[Pigging by Wilfrid: October 26, 2007]
Will you look at this? Food for grown-ups. Pristine simplicity
And a piece of fish as good as any you might eat between the Bronx and the Battery.
So far, and based on two dinners, well done chef Matt Hamilton. Mehenni Zebentout too, owner of Belcourt and Nomad - just across the street - who casts an all-seeing eye over the busy dining room and the eager, if stretched, service. I was an acknowledged fan of Uovo, Matt's ambitious attempt to bring interesting food to Avenue B.
Uovo had the virtues of an above average neighborhood restaurant: inventive seasonal menu, regularly changing specials, affordable wines. Occasionally, people acting on my recommendation would travel across the city on a weekend night, and find it disappointing. I had to explain that it wasn't a destination, as such. The kitchen could get over-strained. I walked in and snagged the last table one busy Saturday prime time, and indeed, dishes I'd relished on quiet nights were under-prepared and imprecise.
Nevertheless, when Uovo closed, I left me with a quiet craving for the fried duck livers, the sunchokes, the rabbit pie, the bloody hanger steak, the sweetbread poppers. Happily for me, after a brief spell at Pair of 8's on the UWS, Hamilton is back on my radar with this already hellishly busy brasserie on the corner of Second Avenue and 4th Street. I snuck in soon after opening, before the place was slammed, but also made a point of checking it out in the middle of the busiest night of the week. Really, to see how the kitchen coped with every table full. They passed the test.
There was not an inch of space in the doorway, let alone at a table, mid-evening Saturday, but I managed to convey a cellphone number, and was summoned from watching the Red Sox overachieve at a nearby bar precisely thirty-five minutes later, as promised. The Belcourt octopus can go tentacle to tentacle with any in town, tender, gently charred, and oozing just enough of that distinctive octogrease. The menu says oil-poached, but surely it's crisped on the grill before serving? The salsify and house-pickled carrots are a nice balance.
Just as an aside, are New York chefs getting better at preparing octopus, or does the tenderness one expects and now regularly finds have more to do with big suppliers like Vince Cutrone beating the diddley out of the creatures with mechanical tenderizing devices? Discuss.
One reservation about the current Belcourt approach is that some dishes have ingredients which aren't integral to the concept. Here it's a solitary chip, strongly tapenade-flavored, on the side: nothing wrong with it, but perhaps superfluous.
On another occasion, I started with the ravioli. I am a sucker, this time of year, for any pasta dish which plays sweetly with pumpkins or chestnuts or squash. Hamilton stuffs his pockets with apple and butternut squash and dresses them in a brown butter sauce with sage. A few mushrooms are the garnish. The apple filling is certainly sweet, but I'd describe this as a welcoming dish.
Where Uovo appetized diners with crumbed sweetbread poppers, Belcourt dips them in lemon and garlic, adds some char-marks, and serves them with crisp flatbread. A straightforward dish, except...grapes? Plain grapes, as far as I could tell. They don't impede enjoyment, but again, I wasn't sure what they were for.
Looking around the jammed room, I liked the mirrors, I liked the tiled floor. I couldn't hear myself speak, and the two-tops are the size of large postage stamps; but complaining about this is like complaining about the weather. Service, under pressure, hung on by its fingernails. Just when you thought the bread wasn't coming, that no-one would carry the glass of wine from the bar to your table, that there would be no silverware with the entrée...it somehow happens. The staff didn't get much of a running-in period before the crowds hit.
I can't praise the next dish highly enough. Branzino baked in a sea salt crust, and flawed only by the absence of its head, which I'm sure would have been tasty too. The simplicity of presentation, over some wilted escarole, is laudable. The cooking was exact, the flesh sweet and precisely seasoned, and I don't know how it could have been improved.
Hanger steak is on the menu, as is the ex-Uovo lamb burger, but the first meat entrée I encountered was de rigeur pork belly, partnered by a tasty, coarse-grind, house-made pork sausage. The accompanying house sauerkraut and spaetzle made sense; the pickled beets tasted like a commercial product - it's a pity if they're housemade, because they could be less harsh and vinegary. Nothing against Belcourt, but I am taking a self-imposed sabbatical from praising pork belly. The fad is getting out of hand.
Next from the meats, a hunk of preserved rabbit with a splash of chestnut sauce, served over soft polenta. This is all good (a pinch more salt, maybe), but I was put off at first by the moat of olive oil. My mistake; the oil's good, and the components work together. Chef Matt excels with vegetable sides, and the sunchokes, baked crisp in their skins, and drizzled with hazelnut butter, were good as ever.
Three cheeses are usually available. The Mizithra cheese and honey tart I ordered out of curiosity and ignorance, turned out to be a sort of loose cheese cake. I have since learnt that this is an unpasteurised Greek goat cheese, claimed, not without basis, to resemble Ricotta.
There are some signature cocktails, naturally, and a fairly limited wine-list. So far, I've been drinking unremarkable Cahors and Madiran by the glass. This keeps cost down, but in any case, dinner for two with four drinks and tax scarcely tops sixty dollars a head.
I confess that when I saw Belcourt's location and look, I worried that Hamilton's characteristic dishes might be sidelined by helpings of paté maison, croque monsieur, and frisée aux lardons, to appeal to a passing post-theater and pre-bar crowd not amenable to sunchokes and lapin confit. It's pleasing to note that Belcourt is a smash hit without compromise, and it's hard to see any reason it won't stay that way.
The link on Menu Pages notwithstanding, Belcourt appears to have no web presence as yet. This article can be discussed at MouthfulsFood.
