job:

In the weeks since the announcement that Frank Bruni would be hanging up his napkin, we’ve received numerous applications for the job of NYT restaurant critic. We narrowed the list, and then narrowed it some more. We had some really impressive candidates, writers who know their food and have interesting things to say about the way we eat.

Then we threw out the list and drafted Sam Sifton.

Restaurant criticism burns people out, but Sifton had one of the shortest tenures on record. The Eater.com timeline shows just two New York Times critics with shorter stays: John L. Hess for nine months in 1973–74, and Marian Burros for a year in 1983–84. Burros, however, was never billed as a permanent replacement, which leaves Sifton in the dubious company of the now-forgotten Hess.

Here’s hoping Sifton has more enthusiasm for editing than he did for reviewing. I don’t think dummies get to be national editor, but as a critic, he was vacuous, bored, and intellectually lazy. At least half the time, he was more interested in reviewing the guests than the food—more fascinated with their shoes, clothes, hairdos and gadgets, than with what they were eating.

Sifton was a man of simple pleasures, seldom interested in being challenged, seldom engaged thoughtfully on any culinary subject except fishing. His reviews were full of empty adjectives like “delicious,” “terrific,” and “good,” and laden with obscure references to second-rate fiction. He embraced mediocrity, and neither established nor recognized trends.

He didn’t even work very hard. Frank Bruni, may have had no experience reviewing restaurants, but he at least realized he had a lot to learn, and worked his tail off. Here’s a comparison of Bruni’s first two years to Sifton’s:

1. Starred Reviews. In his first two years, Bruni filed every Wednesday but two (and for those two, Julia Moskin filed in his place). In Sifton’s first two years, he skipped four Wednesdays (and no one replaced him).
2. Critic’s Notebook. These are the longer “thought pieces” that appear roughly every couple of months In his first two years, Bruni filed 17 of these. Sifton filed 12.
3. Diner’s Journal. Before the blog came along, Bruni used to file a shorter review (unstarred) on Fridays. He did 80 of these. The closest equivalent in the current system is “Dining Briefs”. Sifton has done 26.
4. The Blog. That leaves the blog—difficult to quantify, because the NYT search engine can’t filter out blog posts specifically. Bruni often used the blog to write about restaurants he wasn’t going to review, whereas Sifton almost never did. Bruni generally filed at least 1–2 substantive blog posts per week, while Sifton’s average is near zero. (A short post linking to that week’s newspaper review is not substantive.) In lieu of writing about restaurants, Sifton posted near-useless “Hey, Mr. Critic!” Q&A pieces every so often.

If you don’t care for the numerical approach, just read Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema’s devastating lampoon of Sifton’s laziness or Josh Ozersky’s takedown in Time. These are notable, because critics seldom attack one of their own, whatever their private opinions may be. Why The Times was willing to pay Sifton to do so little work is utterly beyond me.

Industry people I spoke with found Sifton unimpressive. His predecessor, Frank Bruni, came in with a thin resume, but at least he worked hard, wrote well, took the job seriously, and established a clear voice that readers could relate to. Sifton treated it like a two-year vacation.

Fortunately, The Times needed a new national editor, so after two years we are done with him, and he is done with us. Sifton gets an early out from a job he never wanted, and management gets another chance to find someone competent to write restaurant reviews.

If this seems harsh, I offer no apology. There is no other critical discipline at The Times that is treated like a hobby—a mid-career sabbatical before moving on to greener pastures. In books, architecture, theater, film, music, and other fields, the paper has critics who’ve honed their craft for years—decades, even. Whether or not you agree with them, at least you’ve got someone dedicated to his craft.

For restaurants, The Times first gave us a dabbler who had never been to a Michelin-starred restaurant in his life, outside of Italy, before being appointed restaurant critic. And then it gave us someone who had his eye on management, and coasted along while he waited for a better job to open up.

The Times can do better. It must.

Esca

I read the occasional bad reviews of Esca from sources I trust, but never enough to persuade me that the restaurant had lost a step since my last visit, four years ago, when I gave it three stars.

The proffer hasn’t really changed: it’s an Italian seafood restaurant from the Batali–Bastianich empire, it remains insanely popular, and I haven’t been served a bad dish yet.

Many of the Batali–Bastianich restaurants take the attitude that you should tolerate the horrible service they mete out, and just consider yourself lucky that you’re fortunate enough to be in their orbit. It has happened often enough to persuade me that it’s not an accident.

I saw none of that at Esca, where the service was so pleasant and solicitous that you’d almost think Danny Meyer had taken it over. The staff even seated me before my girlfried had arrived—practically unheard of at a Batali restaurant.

Prices have risen only modestly in the four years since my last visit. It looks like every course is about two dollars more, bringing the cost of a four-course meal to around $90 before wine, tax, and tip—about comparable to most of the other New York Times three-star restaurants. But it’s also a menu that’s built for grazing, and you can have an extremely satisfying meal for a lot less than that.

The amuse bouche, chickpea crostini (above left), seems to be unchanged from my last visit. It’s the least satisfying part of the meal.

To start, my girlfriend had the Polipo, or grilled octopus ($17; above left). It’s an Esca specialty, and the kitchen nailed it. After all these years, it is still hard to find crudo better than Esca’s: Bonita, a fish from the tuna family, was served raw ($18; above right), spackled with crushed almonds and resting in a drizzle of olive oil.

The pasta section of the menu offers just six choices, and four of them are made with chilis or hot peppers, which rather limits the options of a diner who prefers to avoid hot food, as my girlfriend did. Fortunately, the Maccheroni alla Chittara ($25; above left) is a winner. The word chittara refers to a pasta-cutting machine that resembles a harp. Most references spell it “chitarra,” but the team at Esca prefer one ‘t’ and two ‘r’s. Here, it’s served in a subtle, exquisitely balanced sea urchin and crab meat sauce.

I ordered an old favorite, the Spaghetti Neri ($24; above right), a squid ink pasta with cuttlefish, green chilis and scallion, which is as good as it was last time. Esca ought to offer more pastas, as the kitchen has obviously mastered them.

The wine lists are strong at all of the Bastianich restaurants, but at Esca it’s not the epic-length tome as at some of its sister restaurants. Vinosia’s Fiama di Avelino (above left) seemed slightly over-priced at $51, but it paired well with the food.

The restaurant is split into several dining rooms, bustling but not overly loud. The space is functional, but it does not have much charm. The food remains the main attraction.

Esca (402 W. 43rd Street at Ninth Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen)

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

Duck Leg Confit at Brasserie Athénée

I’m not going to make a case for Brasserie Athénée, a Theater District restaurant on the edge of the infamous Restaurant Row. It gets largely mediocre reviews. Like most restaurants in that neighborhood, you can get a good meal or a terrible one, depending on what you order, how busy they are (the pre-theater rush tends to be awful), and who’s on duty in the kitchen that day.

I’ll only tell you that the Duck Leg Confit ($21) that my son and I had yesterday was one of the city’s better examples of the genre, especially at the price.

Brasserie Athénée (300 W. 46th Street at Eighth Avenue, West Midtown)

The Chef’s Table at Hecho en Dumbo

 

Hecho en Dumbo, literally “Made in Dumbo,” opened on the buzzing Bowery in early 2010. Once upon a time, it was a Mexican pop-up in DUMBO, till they found permanent digs.

The bare-bones dining room looks like it came right out of Brooklyn. Loud, bustling and crowded, with no customers within a decade of my age, reservations not taken. You probably wouldn’t find me there, which is no knock on what they are doing. It’s just not my kind of joint.

Earlier this year, they launched a chef’s tasting menu at a bright, blond wood counter that looks out over the open kitchen (hat tip: Eater.com). You sit on a metal stool that isn’t very comfortable, but service is attentive, the show is worth watching, and it’s comparatively quiet.

There are about 10 seats. We had the place to ourselves when we arrived at about 6:30 p.m. A couple of other parties had arrived by the time we left, 2½ hours later. Reservations are accepted for parties of 1 or 2, and there is a fairly stern warning that cancellations aren’t accepted after 5:00 p.m. the day before.

The menu is nominally five courses, but we were served ten, including various amuses and at least two comps. But even the normal menu is a remarkably good deal at $55. The care and quality of the preparation is apparent, although at that price they are not serving luxury ingredients.

Various websites mention a wine pairing option, but that has been discontinued: we had cocktails and wines by the glass (there is also a beer selection).

I didn’t take notes and forgot to take a copy of the menu with me, so I present the photos after the jump with light comments, and in some cases none at all. Take my word for it: this deal is worth your while.

The Chef’s Table at Hecho en Dumbo (354 Bowery between Great Jones and E. 4th Streets, East Village)

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

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