Review Recap: Locanda Verde

Today, Frank Bruni awarded the expected two stars to Locanda Verde, while also scolding chef Andrew Carmellini for not doing more:

Renown in the restaurant world can dawn so suddenly and grow so quickly that many chefs get ahead of themselves, winding up a half-dozen paces beyond where they rightfully belong.

For Andrew Carmellini, the opposite has been true. Now 38, he has lagged behind, without billing as prominent or a showcase quite as flattering as he deserves…

But in keeping with the Carmellini story, Locanda Verde doesn’t amount to the exactly right situation or perfect fit for him. It’s not the Carmellini restaurant that many of us have been waiting and hoping for, though it has plenty to recommend it. Hit the menu’s strong spots and you’ll have a terrific meal at a reasonable price.

Like the menu at A Voce, the one here is emphatically market-driven, as the restaurant’s name (which means “green inn”) telegraphs. But the dishes in aggregate tend to be more rustic and less elegant, perhaps a reflection of Mr. Carmellini’s mood, certainly a reflection of the moment.

Bruni has a long history of over-rating Italian restaurants, but he certainly gets the food:

The pasta dishes and entrees weren’t as uniformly successful. While the “Sunday night ragù” on top of big, floppy gigantoni was a porky dream and while a dish called “my grandmother’s ravioli”— filled with short rib and pork and sauced with San Marzano tomatoes — made me want to swap ancestors with Mr. Carmellini, the crumbled mix of meats in a white Bolognese was a total washout, and the noodles in several dishes were slightly overcooked. Neither his grandmother nor mine would approve.

Carmellini’s last place, A Voce, was obviously a two-star restaurant, but it got three from Bruni. Today, he walks it back:

When he left in 2005 to open A Voce, he got his own kitchen, where he did some of the city’s best Italian cooking. But A Voce’s coolly modern, oddly soulless cosmetics were more of a drag on his efforts than a complement to them.

I couldn’t agree more. Although some of the finger-wagging in today’s review strikes the wrong tone, this time he got the rating right.

Braeburn

Note: Braeburn closed in January 2011.

Braeburn came quietly to the West Village last October, where it was important enough to be reviewed by all of the major critics, but dull enough to be greeted with yawns. Bruni and Platt awarded one star apiece. Restaurant Girl awarded two, which in her quirky system amounts to the same thing.

In a way, I can see what they mean. Its faux-farmhouse décor reminds you very much of places you’ve seen before. Or maybe a dozen of them. The menu, too, seems like the highlight reel from other farm-to-table restaurants. The chef, Brian Bistrong, won raves at The Harrison, but like so many in the business, he has moved on to something less ambitious.

But there’s something to be said for a restaurant that does a lovely job with simple things, and makes them just exciting enough that you’re happy you dropped in. Such was the case with a Poached and Panko Crusted Farm Egg ($10) with artichoke hash and parmesan foam. So too a tender Almond Crusted Flounder ($22) with cherry tomato salad, basil, and shallots.

The rest of the menu is along similar lines. There are seven appetizers ($9–13), four sides ($6), and six entrées ($22–28). There’s also a daily special, usually some kind of comfort food; Monday’s was Chicken Fried Steak ($18). The three-course prix fixe is $30, with a couple of choices for each course.

The occasion was a catch-up meal with a distant cousin whom I’d not seen since childhood. I figured Braeburn would be comfortable and quiet. At 6:15 p.m., we had the dining room to ourselves. Our timing was perfect. About two hours later, as we were getting up to leave, the tables had started to fill up, and it wasn’t so quiet any more.

The server seemed to realize that we wanted to talk. She stayed out of the way, but circled back frequently enough to keep track of us. We took our time before ordering and never felt rushed.

Braeburn (117 Perry Street at Greenwich Street, West Village)

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

Review Preview: Locanda Verde

Record to date: 6–3

The NYT took its sweet time posting the teaser for tomorrow’s review: Locanda Verde. We’ll therefore skip the analysis and go straight to the prediction: Bruni + Carmellini + Italian = 2 stars.

Daisy May's BBQ

Perhaps I’m better off that Daisy May’s BBQ isn’t better located. If it were easily reachable by subway, I’d be there a lot more often, and I’d be doing even worse on my diet.

Daisy May’s is at 46th Street and Eleventh Avenue. They could hardly have chosen a less accessible location in Manhattan. Not even buses go there, and the closest subway is a solid fifteen minute walk away. The neighborhood itself is ugly, much favored by auto repair joints and strip clubs. Despite that, Daisy May’s is clearly not doing badly, but in the East Village they’d be minting money.

But Daisy May’s is where it is, so I seldom go. Our last visit was three years ago, when we had the rack of lamb for two, a special that needs to be pre-ordered. Recently, I saw a couple of blog posts about the Oklahoma Beef Rib (HowFresh Eats, Cynical Cook)—a cut of meat most BBQ places don’t serve—and decided I had to have one.

Unfortunately, the cashier misheard my order, and I got the beef brisket combo instead (photo below). I should have been suspicious, as the brisket combo is only $14, while the beef rib combo is $21.50. I just shrugged, and assumed I was getting an early-bird special, or something like that. Bad assumption.

As you can see, Daisy May’s is still bare-bones, although they’ve now got a beer license, so it’s no longer strictly BYO. The brisket (lower-right in the photo) came with two sides; I chose the mac & cheese and the baked beans with burnt ends. It was all very good, but not worth the long walk from Eighth Avenue.

They clearly had the beef ribs—other diners were eating them, as I looked on with envy. It was just a misunderstanding. Perhaps it was all for the best. I wasn’t that hungry, and the beef ribs are huge. There’s always another day.

Yankee Stadium

On Saturday, we paid our first visit to the new Yankee Stadium. Unlike our trip to Citi Field last month, we had a beautiful day. It was the tenth anniversary of David Cone’s perfect game. Cone was on hand to toss the ceremonial first pitch to Yankee manager Joe Girardi (photo below), who was his catcher on that historic day.

The Yankees are the city’s best pro team, but they have the lesser stadium. In every respect, we found it inferior to Citi Field, including food service, seating, wayfinding, traffic flow, and subway connections. After the game (a 2–1 Yankee victory), it took us about 45 minutes to exit the stadium and get into the subway, about twice as long as it took at Citi Field. Fewer of the seats are covered at Yankee Stadium than at Citi Field. I would not want to be here in the rain.

If I didn’t know otherwise, I would think the two stadiums were constructed about twenty years apart. Citi Field is state-of-the-art. Yankee Stadium already feels obsolete.

Of course, the Yankees have one thing the Mets don’t: a winning team.

abc

Review Recap: Monkey Bar

Today, Frank Bruni awarded one star to Monkey Bar:

It’s a clubhouse, its members making their way to it not from the 18th hole but from the vanity fairways of Condé Nast, I.C.M., Time Warner and the like. Maybe they take a moment to glance at the listed appetizers and entrees, maybe not. It hardly matters, because they’ve been here often enough to know what’s what, and the lighting is too magnanimously dim for an annoyance like reading.

The obvious question is: why?

It opened about four months ago. But it didn’t open equally to everyone, as I learned when I called, using a pseudonym, to make a reservation. I wasn’t simply told that 6:30 was the closest to a prime time that I could hope for; I was told that anything better was for people with private lines to the owners…

All of that would be more objectionable if it weren’t just an amplified — and curiously forthright — version of the haughty games so many restaurants play.

And it would be less forgivable if there wasn’t actually something to savor on the far side of the velvet rope, along with signs that Mr. Carter and his crew truly care about that.

So let me see if I have this straight. It’s almost impossible to get in at a reasonable time, unless you’re a friend of Graydon Carter’s. And once you do get in, you’re as liable as not to be served mediocre food. Maybe you’ll see a celebrity or two…but you can do that on TV.

Once again, Bruni awards one star—supposedly meaning “good”—to a restaurant that isn’t good, thereby making it impossible to give one star to the restaurants that have truly earned it.

Falai

Note: Falai closed in August 2011. The chef, Iacopo Falai, cited changes in the neighborhood, implying that the upscale clientele the restaurant catered to was no longer coming to the Lower East Side. The space is now Pig and Khao.

*

It’s a sad consequence of Frank Bruni’s blatant Italian bias, that when he delivers a rave review of an Italian restaurant, I promptly ignore it. Of course, sometimes I’ve been to those restaurants already, and sometimes I go for other reasons. But I’d never choose an Italian place on his recommendation.

So it was with Falai, which received the deuce from Frankie two-stars in June 2005. Duly noted and ignored. Then, about a month ago, we walked into Falai Panetteria when a reservation at another place fell through. We were surprised at how good it was, which made us think that perhaps the mother ship deserved Frank’s deuce after all.

The chef at both places (and a third in Soho, to which we haven’t been) is Iacopo Falai, a former Le Cirque pastry chef. Here, at his main restaurant, he serves a focused Italian menu of just five appetizers ($12–16), seven pastas ($13–19), and six entrées ($25–27). The small semi-open kitchen probably can’t accommodate any more.

The all-white décor would be tough on the eyes if the lights were turned up, but the staff wisely keeps them dim. The narrow-but-deep room is a typical Lower East Side storefront. The floor tile looks at first as if it could be original, but then you notice that it embed’s Falai’s logo (above right). The staff all dress smartly, imparting an upscale vibe that makes the place feel like it belongs elsewhere.

Fortunately for Falai, diners don’t seem to mind visiting a fancy restaurant that is across the street from a pawn shop. On a Saturday evening, women were wearing their high heels and fancy summer dresses. At 8:00 p.m., the dining room was empty, as most diners had chosen to sit in the outdoor garden out back. But by 9:00 the room was mostly full. 

The white interior gave my camera fits. Shots with flash looked like nuclear winter, so I shot in ambient light, which played havoc with contrast and color balance. The amuse-bouche (right) was much better than the photo shows. I believe it was yogurt and roe with a pea-shoot broth poured table-side.

Of our appetizers, we were most impressed with Pici ($18; above left), with egg-less pasta, Italian cinnamon sausage, Brussels sprouts, and pecorino cheese. It was both an unusual and an intensely flavored dish. Gnudi ($16; above right) were an excellent rendition of a classic, with ricotta cheese, baby spinach.

Branzino wrapped in zucchini ($26; above left) was the more impressive entrée. It tasted as lovely as it looked. In contrast, Peking duck breast, or Anatra ($27; above right) was pedestrian. The skin had neither the crispness nor the spicy taste of traditional Peking duck, and the little dollops of ingredients scattered on the plate weren’t properly integrated into the dish. It’s a pity that the most expensive item on the menu is also the least interesting.

Pre-dessert was a tiny panna cotta (above left). We don’t normally order a dessert, but as it’s Chef Falai’s speciality we couldn’t resist. Profiteroles ($10; above right) were terrific.

To drink, we had a 2003 Copertino from the Puglia region of Italy ($52), with which we were perfectly satisfied. Service throughout the evening was attentive and polished.

Falai (68 Clinton Street between Rivington & Stanton Streets, Lower East Side)

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

Review Preview: Monkey Bar

Record to date: 6–2

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Monkey Bar, Graydon Carter’s midtown cafeteria for celebrities and wannabes.

The Skinny: The two relevant data points are Carter’s downtown restaurant, the Waverly Inn (one star; January 2007) and the imitation a few blocks away, Charles (goose egg, April 2009). In both reviews, Bruni wrote hilariously as his alias, Frannie von Furstinshow. Without that conceit, the reviews were entirely pointless.

Would he pull that stunt again, a mere two months later? No one has suggested there is actually important cooking being committed at the Monkey Bar. It’s a place where Graydon Carter decides who is A–List, who is B, and who is Nobody. Even Restaurant Girl was banished to Siberia. Don’t they know who she IS?

Not long ago, the restaurant disconnected its reservation line: too many nobodies were calling for not enough seats. You can e-mail for one of the few reservations not claimed by Carter’s friends, but if you’re not Barry Diller or Madonna, you’re probably not getting in. If you do, you’ll get the sorriest real-estate, and you’ll probably be over-paying for mediocre food.

Of course, mediocrity never stopped Frank from giving one star in the past, and it wouldn’t surprise us if he does again. But Monkey Bar, even more than the Waverly Inn, feels like a cynical exercise in crass showmanship, and we think Bruni will penalize it accordingly.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will give no stars to the Monkey Bar

DBGB

Chef Daniel Boulud is gradually working his way down the formality ladder. His five New York restaurants, in order of opening, are Daniel, Café Boulud, DB Bistro Moderne, Bar Boulud, and now DBGB—each more casual than its predecessor.

This is sensible positioning on Boulud’s part. Each of his five NYC properties fills a distinct niche, but all of them retain an essential French soul. In that respect, he parts company with fellow four-star chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who puts his name to a much wider variety of concepts, many of which have little to do with the cuisine he is famous for.

Not that DBGB is a classical French restaurant—it serves hamburgers and hot dogs, after all—but the core of the menu is French, and it’s a sensibly edited document. It doesn’t try to be all things to all people—as David Bouley tried and failed last year at Secession.

And Boulud knows how to roll out a restaurant. Industry glitterati were all a-twitter at the opening, fawning over the chef’s beer and sausages, admiring the row of cooking pots dotted along the walls, all donated by famous chefs. Beneath its rustic pretensions is a business model that, according to the Times, needs to gross $4.5 million per year to be profitable.

None of this is resentment. Actually, it’s admiration. Boulud could teach the rest of the industry how to open a restaurant. Even at his most casual place, the kitchen runs smoothly. The serving staff are attentive and friendly. They take reservations, check parcels, and transfer the bar tab to the table. It’s nice to know that at least some of David Chang’s antics aren’t being copied by everyone.

The menu is a slave to fashion in at least some respects, with many sections that blur the traditional lines between appetizers and entrées, a system that encourages sharing, and at times over-ordering. We had about the right quantity of food, but it was far too monotonous, and our stomachs felt weighed down at the end of the evening. We may well have chosen the wrong mix of items, and in that respect neither the menu nor our server offered much guidance.

About that menu: there are cold appetizers ($7–17), fruits de mer ($30, 60, 90), hot appetizers ($8–16), charcuterie (a subset of the Bar Boulud menu; $7–12); sausages ($9–15); a section labeled tête aux pieds, which I interpret loosely as “head and feet” ($9–12), entrées ($16–26), three different burgers ($14–19), and side dishes ($6).

Despite all of those categories, the menu manages to avoid the appearance of rambling. The largest section is the sausages, with 14 choices. Along with the tête aux pieds, it’s somewhat confusingly captioned “To Share,” although the section also includes the DBGB Dog ($9), which is just a standard hot dog, albeit with house-made sautéed onions and relish.

We ordered one hot appetizer, two sausages, and one of the tête aux pieds, all to share. This may have been the wrong way to appreciate the menu, but our server either encouraged, or at least did not discourage us from doing this. The kitchen sent out the items one at a time, and at a good pace.

We loved the Octopus à la Plancha ($12; above left), an ample portion lightly cooked, exactly as it should be. Our next item was supposed to be the Toscane ($11; above right). We are not sure if we got the right thing, as it was in a sub-section of the menu captioned “spicy,” and we found nothnig spicy or Tuscan about it. This was the one part of the evening when we could not flag down a server, so we decided to just eat what we had been given. The sausages here tasted like dressed-up breakfast—which is to say, not bad but not wonderful either.

Our next item, the Tunisienne ($15; above left) lived up to its billing. A spicy lamb & mint merguez gave way to a punchy braised spinach with chickpeas. Other sausages caught my eye, such as the Toulouse (pork & duck gizzard with cassoulet beans) and the Boudin Basque (spicy blood and pig’s head), but those will have to wait until another day.

The Pied de Cochon, or pig’s foot ($13; above right) needs to come with a Surgeon General’s warning. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but this thing is huge. Even to share, it was probably excessive. Meat from the pig’s foot appeared to have been smoked, braised, then wrapped in a log and deep fried. There were a few small pieces of bone that apparently remained by mistake, though it is hard to say for sure, as I have nothing to compare it to. The dish was intense, but in the end a bit cloying.

A side order of fries (photo above; $6) was a tad on the mushy side.

There’s a wine list, naturally, but we ordered from the long list of beers, which pair well with such fat-laden food.

DBGB is a noisy restaurant. There are a few booths in alcoves that seem to offer a bit of seclusion, but they’re available only for larger parties. Most diners, even VIPs, are seated in the larger central section, where the packed tables and exposed hard surfaces are tough on the ears. Despite the raucous atmosphere, servers are dressed smartly, and we saw at least three managers prowling the floor and checking on customers’ wants. Except for one brief stretch when we could get no one’s attention to ask about our Tuscan sausage, it seemed there was always a server, a runner, or a manager stopping by—even if you couldn’t quite hear them.

There is much more here, and if the restaurant were on my way home I’d visit a lot more frequently, but I feel full just thinking about all of that fattening food. I’d still like to come back for the “Piggie” (a 6 oz. burger topped with Daisy May’s pulled pork), but I think I need to diet first.

DBGB (299 Bowery at E. 1st Street, East Village)

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

Review Recap: Aldea

Today, Frank Bruni awards the expected two stars to Aldea:

The cooking is precious, lusty, ultramodern, rustic and a host of other adjectives that don’t normally squeeze together but find themselves in a tight, mostly happy clutch here. Although Aldea has a clean, sleek and relatively spare look, it has a much more complex taste.

One minute you’re nibbling on crisp pig’s ears. The next you’re carefully maneuvering your spoon under a translucent, quivering orb of concentrated mushroom broth — one of those liquid ravioli that the Spanish alchemist Ferran Adrià made famous — in an avant-garde consommé.

The entree in front of you is a go-for-broke hillock of rice with duck cracklings and black olives. The entree in front of your companion is a refined, butter-soft fillet of wild bass that has been poached in a technique similar to sous vide and tucked under a billowing nimbus made from Arbois and air.

For dessert there are doughnuts (though they’re labeled “little dreams”). But there is also “chocolate in textures,” a dark tableau that seems as ready for exhibition as for ingestion.

I more-or-less agree with all of this, although I could have done without the pejorative “precious.” One could easily imagine Aldea earning the third star eventually, an outcome Bruni himself anticpates: “…there’s plenty to eat, whether you’re hungry for something delicate or blunt. It establishes Aldea as a restaurant worth trying, and Mr. Mendes as a chef worth keeping an eye on.”

*

In Critic’s Notebook, Bruni has a look at the latest trends in pizza:

I believe by and large that Neapolitan pies — if they can avoid soupiness, as they did at Motorino — are the most appealing. Yet the pan pizzas at Veloce Pizzeria, which opened in the East Village a month and a half ago, pleased me every bit as much. Sara Jenkins, the chef who supervises their production, said she isn’t sure whether to call them Sicilian or grandma style. Whatever their proper tag, these denser, richer, square pies were superb. The nicely charred crust — with a dough of potato, durum and fine zero-zero flour — was firm enough to support a generous measure of toppings. Its extra-crisp edges had the salty, zingy flavor and texture of a frico. And the toppings were first-rate, the mushroom pizza showcasing a bevy of hen-of-the-woods.

I believe that firmer, less runny cheese works better most of the time, and yet the Pugliese pie at Motorino, which uses wet-centered burrata, was a masterpiece, the burrata lending the pie an opulence and creaminess.

Crisp crusts, it turns out, aren’t so difficult: most places I visited had mastered that much. But crusts that are crisp without being dry — that have some give and suppleness — are an altogether trickier matter. That’s where Lucali, for example, fell down, though the ratio of mozzarella to tomatoes on its plain pie was faultless, and the tomatoes had a beautiful, round flavor.

This is Bruni at his best. Had he been doing this, instead of reviewing high-end restaurants, the last five years would have been much happier for Times readers—and, we get the sense, for Bruni as well.