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]]>This covetable Swedish import is moving its only NYC store just a few doors down on the same Soho street to a larger location. The space will maintain the brand’s minimalist vibe with marble floors, gray walls, white tables and glass display cases. Women can nab sophisticated looks such as front-pleated skirts ($290); structured blouses ($580) with haphazard, geometric seams; and sheer, print collared shirts ($480). Men can spruce up their wardrobe with work-ready trousers ($260) and classic trench coats ($1,200). Of course, you’ll find denim, including Acne’s most popular styles: slim-fit jeans for men ($270) and cropped, relaxed-fit boyfriend styles for women ($270).
Barneys sets the prodigious record for housing the most progressive, conceptual and hard-to-find labels in the city. You’ll find Balenciaga and Commes des Garcons; Lanvin, Azzedine Alaia and Dries van Noten. The ground floor offers an excellent selection of accessories such as Hermes watches, Pucci scarves and an in-store shop from Parisian luggage company Goyard, while the shoe department hosts almost every Manolo Blahnik on over (as well as a range of pairs from Miu Miu, Christian Louboutin and Lanvin).
]]>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.
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