Enduro

Note: Enduro did not endure. As of August 2014, the space is BV’s Grill, owned by the same people.

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Welcome to Enduro, a handsome new West Midtown spot owned by the heir to the Junior’s restaurant chain.

The name won’t mean very much to the rest of us: the owner’s grandfather ran a string of “Enduro” restaurants in the 1920s. It’s also a type of off-road motorcycle racing, in case you were wondering. But the owners get plenty of mileage out of the name. On the corridor leading to the restrooms, there’s a bunch of fake ads for fictitious products called “Enduro.”

They dropped some coin to build this place, spending $7 million to renovate a former Outback Steakhouse. The dining room is spacious and masculine, with heavy wood tables and big horseshoe banquettes, dominated by a large rectangular bar in the center of the room.

Enduro claims to be a classic American grill, a sufficiently malleable description that allows the chef to serve almost anything. On a rotisserie grill, prominently visible in the partially-open kitchen, you’ll find pork loin, chicken, and rotating whole fish specials.

The dinner menu offers snacks ($4–16), salads ($10–24), appetizers ($10–17), mains ($16–49), and side dishes ($8–12). Those are wide ranges. You could get out cheaply with the burger ($16), or not so cheaply with the ribeye steak ($49).

The all-American wine list offers 13 choices by the glass, and 2½ pages’ worth by the bottle, with reds ranging from $40–600, and a decent selection under $60. I didn’t see many bargains, but it was clearly a list with a point of view, and not just the generic stuff that most new restaurants serve.

 

Pretzel Bread ($4; above left) is baked in shiny round balls, with creamy mustard that delivers a potent kick. Chicken Liver Spread ($8; above right) is a great starter, but it needed to come with twice as much bread. Extra bread came along later, at no charge, but we had to wait for it.

 

I didn’t taste my companions’ dishes, but there were general nods of approval for Linguini with clams, garlic, and olive oil ($17; above left), and Striped Bass with brown butter and bok choy ($28; above right).

 

Berkshire Pork Loin off the rotisserie ($24; above left) had a great smoky flavor, but it could have used some crisping at the edges for textual contrast. A side of thick-cut bacon ($8; above right) was a hit at our table; it won’t put Peter Luger out of business, but it’s well worth ordering.

You worry that it could get noisy here, but tables are generously spread out, and the high ceilings dissipate the sound. It was about 80 percent full on a Friday night, with a multi-generational crowd ranging from baby carriages to geriatrics.

Managers and servers seemed to be on top of things in the dining room, but it was a challenge to get a bartender’s attention. There were other minor service lapses: the long wait for a second helping of bread; entrées served with sauces on the side, but no serving spoons.

But the food is good enough for this type of place, the room friendly and welcoming. Enduro is located on the edge of Midtown, where there are plenty of business lunches to be had, with plenty of housing stock to the east, where there’s always demand for a place like this.

Enduro (919 Third Avenue at 56th Street, East Midtown)

Food: American grill standards
Service: Enthusiastic but not yet polished
Ambiance: A large corporate space where you can relax

Rating: ★

Domain

Remember Etats-Unis, the Upper East Side restaurant with an improbable Michelin star? I never quite bought into the star, but for what it was — straight, up-the-gut comfort food — it was certainly well above the neighborhood average.

I’m not sure why Etats-Unis closed (it was always reasonably full, in my experience), but close it did, nearly four years ago. The chef, Derrick Styczek, has resurfaced at Domain, a new restaurant in the space that was formerly Vareli in Morningside Heights, a short hop from the Columbia campus. The name might not be the best choice. Search on “Domain restaurant,” and you’re liable to get back a list of Internet domain hosting services.

There’s room to spread out here, in a roomy two-story storefront that was nowhere near full on a Wednesday evening (the Jewish holiday week, to be fair). It’s an attractive, romantic spot, with dark wood, low lighting, and acres of exposed brick. Not that you haven’t seen it before, but you haven’t seen it here.

Styczek’s cooking is more dainty and precious than I recall at Etats-Unis. There are hints of the former comfort-food style it’s not quite as pleasurable here. Prices are calibrated to the neighborhood, with only one entrée (lamb) abouve $29.

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Sushi Dojo

 

Note: This review was written when David Boudahana was Executive Chef at Sushi Dojo. The owners fired him in late 2015 after a series of run-ins with the Department of Health. The restaurant’s other sushi chefs were excellent, so the restaurant should be able to keep running without missing a beat.

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Was I imagining it, or have we entered a Golden Age of Japanese cuisine in New York? New York’s Adam Platt seems to agree: this week, he posted a roundup of six new entrants—and he still didn’t manage to hit all of them.

I won’t have the time or the money for such an extensive survey. If I could only do one, I wasn’t sorry that it was Sushi Dojo, which opened in the East Village in early June and was an instant hit.

 

The chef getting all the press is an unlikely one: 27-year-old David Bouhadana (above left), a Jewish kid from Florida who trained with Iron Chef Morimoto and apprenticed for four years in Japan. To this gaijin’s ears, his Japanese sounds like the real McCoy. (I remember him vaguely from Sushi Uo, where he worked briefly in 2009.) Joining him are Hiromi Suzuki (one of the few female sushi chefs in New York) and Makato Yoshizawa, the only one of the group born and raised in Japan.

The restaurant’s name, loosely translated, means “Sushi Education.” The chefs will talk about their fish until you’re ready for a Ph.D., but they can leave you alone, if you’d prefer. It would be pretentious to suggest that you can’t get your education elsewhere, but these chefs are more talkative (in a good way) than many others I’ve encountered.

There’s a menu of hot dishes from the kitchen, sushi and sashimi à la carte, and omakases at escalating prices. On the evening we were there, the top omakase was $80 per head (since raised to $90), which compares favorably to $135 at Neta a few months ago. Ingredients are everything in sushi: much of the bill at Neta was taken up with an insane serving of toro tartare and caviar, which is $48 all by itself when ordered separately.

The sushi itself at Neta was pedestrian; here, it’s the highlight of the meal. The chef said that about 70 percent of the fish they serve is imported from Japan, with the rest sourced from the likes of Boston, New Zealand, Montauk, San Francisco, and so forth. In our omakase, I thought the ratio was more like 50/50.

 

There are about 40 sakes on the menu. We discussed our preference with the sommelier, who brought out a selection of three for us to try, and then steered us to an inexpensive choice. We ordered the $80 omakase with Chef Suzuki (above right), and she went to work. A poached South African ocotpus (upper left of photo) had just come steaming out of the oven.

 

We started (above left) with a few pieces of that octopus; tuna tartare with wasabi, soy, and yam; and a British Columbia oyster. Then came a selection of sashimi (above right) with shrimp, hamachi, tuna, and yellowtail.

 

The heads of the shrimp were sent to the kitchen, and came back deep fried (above left). This is a terrific dish, if you don’t mind the gross-out factor. I’ve always eaten shrimp heads, but I realize that many people don’t.

The planned omakase included five pieces of sushi: madai, golden eye snapper (Japan), shimaji (Japan), Tasmanian trout, and fatty tuna otoro (Boston). I’ve shown the trout (above right); you can see every piece in the slide show below.

 

We didn’t feel quite ready to be done, so we ordered five extra pieces. A scallop (above), seared with the blowtorch and finished with soy and yuzu zest, was one of the highlights. We also enjoyed the Japanese spotted sardine, salted and cured; the Santa Barbara sea urchin; sea eel; and seared fatty tuna with lemon juice and salt.

The omakase did not include dessert or anything from the kitchen, aside from the deep-fried shrimp heads. If our experience is any guide, you’ll probably want a bit more. (The kitchen sent out a pot of tea in a clay pot, which does not normally come with it.) I ought to add that we dined at the publicist’s invitation, and although we paid for our meal, it was at a discounted rate.

There are 36 seats, which were mostly full by 9:00 pm (when we were wrapping up), but only 14 at the bar. As usual for such establishments, you need to sit at the bar to get the most out of the experience, or should I say, the education.

If you want sushi around here, the sky’s the limit. At Kurumazushi, you can spend $1,000 in 45 minutes, and they’ll serve you slabs of imported otoro the size of porterhouse steaks. Sushi Dojo occupies a more rational sphere. In its price range, it is one of the better Japanese meals I’ve had in New York.

Sushi Dojo (110 First Avenue at E. 7th Street, East Village)

Food: Sushi front and center
Service: Personalized service from one of three sushi chefs
Ambiance: Austere but not too serious, in the traditional blond wood

Rating: ★★

Mighty Quinn's Barbecue

Barbecue is a cuisine I love, but all too rarely find the time to enjoy. Many of the recently acclaimed places have opened in Brooklyn or Queens, and I don’t love ’cue quite enough to head over there.

Mighty Quinn’s Barbecue is an exception, opening last December on a bright East Village street corner in the old Vandaag space. I had a mid-day appointment in the area, so I headed over at 11:30 a.m., when they open for lunch.

Good barbecue in NYC is still scarce enough that the better places can be packed at peak hours. Getting there early is a boon: I was served immediately. It’s not a huge space, and I’m sure at the dinner hour it’s packed.

The owners have put a high gloss on what is still, at root, a bare-bones operation. The space is bright, shiny, and comfortable. Nevertheless, you stand in a cafeteria line, and the food is served on metal trays.

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Estela

I’ve got mixed feelings about Estela, the new tapas-style restaurant from chef Ignacio Matos and beverage director Thomas Carter.

We last saw Matos at Isa, where he wowed audiences and critics (or most of them), but didn’t wow the owner, the world’s greatest poseur, Taavo Somer. Apparently unwilling to operate even one good restaurant, Somer fired Matos abruptly in the summer of 2012. Isa still exists, but is culinarily irrelevant, like all of Somer’s other places.

So it’s an understatement to say I was rooting for Estela to succeed. I didn’t love everything I tasted at Isa, but I loved a lot of it, and it mattered.

Alas, Estela is a let-down. The food is all pleasant enough and mostly pretty good. You won’t eat badly here. But most of it is beneath what Matos was trying to do at Isa. It was worth going out of your way to visit Isa. It’s worth dropping in at Estela if you’re in a few blocks’ radius.

It’s an even bigger come-down for Carter, who was beverage director at Blue Hill Stone Barns, and now serves a wine list that fits on a single page. (That is, unless there’s a larger list that the server neglected to show us.)

None of this is accidental. In a joint interview with Eater, Matos and Carter made their lower ambitions abundantly clear: “I don’t want us to think in terms of ‘developing dishes’ or anything like that,” says Mattos of the way he’s training his young and small kitchen to work. “These should just be plates of food, nurturing and relatively cheap, that remind you of the home-cooked meals you never experience anymore.”

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