Ed's Chowder House

I’ve written before about the shortage of good pre-concert dining in the Lincoln Center area. After Picholine and Bar Boulud, your options—at least the good ones—tail off considerably. This remains a mystery to me. There are 10,000 seats across the street, their occupants generally have sophisticated tastes, and they have to eat. Why aren’t there better restaurants catering to them?

Lately, Ed’s Chowder House has been my go-to pre-concert restaurant. Sam Sifton gave it zero stars in the Times, and that’s not right. Ed’s isn’t better than Picholine or Bar Boulud, but it’s good, and you can always walk in and get seated at the bar.

I wrote my last review after a visit on opening night. I won’t repeat the long history of the space: briefly, it’s a Jeffrey Chodorow restaurant, built (like most of his places) where a previous Chodorow restaurant failed. It looks like this one will last. Periodic checks on OpenTable suggest that it’s at least doing a solid pre-concert business.

The eponymous Ed Brown’s main restaurant, eighty one, has closed, so he is probably spending more time here (he is listed as the “Chef Collaborator”). That is a good thing: the man knows fish.

Blissfully, this doesn’t feel like a Chodorow place. The reasonably-priced menu doesn’t ramble, and for the most part it’s free of gimmicks. The servers don’t upsell. The host even seated me early, even though my party was incomplete, which has never happened before at a Chodorow restaurant.

I do think they should merge their bar and dining room menus. They aren’t all that much different, and as they’ll allow you to order from either one, in either room, there is little point in having two.

The bread service (above) remains terrific, as it has been each time I’ve visited.

The food I’ve tried is simple and well done, and doesn’t require much elaboration: a clam chowder ($11.50; above left), an asparagus salad ($14.00; above right). On another occasion, I had the lobster roll, which at $26 is a bit on the expensive side, but very good indeed.

The mains are either “composed” and “simple,” a slightly irritating trend that I cannot blame on Jeffrey Chodorow. But “simple” sea bass ($26; above left) was excellent, and so was a Pat La Freida burger ($17; above right) from the bar menu. The fries, however, had been seasoned with something awful, perhaps truffle oil, that basically ruined them.

The food was good, the service was good, the room is comfortable and unhurried, and they got us to our opera on time. What more could you ask from a Lincoln Center restaurant?

Ed’s Chowder House (44 W. 63rd St. btwn. Broadway & Columbus, Lincoln Center)

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

Review Recap: Ed's Chowder House & Tanuki Tavern

Today, Sam Sifton filed the expected two-fer on Ed’s Chowder House and Tanuki Tavern. We were correct that Sifton would uncork his first zero-star review; but wrong about which one would be the victim.

He clearly “gets” what the owner, Jeffrey Chodorow, is about:

For more than two decades he has run counter to restaurateurs interested in rubbed-wood authenticity and locavore cuisine. He has stood, always, for brash showmanship, the belief that in restaurants, the whole and complete point of the business is volume. In the face of recessions and in boom times alike he has accumulated more than 25 restaurants and bars in close to a dozen cities, all of them tied to the idea of dazzling, low-cut, cocktail-fueled good times…

From his first foray, the flashy China Grill, to his latest, Tanuki Tavern in the Hotel Gansevoort and Ed’s Chowder House in the Empire Hotel, he has promised that opportunity: fun, against the customer’s outlay of cash.

To our surprise, he thinks that Tanuki is the one that comes the closest to meeting those modest objectives:

The concept at Tanuki Tavern is that it’s an izakaya, or Japanese-style tapas bar. That is not entirely accurate. Really Tanuki is Ono, the immense Japanese-style restaurant Mr. Chodorow opened five years ago, now in a smaller space with almost the same number of seats. He sublets the rest of the space to the nightclub Provocateur. (Mr. Chodorow isn’t in this racket to spill soup.)

The result is young and exciting, with food from the same larder as Ono’s: respectable, perfectly good quasi-Asian fare. Also like Ono, it is pretty in design and execution: Japanese cabinetry and piped-in ’80s rock, LED candles, paper lanterns and two floors of tables full of men and women in clothing inappropriate to the weather. Tanuki is a fine place to drink sake, eat chicken wings and visit a simulacrum of South Beach, Sunset Boulevard, the timeless thump-thump-thump of Saturday night on the Vegas strip. It provides direct transport, in other words, to Chodorowland.

At Ed’s Chowder House, Sifton wonders if the restaurant’s namesake, Chef Ed Brown, has been watching the kitchen:

There was, one night, something of his style and worth in a terrific dish of smoked Chatham cod cakes with a roasted tomato-chili jam… But none of his delicacy was apparent in other meals — in greasy, overdone fried calamari with saffron aioli, for instance, or in celery-heavy, muddy-hued steamed clams with plonk broth…

Did Mr. Brown personally have something to do with the ammonia taste of a particularly elderly wing of skate served with horseradishy mashed potatoes and left untouched on the plate (to the shrug of a waiter)? It seems somehow unlikely.

We lose $2 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets. Eater wins $2 on Tanuki Tavern, but loses $1 on Ed’s Chowder House, for a net of $1.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$6.00		$8.00
Gain/Loss	+$1.00		–$2.00
Total	$7.00		$6.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	5–3 (62.5%)		4–4 (50.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 74–31 (70%).

Review Preview: Ed's Chowder House & Tanuki Tavern

Tomorrow, Sam Sifton files his first double-review, hitting Jeffrey Chodorow’s latest failures restaurants: Ed’s Chowder House and Tanuki Tavern. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows:

Ed’s Chowder House: Goose Egg: 10 - 1; One Star: 3 - 1; SIFT HAPPENS: 5-1; Three Stars: 20 - 1

Tanuki Tavern: Goose Egg: 3 - 1; One Star: 2-1; SIFT HAPPENS: 7 - 1; Three Stars: 25 - 1

Despite my incessant joking at Chodorow’s expense—let’s face it, who doesn’t joke about this guy—I actually liked Ed’s Chowder House when I dropped by in September. I was there for a drink last night, and we’re going again in January. I sampled only a little of the menu on that earlier visit, but it strikes us as a quintessential one-bagger.

Chodorow is the past master of building new restaurants on the smouldering husk of previous failures, and Tanuki Tavern is one of these. We’ve avoided the place like the plague. We have no intel at all, but if Sifton is ready to give his first goose egg, this would be a perfect time for it.

We predict that Sifton will award one star to Ed’s Chowder House and zilch to Tanuki Tavern.

Ed's Chowder House

Note: Click here for a more recent review of Ed’s Chowder House.

A new Jeffrey Chodorow restaurant is a bit like a NASCAR race. You suspect there will be a crash. The only question is when?

You have to at least admire Chodorow’s tenacity. After failures at Mix, Rocco’s, Brasserio Caviar & Banana, Tuscan, Tuscan Steak, English is Italian, Wild Salmon, Kobe Club, and Ono, it’s amazing he has any capital left over. Or patience.

When Chodorow opened Center Cut across from Lincoln Center last year, I thought: “Here, finally, is a restaurant he can’t screw up.” Steakhouses seldom fail in New York, and this is a neighborhood that cries out for more dining options. The Lincoln Center restaurants are packed almost every night, despite the fact that very few of them are great. The area needed a place like Center Cut.

I actually liked Center Cut. I didn’t love it, but it was convenient before a show. It was also a place you could get into, and therein lay the problem. Even in a neighborhood that needed more restaurants, the crowds didn’t warm up to Center Cut: I gave plenty of reasons in my review. Once again, Chodorow had screwed up, as only he can.

Now comes Ed’s Chowder House, built on the carcass that was Center Cut. Chodorow has wisely enlisted Ed Brown of the Michelin-starred eighty one, who knows a thing or two about seafood from his thirteen-year stint at Rockefeller Center’s Sea Grill.

This isn’t a gut renovation—Center Cut’s wine wall still separates the bar and the dining room—but the space is now much brighter and livelier. It’s tough to compare a steakhouse and a seafood shack, but prices here are much lower. Center Cut had $17 cocktails (one of Chodorow’s many errors), but they top out here at $12. There are acceptable wines below $50, which Center Cut didn’t have.

The front area, where I ate, is called the “Chowder Bar.” It has its own menu that partly overlaps the dining room menu, but has a few of its own items—a burger ($15) and a lobster roll ($24), for instance. But the servers there offer you the dining room menu too, which leaves you with a lot to ponder.

Too much, in fact. This is the failing of every Chodorow restaurant I’ve visited. At Wild Salmon, even a physicist couldn’t have calculated the number of variations. Chodorow is positively restrained here, but there are still twenty-five entrées in two categories ($17–35)—half of them in a boxed-off list captioned “simply,” the other half being composed plates.

I would far prefer to see the list of the entrées that the restaurant can do really well—and I guarantee you it’s not all twenty-five of them.

The appetizer list is a bit more sensible, with ten choices ($9–16), but there are four soups ($9–15), nine sides ($6), and the obligatory raw bar. Both menus (dining room and chowder bar) have dates printed on them, which suggests they’ll be revised frequently.

Center Cut had a terrific bread service, and so does Ed’s Chowder House (above left). Among the soups are three kinds of chowder, or you can get a sampler for $12 (above right). I loved the New England clam chowder and the sweet corn chowder, but the Manhattan-style chowder tasted like Campbell’s.

A Savory Lobster Crumble ($16; above left) is listed as an appetizer, but it’s hearty enough to be a small entrée. I would be happy to eat this again. I asked a server to recommend her favorite side dish, and she suggested the Jalapeño Creamed Corn (above right), and this was also very good.

This was the first night for Ed’s Chowder House, so consider this a preliminary view. The Chod himself was in the house. Servers were more polished than I would expect at a brand new restaurant. A cocktail took a bit too long to appear, but the staff got me out in time for my 7:30 concert. There was no attempt to upsell me—a first in a Chodorow restaurant.

If this were really Ed Brown’s Chowder House, I would confidently predict success. But this is also Jeffrey Chodorow’s House, and he’s proved there’s no restaurant he can’t foul up. I’ll be rooting for this one, not for any partisan reason, but simply because it’s always good to have another option at Lincoln Center.

Ed’s Chowder House will get a repeat visit from me. I can only hope that after Ed Brown decamps uptown, the China Grill Management folks don’t screw it up.

Ed’s Chowder House (44 W. 63rd St. btwn. Broadway & Columbus, Lincoln Center)