If the prix fixe is a chef’s CliffsNotes, the tasting menu is their magnum opus—lengthier and denser, painstakingly edited, with many an all-nighter spent carving out both structure and statement. Sure, they can be self-indulgent, glacially slow, sometimes damn-near masochistic in their nonstop cortege of plates. But boy, what a way to eat when the chef’s got something to say—and Bryce Shuman has plenty.
In March, the Eleven Madison Park vet discarded the à la carte offerings at Betony, the ambitious two-year-old midtowner that garnered him a Michelin star, and recharged the fine-dining room with a four-course prix fixe ($95) and a 10-course chef’s tasting menu ($195; optional wine pairing $95). But despite the luxe reworking—matched with a pleasant though militantly stiff waitstaff and those fussy trappings left over from the space’s days as the oligarchic Brasserie Pushkin—Shuman thankfully hasn’t lost his sense of fun.
That mirth is felt from the get-go, kicking off with a play-with-your-food plate of English-pea puree spackled with sesame and olive oil and served with a single rainbow kale leaf that the waistcoated server instructs to use as a utensil. Later, it’s palpable in a crispy carrot roll—twee enough for a hamster—snowed with crumbles of the fermented root veg, and a nest of julienned kohlrabi, broccoli stem and watermelon radish strips, sauced with honey-mustard dressing and scattered with chive tips. Altogether, you’ve got the world’s most elegant coleslaw.
Shuman isn’t immune to redundancy, however. Rice crackers pop up a touch too often, a carbonized crisp hooding a briny pat of caviar, caramelized onions and a crème fraîche dollop in one course and a tapioca wafer acting as a crunchy counterpoint to sweet hamachi and virile green-onion pesto in another.
And there are instances when the pomp and circumstance get in the way of the chef’s good nature: The flamboyant pageantry of the cheese course is enough to give you a case of the church giggles—a waiter earnestly slices open a bread roll nestled in a wreath of hay to reveal a molten core of velvety Wisconsin cow’s-milk cheese. It would be more entertaining to let diners gamely crack it open themselves rather than keep all the fun sequestered on a tray. Luckily, Shuman’s clear glee is almost enough to make up for it.
]]>That relative conservatism is at play at the relaunched Mission Chinese, trading in beer kegs, paper dragons and a cramped, dive-punk Orchard Street basement for smart cocktails, banquet-hall booths and an ample, gleaming dining room in the far reaches of Chinatown.
That inescapable hour-long wait for a table can be spent in the downstairs bar, but the real party is upstairs—a lively hodgepodge of bespectacled food disciples and beanie-clad millennials spinning lazy Susans loaded with pork cheeks and turnip cakes while golden-age hip-hop pumps through the room. It’s a rollicking good time, sure, but a wildly inconsistent one.
I can’t stay away from Chinese food. I really love that stuff.
The Scoville-crushing chicken wings ($13) have retained their unmerciful, skin-rippling heat, but other Bowien-fan favorites have had their burners turned down: The kung pao pastrami ($14) is a flickering flame compared to the four-alarm-chili roar it once was.
The menu expands from those oldies with 30-plus new dishes, many of which show Bowien—with executive chef Angela Dimayuga—hasn’t wholly lost his edge. A tin of anchovies, served with tartine flatbread ($12.50) blistered via a wood oven inherited from former tenant Rosette, packs a power punch of pickled chili and crunchy fennel seed. It’s salty, spicy and impossible to stop picking at.
The whole-smoked pork jowl ($35) is over-the-top lardy—one bite satisfies your fat quota for the day. Better are the Jurassic salt-and-pepper lamb rib tips ($37), soft and lax on the bone. Slick a piece of flatbread with kefir crème fraîche, then pile on a few shreds of lamb and a zippy bread-and-butter pickle—it’s Mission-gone-Moroccan, and staunchly, singularly Bowien.
Point of view has never been the chef’s problem—he’s got personality in spades. But that freewheeling, dip-a-toe gumption often translates to a lack of focus. There’s simply too much going on here: a sea-urchin-stocked raw bar, a roaming prime-rib cart and, most egregiously, pizza ($14)—a soggy, passable pie added to the menu simply because of that wood oven’s existence. The old idiom applies: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
]]>This luxe restaurant has been wowing midtown diners since the ’70s. Whether you prefer Cantonese, Shanghai or Szechuan food, you’ll find it done in style. The menu offers no fewer than five duck entrées and a slew of nontraditional items, such as Lily in the Woods (Chinese cabbage hearts simmered in broth and served with black wood mushrooms). Waiters theatrically assemble your table’s centerpiece—vegetables skillfully carved into animal shapes.
The menagerie heralds the arrival of the fancy food: moist shredded duck or Neptune’s Net, a potato nest bursting with scallops, shrimp, lobster and sea bass. The experience doesn’t come cheap, but for top-notch regional cuisine served graciously beside a taro dove, there is no other choice.
One can manage without eating flesh,
but one cannot manage without the bamboo.
Where China borders Mongolia in the colder north, the food reflects the terrain—it’s rustic and comforting, loaded with rich lamb and focused more on wheat-flour noodles and buns than the rice ubiquitous elsewhere. Thanks to a change in immigration patterns, Flushing has seen an increase in Northern Chinese restaurants like the seven-year-old Fu Run, whose owners are from Dongbei (what was once known as Manchuria). They call their justly celebrated dish the “Muslim lamb chop,” but it’s more like a half rack of ribs: A platter of bone-in, fatty meat is braised, then battered and deep-fried, the whole juicy slab blanketed with cumin seeds, chili powder and flakes, and black and white sesame seeds.
Try it with a wonderfully greasy beef-stuffed pancake called a bing, and cold saladesque dishes like the bright, fresh “tiger vegetable” (shredded scallions, cilantro, chilies and tiny shrimp) or liang pi noodles, transparent mung-bean noodles listed as “green-bean sheet jelly” and tossed with chili oil, peanuts and crushed cucumbers.
]]>Danny Bowien has gone normcore. Since shuttering his kaleidoscopic Szechuan clubhouse Mission Chinese Food in November 2013 due to Department of Buildings violations, the James Beard Award–winning wunderkind has become a father, sheared his trademark Fabio-blond locks and opened a bland Mexican offshoot, Mission Cantina, to middling reviews.
That relative conservatism is at play at the relaunched Mission Chinese, trading in beer kegs, paper dragons and a cramped, dive-punk Orchard Street basement for smart cocktails, banquet-hall booths and an ample, gleaming dining room in the far reaches of Chinatown.
On Christmas, my family and I see a movie and go out for Chinese food. We dont celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense, in that we do not actually celebrate Christmas.
That inescapable hour-long wait for a table can be spent in the downstairs bar, but the real party is upstairs—a lively hodgepodge of bespectacled food disciples and beanie-clad millennials spinning lazy Susans loaded with pork cheeks and turnip cakes while golden-age hip-hop pumps through the room. It’s a rollicking good time, sure, but a wildly inconsistent one.
The Scoville-crushing chicken wings ($13) have retained their unmerciful, skin-rippling heat, but other Bowien-fan favorites have had their burners turned down: The kung pao pastrami ($14) is a flickering flame compared to the four-alarm-chili roar it once was.
The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy.
The menu expands from those oldies with 30-plus new dishes, many of which show Bowien—with executive chef Angela Dimayuga—hasn’t wholly lost his edge. A tin of anchovies, served with tartine flatbread ($12.50) blistered via a wood oven inherited from former tenant Rosette, packs a power punch of pickled chili and crunchy fennel seed. It’s salty, spicy and impossible to stop picking at.
The whole-smoked pork jowl ($35) is over-the-top lardy—one bite satisfies your fat quota for the day. Better are the Jurassic salt-and-pepper lamb rib tips ($37), soft and lax on the bone. Slick a piece of flatbread with kefir crème fraîche, then pile on a few shreds of lamb and a zippy bread-and-butter pickle—it’s Mission-gone-Moroccan, and staunchly, singularly Bowien.
]]>New York’s first dim sum house opened in 1920 at a crook in Doyers Street known at the time as “the bloody angle.” That Chinatown passage bore witness to the grisly havoc of the Tong gang wars—shootings and hatchet murders—but the bakery and tea shop had a sweeter reputation: Its almond cookies and moon cakes were legendary. For more than three decades, the Choy family ran Nom Wah, but in 1974, Ed and May Choy sold the operation to longtime manager Wally Tang, who started there in 1950 as a waiter when he was 16.
In 2010, Wally Tang passed Nom Wah on to his nephew Wilson Tang, a banker at ING Direct. The 90-year-old stalwart had fallen into disrepair, so Tang gave it a remodel. He and his wife raided flea markets for vintage lamps and the restaurant’s storage room for archival photographs. Tang painted the dingy green walls a mustard yellow, and cleaned decades of dust and grease off the tea tins lining the restaurant’s shelves. The most important tweaks, though, were behind the scenes: Tang updated the kitchen and did away with the procedure of cooking dim sum en masse. Now, each plate is cooked to order.
I love Chinese food, like steamed dim sum, and I can have noodles morning, noon and night, hot or cold. I like food that’s very simple on the digestive system – I tend to keep it light.
Tang’s nips and tucks transformed a health department nightmare into a charming old-school institution, completely unlike the chaotic banquet halls that dominate Chinatown’s dim sum scene. The dining room is transportive—checkered tablecloths cover Art Deco tables and couples huddle beneath an old poster of a glam Chinese movie star. The food, too, stands apart; the dim sum here tastes fresher than the competition. Try the ultra-fluffy oversize roasted-pork bun ($1.25), the flaky fried crpe egg roll ($3.95) and the tender stuffed eggplant ($3.50) filled with a spiced shrimp-and-squid mixture.
]]>At this uptown offshoot of Ed Schoenfeld and Joe Ng’s West Village dim sum house, located in the former Fatty Crab annex, dumpling devotees can find signature plates and Asian-inflected fare that, while wildly inventive, relies on classical Chinese technique. The soup dumplings are an absolute must-order, packed with pork and crab in a rich, flavorful broth.
The dining room is certainly an unconventional backdrop for a Chinese restaurant. Dressed in farm-to-table drag with potted plants in the windows, blond wood pillars and gingham booths, the place could easily pass for another seasonal New American restaurant. And the eclectic menu is just as hard to pin down. Head straight for the family-style entrées. Although there’s a beautiful pricey steak—Creekstone Farms rib eye in a tenderizing marinade of fresh papaya and soy—the real draw for the neighborhood is the stuff that’s most recognizably Chinese, given the dearth of good Sino restaurants nearby.
Tang’s nips and tucks transformed a health department nightmare into a charming old-school institution, completely unlike the chaotic banquet halls that dominate Chinatown’s dim sum scene. The dining room is transportive—checkered tablecloths cover Art Deco tables and couples huddle beneath an old poster of a glam Chinese movie star. The food, too, stands apart; the dim sum here tastes fresher than the competition. Try the ultra-fluffy oversize roasted-pork bun ($1.25), the flaky fried crpe egg roll ($3.95) and the tender stuffed eggplant ($3.50) filled with a spiced shrimp-and-squid mixture.
]]>The pastas are unimpeachable successes. A bomb of fresh lemon accompanied each bite of the marshmallow-soft ricotta-stuffed tortelli, and the spinach tagliatelle is pure food porn; the savory, rich bolognese ragù painted each strand beautifully. Unfortunately, you pay for the pleasure; primis run as high as $27, and that’s a lot to spend on spaghetti, even if it does have crab in it.
The main courses just never thrilled me the way I imagined Batali—and executive chef Mark Ladner—would. The lamb three ways featured a lamb-chop, braised lamb shoulder and cool little fried lamb-tail balls, but I wasn’t dizzy in love. The most attractive entrées require sharing—the balcony eaves host large circular tables made for this—and while I watched longingly as a nearby server spent 15 minutes excavating an arctic char salt-baked in a Dead Sea’s worth of sodium, bigger doesn’t mean better. The braised veal shank for two had all the flavor of a standard-edition pot roast.
Still more mystifying was the cheese course, which basically ignores hundreds of great Italian cheeses and instead plays only with two-, four- and six-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano. I was especially disappointed, on one visit, to learn that the ten-course tasting menu merited only a chunk of the two-year-old, rather than a full flight. At $120 per person, not including wine, diners deserve better.
If Del Posto were the creation of some chef fresh from Florence, he’d be crowned a pasta wunderkind. Batali, alas, lives by higher standards. Towards the end of one meal, an elegant man at the next table told me that Del Posto wasn’t bad, but that he planned to stick with Babbo, where he dines every week. I can’t say I blame him.
]]>The Italian-American supper clubs immortalized in mob movies and sepia-toned photos were never as dreamy as they seemed. And the red-sauce classics still served behind curtained windows at clubby holdouts like Il Mulino and Rao’s are rarely as inspiring as our memories of them. The young guns behind Carbone, though, have moved beyond sentimentality in their homage to these restaurants by flipping the whole genre onto its head.
The new spot, from tag-team chefs Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, is a Godfather hangout on steroids, more fantastical set piece than history-bound throwback. Like Torrisi and Parm, their earlier projects together, it’s a hyped-up spin on a vanishing form, a restaurant where, bread sticks to bowties, everything looks, tastes and feels like much more of itself.
Under brass chandeliers, on navy walls, hangs brash modern art on old-school Italianate themes, curated, like the food here, by a downtown tastemaker (Julian Schnabel’s son Vito). The waiters, a seasoned crew plucked from powerhouse dining rooms all throughout the city, have the smooth steps and cool banter of celluloid pros. But Zac Posen designed their wide-lapelled burgundy tuxes. And the moneyed swells blowing their bankrolls in the entry-level front room or more sedate VIP inner sanctum—out back near the kitchen—aren’t capos or dons but young bankers and food-obsessed hipsters.
Whether you know a guy who knows a guy or simply scored your seat on OpenTable, you’ll feel like an insider as you pass under the antique neon sign hanging above the door, left over from Rocco, the 90-year-old joint this new hot spot replaced. Those swarming waiters ply every table with complimentary extras, swooping in with a hollowed cheese, big as a drum, stuffed with sharp chianti-soaked Parmesan nuggets (aged up the block at Murray’s), with smoky whispers of Broadbent ham carved from a haunch on a dining room pedestal.
The enormous menu, which opens as wide as The New York Times, reads like an encyclopedia of red-checkered classics. But co-chefs Torrisi and Carbone have made such dramatic improvements, you’ll barely recognize anything. You’ve never had a Caesar salad like their tableside masterpiece, a beautifully dressed, nuanced variation on the classic, amplified with warm garlic-bread croutons, two types of anchovies and three types of cheese.
You may have already heard about the restaurant’s exorbitant prices—that salad will set you back $17—but there’s real value in the top-shelf raw materials and gargantuan servings, and in the unbridled excess of the whole dining experience.
]]>Michael White, who built a national reputation at Fiamma in New York and Las Vegas, only to see his fledgling empire squashed overnight in a partnership meltdown, returned stronger than he left. The chef strives to continue the comeback that began at Convivio and Alto with the new seafoodcentric Marea, his third and most ambitious venture with partner Chris Cannon.
An upmarket shrine to the simple pleasures of the Italian coastline, the project is a gutsy gamble from a chef with bravado to burn. The most extravagant New York restaurant to open so far this year, Marea features an enormous menu, daunting prices and almost maniacal optimism (is there another new spot in town offering California caviar at $175 an ounce?). But the restaurant, which took over the space vacated last year by the venerable San Domenico, suffers from a split personality, with a menu sprawling enough to service the two distinct venues it could easily be.
The high prices and opulent dining room—with silver-dipped seashells and rosewood walls cloistered from the street behind gauzy blinds—suggests a restaurant with the loftiest auteur ambitions. While a good chunk of the dishes live up to the setting, many others—the basic iced platters of raw oysters and clams, the la carte whole fish featuring your choice of sauce, cooking method and sides—seem better suited to a far more casual fish shack. White, simply too eager to please, covers all of his bases, with prestarter crostini and fritti (including a delicious snack of lardo and sea urchin on toast), followed by crudo, antipasti, a whole raw bar selection, pastas, risottos, fish, meat and sides.
Most diners here, however, seem to be drawn to the restaurant for the chef’s more distinctive creations (since joining forces with Cannon, he’s cultivated the foodie following that eluded him somewhat in his Fiamma days). While there are very fine raw bars around town, few restaurants do crudi quite like Marea. Adding a few boisterous condiments to pristine raw fish, White creates beautiful and exuberant morsels. A pick-your-own sampler included exceptional sushi-grade tuna with oyster cream and a shaved artichoke chip, striped marlin with preserved lemon and olives, and cuttlefish strands anointed with briny bottarga. The chef gets even more adventurous in a cold lobster starter featuring an unlikely accompaniment: creamy burrata. The unorthodox marriage of seafood and cheese turns out in this case to be truly inspired (that the shelled lobster meat was supremely tender and sweet, and the cheese among the richest I’ve tasted, certainly helped).
Marea’s large, seafood-friendly, all-Italian beer list includes intriguing bottles you won’t find anywhere else, including the herb-infused Nuova Mattina ($13).
Sea urchin-lardo crostini, cuttlefish crudo, lobster with burrata, fusilli with octopus and bone marrow
The onyx bar, glowing gold, is an inviting spot for a snack and a drink—or a meal of crudi and pasta.
Michael White’s introduction to upscale Italian cuisine began at the original San Domenico in Imola, Italy, where he cooked early in his career. Partner Chris Cannon, meanwhile, once worked for the New York San Domenico’s Tony May (who is reopening his restaurant farther downtown later this year).
]]>Mario Batali has the toughest act to follow in New York dining: himself. I’ve eaten at his Italian restaurants—Babbo, Lupa, Esca and Otto—over two dozen times and never had a bad meal. Consistent excellence, and relentless Food Network appearances, have turned molto Mario into the most talked-about chef in town; in recent weeks, the rumor mill even suggested that Del Posto, his latest venture with mother-son team Lidia and Joe Bastianich, might well become the first four-star Italian restaurant in the city. But to these taste buds, it has a ways to go.
Much has been made of the $29 valet parking and coy reservationists, but I was more unnerved by the un-Batali, upscale-hotel vibe. The big open space feels like a lobby: There’s a lounge to the left, fine dining to the right, private tables upstairs and giant drapes blotting out the view of the Meatpacking District. In the background, a live pianist played sleepy sonatas. On the plus side, the noticeably large tables are spaced generously apart from one another. The service is knowledgeable, omnipresent and invisible. And the wine list features some great Italian choices in all price ranges.
The first food to hit the table was a not-especially memorable bread basket, accompanied by butter and rosemary-seasoned lardo. I could not sample all 16 or so antipasti available, but the ones I did try showed some originality. The seafood salad was light, non-oily and came with seaweed. The vegetable fritto misto included orange slices and a tasty anchovy-and-garlic sauce. The otherwise boring porcini salad was saved by powerful fennel flavor.
And my favorite appetizer, the salami-like cotechino sausage, was pulled from the world’s swankest hot dog cart and sliced over lentils; the garlicky, molasses flavor resonated for minutes.
The pastas are unimpeachable successes. A bomb of fresh lemon accompanied each bite of the marshmallow-soft ricotta-stuffed tortelli, and the spinach tagliatelle is pure food porn; the savory, rich bolognese ragù painted each strand beautifully. Unfortunately, you pay for the pleasure; primis run as high as $27, and that’s a lot to spend on spaghetti, even if it does have crab in it.
The main courses just never thrilled me the way I imagined Batali—and executive chef Mark Ladner—would. The lamb three ways featured a lamb-chop, braised lamb shoulder and cool little fried lamb-tail balls, but I wasn’t dizzy in love. The most attractive entrées require sharing—the balcony eaves host large circular tables made for this—and while I watched longingly as a nearby server spent 15 minutes excavating an arctic char salt-baked in a Dead Sea’s worth of sodium, bigger doesn’t mean better. The braised veal shank for two had all the flavor of a standard-edition pot roast.
Still more mystifying was the cheese course, which basically ignores hundreds of great Italian cheeses and instead plays only with two-, four- and six-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano. I was especially disappointed, on one visit, to learn that the ten-course tasting menu merited only a chunk of the two-year-old, rather than a full flight. At $120 per person, not including wine, diners deserve better.
If Del Posto were the creation of some chef fresh from Florence, he’d be crowned a pasta wunderkind. Batali, alas, lives by higher standards. Towards the end of one meal, an elegant man at the next table told me that Del Posto wasn’t bad, but that he planned to stick with Babbo, where he dines every week. I can’t say I blame him.
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