N.Y. State of Restaurant Minds (and Our Meal at the Elm)

The Elm is one of the few restaurants to open this year that seems to be after three stars from The New York Times. The Marrow and Lafayette struck us as concepts that sought the same achievement, but both came up two stars short. We're certain Michael White's team at Costata is chasing three as well, but that review won't be out until (probably) September.

The trend is very much away from fine dining, polished rooms, and chiseled service from suited waiters. It's as if every new restaurant is following what's become the two star template. Pearl & Ash, Uncle Boons, ABC Cocina, Montmartre, Hanjan, and Mighty Quinn's have all opened in the past seven or eight months and have all received two stars. They are fun, casual eateries where reservations and a month spent saving aren't necessary to eat there.

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Two Star Success for ABC Cocina

[benjamin petit for the ny times] dan kluger"For his next trick, Jean-Georges will open a Spanish-inspired, small plates restaurant." These were the words we started tossing around last summer after we caught wind that Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Dan Kluger would be opening a restaurant in the former Pipa space inside the ABC Carpet & Home building. Now that ABC Cocina is open, and has been for three months, Pete Wells has filed a review.

"There’s an alchemy at work at ABC Cocina," he writes, "The kind that can turn the last thing you’d want to order into the first thing you’ll ask for next time around. For me, it was the vegetables with brown rice, which I expected would taste like a tea made by steeping the yellowed pages of the “Moosewood Cookbook” in warm kombucha and straining it through Pigpen’s bandanna. It was, in fact, one of the freshest, cleanest vegetable dishes I’ve tasted all summer."

The success with which Vongerichten and Kluger coax flavors from farm fresh produce is no surprise – their scope of vegetable prowess has been on display at ABC Kitchen since 2010. A few things miss the mark at Cocina, but the restaurant is run by chefs that have a focused and learned approach to cooking – one they have built into a restaurant that New Yorkers are excited to eat at. ABC Cocina is another in the growing canvas of two-star restaurants opening in the city. More on that here. [NYTimes]

Our Inevitably Eroding Food Landscape

evan sung for the ny times"Every taste seems to transport you to another world, while every gesture of the staff convinces you that you live in the privileged center of this one. Daniel, which turned 20 this year, can make you feel that way." So writes Pete Wells at the start of his review this week. It reads with the same magnitude of the Le Bernardin review the critic filed in May last year, but Wells gave that restaurant the same four stars it already had. This week, Daniel has a different fate.

A lot is being said of the way Wells went about the review. "One night I had a reservation 15 minutes apart from a colleague who wasn’t likely to be recognized, as I repeatedly was," the critic explains. "We both ordered the six-course $195 tasting menu. (A three-course prix fixe dinner is $116.) Our meals were virtually identical. Our experiences were not."

But the New York Times restaurant review is irrefutably one of the most relevant pieces of food world commentary. And given the current state of food culture (how long would it take to come up with an accurate count of food-based reality TV shows and/or chefs who have more than one restaurant and/or people that don't take pictures of their food before they eat it), if a restaurant is privy to the fact that the Times critic is dining with them, there is little to be done to dampen the flame his/her mere presence ignites. That's not to say anything what so ever should be done differently for him/her, but seating the critic in the best server's section, folding napkins, refilling water, having the executive chef or proprietor cook the critic's food etc. are actions every restaurant will take should the circumstance arise.

"Daniel built its fame on Mr. Boulud’s exquisite refinements on French peasant food," Wells writes. "Over the years, the refinements have multiplied while the peasant food has been sent away to his many spinoff bistros." Wells gives Daniel three stars. The dagger that took away the coveted fourth is justified, as the critic notes partial treatment, and it suggests success (chefs expanding their empire) comes at a price (their flagship suffers)."

With three stars from Wells, Daniel joins the likes of Carbone, Ichimura at Brushstroke, Atera, The Nomad, Dining Room at the Modern, Kyo Ya, and Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria. It leaves Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Per Se, Eleven Madison Park, and Del Posto as the city's surviving four-star restaurants. [NYTimes]

Hog & Hominy & the Traveling Times Critic

[lance murphy for the times] andrew ticer, left, and michael hudmanFor his review this week, Pete Wells files the third installment of the Critic on the Road column. The column started in early April with Wells' dual review of Oxheart and Underbelly in Houston. San Francisco's Saison was the focus of the second COTR at the end of April and, today, Wells brings us a look at Hog & Hominy in Memphis.

The restaurant is the sophomore effort of chefs and long-time friends Michael Hudman and Andrew Ticer. "The two men bonded in sixth grade while guarding each other on the basketball court," Wells writes. "Talking outside the gym, Mr. Hudman said, each realized for the first time that he was not the only boy in Memphis who spent “crazy Italian Sundays” at his grandmother’s house eating pasta with what each was convinced had to be the world’s best sauce."

Before Hog & Hominy, Hudman and Ticer opened Michael Andrew Italian Kitchen in 2008. That restaurant "is the dutiful and responsible first born," the critic writes. "Hog & Hominy, which they built in another ranch house across the street four years later, is the scrappy younger sibling who stays up later, keeps rowdier company and gets away with things the older brother can’t." Wells enjoys most of the food at Hog & Hominy, adores the pies, and finds that the chef's second efforts have created "a more relevant and original restaurant."

This is to the credit of the chefs' humble approach to food and a synergy they've found between their past and present. "One day Mr. Ticer was talking to the head charcutier for both restaurants, Aaron Winters, about being a kid," Wells writes, "and splitting a hot dog down the middle, and arranging cheese in the crease, and then blasting it in the microwave until it puffed up and bubbled." The result? A beef hot dog on a pretzel bun with yellow mustard, aka what Wells writes is "as good an example as you’ll find of an American restaurant vastly improving something lowbrow without falling into the trap of making it highbrow."

Critic on the Road is a pleasant break from this city's tough lovin', chew-you-up-and-spit-you-out food culture. Wells clearly takes his enthusiam and passion for food with him when he leaves town, but the reviews he writes of these experiences are without the stars and what can turn into the critic's informed, make-you-or-break-you opinions. That could change should Wells write a negative review for COTR, but that doesn't seem to be the agenda. Instead, these reviews can be read as a breath of fresh air – one thousand plus words about the rest of the country; a pocket many of us New Yorkers sometimes forget about, but a chunk of geography full of food people just as passionate and smart as those doing it here. [NYTimes]

Alder Your Perception

After running his Lower East Side atelier on Clinton Street for ten years, Wylie Dufresne took his talents west to Second Avenue, where he opened Alder at the end of March. You might say the restaurant is to WD-50 what The Nomad is to Eleven Madison Park, or Parm is to Torrisi. In each instance, exceptional tasting menus brought notoriety to the chef's names. Riding the success of these early prix-fixe efforts is what afforded them the opportunity to expand. Alder was a long time in the making, but Dufresne's learned, whimsical approach to cooking is no less avant garde or extraordinary in the East Village. In today's Times review, Pete Wells awards the restaurant a gracious two stars.

The critic writes, "He [Wylie Dufresne] and his colleagues at Alder (Jon Bignelli is the executive chef, leading an intensely collaborative kitchen with heavy input from Mr. Dufresne) get into your brain and rewire its pathways until you find yourself looking at one thing and tasting something else." "At Alder," Wells continues, "You will probably not mistake your spouse for a hat, but you may mistake your rye pasta for a sandwich. This is a nice, normal plate of fettuccine, except that it tastes exactly like a Katz’s pastrami on rye with mustard."

The pasta dish exemplifies what Dufresne does best – take something ordinary and serve it in an extraordinary way. At WD-50, Dufresne's eggs benedict, with suveed egg yolks and deep fried hollandaise, became an emblem of the chef's progressive cooking.

Dufresne's cooking may come off as complex, and in many ways is, but the chef has an uncanny ability to incorporate simple, everyday ingredients into his cooking. That deep fried hollandaise was coated in Thomas' English Muffin crumbs before its trip to the frier. At Alder, foie gras and watermelon are served on a Ritz cracker. "Did that bite of foie gras terrine, topped with a shiso leaf and a semicircle of yuzu-infused watermelon, really sit on a Ritz?" Wells asks. "Yes. Yes it did, and it was delightful beyond all reason."

Wells refers to the menu print as "pill bottle tiny," but advises you to "Buy reading glasses if you need to, because Alder, even with a few misfires, is an exciting restaurant." [NYTimes]

Everyone Should Have an Uncle Boons

[yum kai hua pli - benjamin petit for the times]Pete Wells awards a favorable two stars to Uncle Boons this week in a review that touches on more than half the dishes on offer at the new Nolita Thai hot spot. "The owners and chefs, Ann Redding and her husband, Matt Danzer, met while working as cooks at Per Se," informs Wells, "And the marks of Thomas Keller’s ballet academy are far more visible than you’d expect at a place that plays warbly Thai covers of “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Hang On, Sloopy.”

"The electricity kept cutting out, then flicking back on a few minutes later," Wells writes of a visit to Uncle Boons, but it took nothing away from the bright flavors coaxed out of the small kitchen by Redding and Danzer. Having written a particularly food-focused review, we thought we'd give you a break down of each dish the critic mentions. So if you need help deciding what to order when you go to Uncle Boons, and you should go to Uncle Boons, let this be your guide.

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Two A's, Two T's, Two E's, One Star

One of the criteria for a New York Times restaurant review is the place in question has to have been open for three months. Theoretically, this allows the restaurant time to work out kinks and to see what works and what doesn't. Tweaks are generally made more easily at thirty-seaters versus restaurants with 150 seats that are open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And while Lafayette opened on Monday, April 15th, the solitary star from Pete Wells this week was not due to inexperience.

Andrew Carmellini is a master in the kitchen. For proof, one need only venture to Locanda Verde in Tribeca or The Dutch in SoHo, where the chef displays his proficiency in Italian and American cooking, respectively. Having worked under Gary Kunz at Laspanisse and then for Daniel Boulud for six years, Lafayette is a return to Carmellini's French roots. It shows in (most of) the food, but the restaurant falls short in execution and service.

"Nobody seems to have helped the servers pronounce simple French words on the menu. Specials weren’t mentioned until I asked," Wells writes, "And a menu change (trout in place of dorade) wasn’t disclosed until I ordered it."

"As for the food," the critic writes, "There are salads and charcuterie and oysters and shoestring fries. Almost all of it is worthy, but very little seduces you. Lafayette wants you to fall in love with it, but it tries too hard in some ways and not hard enough in others."

Single star reviews are a surprise when they're attached to ambitious restaurants run by extremely talented, respected, and established chefs. But the less than favorable reviews won't keep people out of the restaurants. If anything, they serve as a ruler and leave the staff on the receiving end with sore knuckles. Service and/or food will be improved upon, the pain will subside, and people will continue to wake up hungry. [NYTimes]

Kajitsu Takes Two

[ed lefkowicz for the nytimes] chilled eggplant at kajitsuMasato Nishihara worked at Kajitsu's East Village location for three years. He moved on somewhat recently, Ryota Ueshima took his place, and the restaurant relocated to Murray Hill. The vegetarian multicourse tradition (called kaiseki) remains, it just happens in a softer, more inviting setting. "The new place shimmers," Pete Wells writes in his review of Kajitsu this week.

Kajitsu is structured around shojin ryori, a seasonally-driven form of cooking that traces back to 13th Century Buddhist monks. Because of the Zen Buddhist belief that it is wrong to kill animals, fish included, shojin ryori is a completely vegetarian form of cooking. That aside, the ideals that drive shojin ryori are not unlike those found in the New Nordic movement, one that's given us restaurants like Aska, Acme, and Atera. At the root of each culinary practice is a strict adherence to local, seasonal ingredients.

"To express wonder that Kajitsu’s chef, Ryota Ueshima, can fashion a delicious multicourse meal out of nothing but plants and mushrooms," writes Wells, "is like being astonished when a French baker makes dessert from flour, butter, sugar and eggs."

"You could design a calendar simply by eating at Kajitsu every four weeks and taking pictures," the critic writes, then reveals the fact that Ueshima changes the menu on the first of every month. "Anticipating the season and showing off local ingredients are both old kaiseki traditions," he continues, "but I found that the things I enjoyed least at Kajitsu were Western vegetables that had not come into their own yet." These few missteps aside, Wells enjoys his meals at Kajitsu and awards the restaurant two stars. [NYTimes]