[Pigging by Wilfrid: December 14, 2009]
Welcome to Planet Ace. Or the Ace Hotel, I should say, on 29th Street, a venue where experience is rated above hospitality, if I read correctly.
The Breslin restaurant within the Ace, named not for the feisty author and columnist, but after the hotel's original name, manages some hospitality, I'm glad to say, along with some worthwhile food.
And it does so, I have to say, in the face of some odds. Enter the Ace on any busy evening, and you will find what the hotel calls "people who make cities interesting" in their teeming hordes. These people turn that enviable trick by sprawling on couches in a dimly lit lobby large enough for a hotel in Minnesota, clutching beer bottles by the neck, while fiddling with their iGadgets, adjusting their pork-pie hats, and shamelessly sporting facial hair stylings which would not have disgraced a nineteenth century glee club. Fascinating folk they are, and it may be as well to have them all gathered in one spot, but of course they do tend to stray into the crowded bar of the restaurant, just off the lobby, where they rub narrow shoulders - at this time of year - with desperately drunk women dressed as elves and the steel-haired European playboys buying them cocktails.
Oh yes, I felt quite at home. As for the interior evoking a hunting lodge, as the pre-opening PR claimed, it evokes more a tastefully distressed version of an old pub, all wood and rust. Fittingly for a Spotted Pig sibling, tables are impossibly hard to come by, but patience rewarded me twice with a window-seat in the bar-room, and an even more generous dose of patience rewarded me with service (the servers are charming when they can get through the mob and make contact with you). So is the food worth all the nonsense? (A seat at the window in the bar, by the way, affords a diverting view. The spectacular white building opposite is Gilsey House (1869), an elabprately decorated slice of faux Paris, cast iron in Second Empire baroque style, and originally a hotel when the district was part of the so-called Tenderloin. Above it, the Empire State Building looms colorfully.)
A board of house-made terrines fought itself to an honorable draw. The rough-hewn pork and headcheese were both good, firm and well-seasoned, and a match for the absurdly overpraised slabs of pâté at Bar Boulud uptown. The headcheese has since made an appearance among the appetizers, fried no less, but it had all been eaten up the time I asked about it. The rabbit terrine was tasty enough too, but the guinea-hen with morels, which sounded especially toothsome, turned out bitter, suggesting the liver had gotten into the mix in an unpleasant way. The morels were scarce, but I'd expected that. No complaints about the ample condiments, and London-born I am nostalgic for the taste of piccalilli (a sort of yellow, mustardy chutney, also served with the house-smoked ham).
Speaking of nostalgia, one British delicacy I always have room for is the scotch egg. Standardly, this is a chicken's egg, boiled, coated in herbed and peppery sausage meat, breadcrumbed and deep fried. Served warm or cold, the egg is usually solid at the point of delivery. Not here - the kitchen, directed by the Spotted Pig's British discovery April Bloomfield - performs the magic of preserving a liquid yolk within the crisp, meaty shell. Clever, and good eating too.
On another occasion I tried the skate and potato terrine, much recommended by some friends. It is served cool, the white fish layered between soft slices of spud, a smudge of aioli on the side. I may have been unlucky, but my slice, well-flavored enough, had chewy fish. Texture is important here. The dish overall was decidedly capery - there may have been no caper berries present, but with the salad and dressing it all had a pungent, vinegary air to it - strands of pickled onion crowned the dish. This is a kitchen which likes vinegar.
I discovered this too in the dressing for the beef shin. Black cabbage was involved in the dish apparently - it was so dark that it was hard to make out - but what my taste-buds mainly found in the tangled foliage atop the meat was flat leaf parsley - lots of it, well-vinegared too. I happen to like parsley. Perhaps it is the garniture of the season, because it was generously heaped over meat dishes at Maialino too. This was just somewhat excessive, and too well-spiked with vinegary dressing. I am only glad I didn't order the vinegard poussin, described as such on the menu. I pucker at the thought of it.
Generally the execution of the shin dish was wanting. Beef shin, the menu says, rather than veal shin - osso bucco - and beef shin is a much cheaper cut which requires careful braising. In the dark, it could have been beef or veal for all I knew, as it had been cooked to extreme dryness and lacked savor. There was a layer of polenta beneath. That dish encouraged me to conclude that the Breslin was bound to be more style than substance, serving any old trendy-sounding animal part to a crowd mainly there to stare at each other and drink from the fancy beer list (wines are okay, but there aren't many). The pig's foot changed my mind.
This mighty construction, simply called a stuffed pig's foot on the menu, and offered for two people at $36, turned out to be a wildly indulgent marriage of two dishes from continental Europe (nothing British about this concept). The French like to braise a trotter, then smear it with mustard, breadcrumb it, and fry it crisp - a style known as Sainte-Menehould after a small Lorraine town which specialises in the titbit. The Italian, on the other hand, will seize most of the porker's limb, and leaving the foot in place, stuff the hollowed out shin with much the same spiced pork mixture as fills the mighty cotechino sausage. When you find a cotechino with ambulatory extremity still attached - and it used to be available in some old-school Italian food stores - you may call it zampone.
Call it folly or genius, but the Breslin has taken zampone and fried it. And a gut-buster it is.
In fact, not only is it excellent, but its size is such that three or four people could easily share it with a few vegetable sides, making it good value too. It comes with a warm salad of sprout leaves, with I liked very much and thought appropriately austere. I think it might be suicidal to eat the menu's "thrice-cooked" potatoes with this.
One possible improvement would be to offer a finger bowl with a slice of lemon - dealing with the trotter is a sticky business. Hardly surprising, I think, that I found no room for sticky pudding or "Eton Mess," a sort of knocked about trifle.
This is a restaurant difficult, in a number of ways, to navigate. You may not warm to the crowd, you may be deterred by the improbability of securing a table. You may even consider the menu limited - if the occasion isn't right for the pig's foot (for two) or pork belly (for two), the meat eater is left with the beef shin - not recommended - the vinegared spring chicken or a lamb burger. Best, probably, to compose a meal from the smaller plates. Rough edges, then, but somehow the pig's foot epiphany made it all worthwhile.
A stark little website can be found here.
