Rolling the Dice: Chop Suey

Every week, we take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We track our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Times Square’s latest Chinese restaurant, Chop Suey. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 4-1
One Star: 3-1 √√
Two Stars: 6-1
Three Stars: 25-1
Four Stars: 5,000-1

The Skinny: Chop Suey has attracted a little bit of critical attention, thanks to its two “consulting chefs,” Zak Pelaccio (savories) and Will Goldfarb (desserts). The Post’s Steve Cuozzo loved it. New Yorker’s Ligaya Mishan wasn’t impressed at all. Cuozzo’s tastes are notoriously opposite of Frank Bruni’s, so we’re more inclined to trust Mishan.

In case the term “consulting chef” is new to you, it basically means they phoned in a couple of menu ideas, pocketed a fee, and have hardly visited the place since it opened. Pelaccio and Goldfarb are talented guys, but these days no one can keep track of all their projects. We don’t expect Bruni to look favorably on chefs who can’t be bothered to show up, and Bruni has never been much of a Goldfarb fan anyway.

If the online menu is accurate, appetizers at Chop Suey average around $15, and entrées around $30, which means you can’t get out of there for less than $50 a head, assuming you drink cokes. That’s a lot of money for Chinese food. It had better be good, or Bruni will bring out his hatchet in a hurry.

Ordinarily we’d be grabbing the zero-star odds, but we hesitate for a couple of reasons. In Times Square, there’s a zero-star restaurant every fifteen feet. It’s one of the city’s few neighborhoods where you expect every restaurant to be bad. Is there any news value in a zero-star review of a Times Square restaurant, especially one that most of the city’s other critics ignored?

The Bet: We agree with Eater that Frank Bruni will “award” —we use the term loosely — one star to Chop Suey.

Return to 5 Ninth

Note: This is a review of 5 Ninth under founding chef Zak Pelaccio. After numerous changes of both chef and format, the restaurant closed in early 2013.

*

My friend and I had dinner at 5 Ninth last Friday evening. The restaurant was running a bit late, and our 9:00pm reservation was honored at more like 9:20.

Some of the silly service quirks remain from my last visit, such as serving bread without bread plates. This seems so elementary that it defies belief they haven’t thought of it. On the other hand, the wine list is to the restaurant’s credit. We had no trouble identifying a very pleasing red for around $27, where one would much more commonly pay something in the 40’s at a restaurant in this price range.

We both started with the Berkshire Pork Belly in a garlic chilli paste. It was four gorgeous hunks of pure fat, which is of course the tastiest part of the animal, so we found it wonderful.

Anything after that was bound to seem bland. My friend had the hangar steak, and I had a baramundi (one of the day’s market specials). The baramundi had a nice crisp exterior, but it was totally unmemorable after the pork belly.

I didn’t note the prices of individual items (and they aren’t shown on the website), but the total for two, with tax and tip, was a very reasonable $127.36.

5 Ninth (5 Ninth Avenue between Gansevoort & Little West 12th Streets, Meatpacking District)

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

Fatty Crab

Note: Fatty Crab closed in July 2016, ending a run of over a decade. The “Fatty” brood, with chef Zak Pelaccio at the helm, once included two Fatty Crabs, two Fatty ’Cues, and other diversions. Pelaccio left the group in 2011 and opened an unrelated restaurant, Fish & Game in Hudson, NY. The group lost its way without Pelaccio, and the various “Fatties” closed, one at a time, with this one being the last. It was fun, while it lasted.

*

Fatty Crab is chef Zak Pelaccio’s casual Malaysian spinoff. His other restaurant, the more upscale and expensive 5 Ninth, is just steps away, in the center of the Meatpacking District.

Indeed, Fatty Crab is about as casual as it gets. The restaurant is tiny, and reservations aren’t accepted. The bar serves beer and wine only. However, it has the foodie buzz, and if you get there much later than 6:30pm, you can expect to wait. A Fatty Crab meal isn’t an epic-length event, and the tables seem to turn rapidly.

The restaurant follows the irritating contemporary trend of turning out plates as they’re ready, regardless of whether you are ready for them. This can work well if you’re intending to share (as my friend and I were), but I find it presumptuous when I am informed that this is what the kitchen means to do, like it or not. Isn’t dining out meant to suit our convenience, rather than the restaurant’s?

The menu comes as several printed sheets held together with a clip board. It offers the following categories: snacks ($4-8), salads ($7-13), noodles/soups ($10-12), vegetables ($7), rice bowls ($1-3), and specialities ($6-28). All of those specialties are $17 or less, except for the restaurant’s signature dish, the chilli crab, which is $28. It was unavailable last night (worldwide shortage of dungeoness crab, we’re told).

A salad of watermelon pickle and crispy pork ($7) was wonderful, offering a sharp contrast between the cool watermelon and the warm crunchy pork. I would have liked a bit more of the pork, but I shouldn’t complain at that price. A sweet and sour fish broth with rice noodles ($10) was plenty of fun, but awfully difficult to eat.

The dish of the evening was Short Rib Rendang ($17), which is braised with kaffir lime, coconut, and chili: tender, succulent, and flavorful. A dish called Chicken Claypot ($10) offered tender cubes of meat that had all of the flavor cooked out of them.

I suspect that Fatty Crab’s menu will reward further exploration. At its wallet-friendly price, the trip will probably be well worth it.

Fatty Crab (643 Hudson St., btwn Gansevoort & Horatio Sts., West Village)

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

5 Ninth

Note: Click here for a later review of 5 Ninth.

Frank Bruni’s one-star review of 5 Ninth did not leave me with any eagerness to visit. That all changes when you receive an invitation, and your host is paying the bill. That’s what happened one night last December.

The building’s facade conceals its intentions. It occupies an eighteenth-century townhouse that has seen better days. Amid the glitz of the meatpacking district, it’s the building that time forgot. Only the brass #5 on the door tells you that you’re in the right place. (My companion, who is not a New Yorker, had to ask at three different storefronts nearby before he was directed to the right one.)

It’s a narrow building, and therein lies part of the problem. The entire ground floor is the bar. Dinner seating is up a treacherous staircase (we saw one patron take a scary tumble during dinner). Most of the tables seat only two; all of them are small. No one takes your coat; your server just directs you to hooks on the wall.

The menu at the website isn’t much use. It doesn’t show prices, and most of the offerings have changed anyway. Prices have also gone up. The Bruni review stated that entrées are $25-32. When I visited, they were $30-34. (I don’t recall seeing any mains below $30, but if there were any, it was only one or two.) There was no amuse bouche, and at these prices I think there should be.

Dinner starts slow at 5 Ninth. It was nearly empty when we arrived (6:30pm), but nearly full by the time we left (8:30 or 8:45). An empty restaurant is no guarantee of efficient service. A basket of bread was deposited on our table, along with a heavenly homemade whipped butter, but without bread plates or spreading knives. We thought that perhaps this was part of the meatpacking ethos—who needs plates when you can eat off the table?—but bread plates finally arrived after we’d had two slices apiece. Not that this bread was even worth the effort, as it was crumbly and stale.

For starters, my companion and I were both attracted to the sardines. We each received two whole fish, quite a bit larger than usual, grilled crisp and just a bit spicy. Separating the meat from the bones required a bit of labor, although well worth it. We kept the same knives that we had used to spread the butter. I’m sure the staff would have replaced them had we asked…but you shouldn’t have to ask.

For the main course, my companion had the goat, which looked wonderful (it resembled duck breast, but I forgot to ask how it tasted). I ordered something called “Mr. Clark’s Pork.” It turns out this dish is named for the farm where chef Zak Pellacio sources his pigs. From the description, you have no idea what you’re getting. It turned out to be heaven for pig lovers: pork loin cooked in its own fat, along with another body part deep fried. This came with what could only have been a potato fritter, grilled flat, with a salsa paste on top.

At the table next to me, a young lady also ordered Mr. Clark’s pork. Unlike me, she didn’t ask the server how the dish was prepared, and she was disappointed to receive a preparation with such a high fat content. It wouldn’t hurt 5 Ninth to be a little less cute with their descriptions.

We skipped dessert, but we were in the mood to finish with some scotch. “Do you have any scotch?” we asked. “Hmmm…I think we have some Laphroig, a McCallans, a Johnnie Walker Blue, and maybe a few others.” Here again, this seems basic. Either the server should know, or the after-dinner drinks should be on the dessert menu. Anyhow, we both chose the Johnnie Walker Blue. I’m a single-malt guy, but this was so smooth that I might just be converted to blends.

5 Ninth has been open since May 2004. Service glitches should have been worked out by December. The artistry of Zak Pellacio’s food deserves better.

5 Ninth (5 Ninth Avenue btwn Gansevoort & Little West 12th Sts, Meatpacking District)

Food: **
Service: Not Acceptable
Ambiance: Fair
Overall: *