[Pigging by Wilfrid: February 22, 2010]
Marc Shepherd of New York Journal took some stick for publishing an unfavorable review of Colicchio & Sons when it had been open only three weeks.
Well here we are another couple of weeks older and grayer, and the restaurant - in effect - just raised its prices. And here comes another brickbat.
Marc's reasonable defense was that an experienced restaurateur charging full price for his menu must expect to be reviewed. He might, however, have made an even more robust rejoinder, to the effect that Colicchio & Sons is hardly a new restaurant at all. Tom Colicchio has been wrestling to make gastronomic sense of this looming space on Tenth Avenue for almost four years now. We had Crafsteak 1.0, with its overreaching list of steaks from different steers on different diets, dry aged for different lengths of time, and then roasted dry in an oven. Then we had Craftsteak 2.0, with Damon Wise of Colicchio's flagship Craft overseeing the food, and still things didn't go so well.
And now, depending on your perspective, we have either a brand new restaurant. Or we have a third iteration of this venture, with a name change, a menu change, and some tweaking of the decor. Coliccho and Craftsteak's executive chef Shane McBride are still overseeing the operation - which is why, four years in, or three weeks in or five weeks in, Colicchio & Sons should be getting the basics right.
On yet another hand, Colicchio & Sons is an outgrowth of its eponym's return to the kitchen in the Tom's Tuesday Dinner series, a weekly tasting menu he prepared in a side room at Craft. As he has said of the Colicchio & Sons name, "I wanted to signal that this restaurant was a very personal one—in a way that the steakhouse isn't. My wife says that "your children are where your past and your future collide"—and I think that's true. At least, it's true for me." So we must take this as one from the heart. I never made it to a Tuesday dinner - the concept seemed a little arch - but a full-scale restaurant with Colicchio at the helm had some appeal. I reached out to make a reservation - and as I did so, the original carte transformed itself before my eyes into a $78 prix fixe. Which inevitably raised the stakes.
I arrived for a not-too-late second seating to find the huge room packed. The lights were low, but as far as I could tell the ambience had had some testosterone extracted. A wood-burning oven warmed a corner of the room, although it seemed somewhat irrelevant to the main menu (pizzas are served in the "Tap Room" in the front). Service was eager; too eager in fact, as my table was double-teamed throughout the evening, which meant repeatedly telling server 2 that I had already ordered something from server 1. Server 1 was still retrieving my cocktail (the "Highline" - a pleasant confection of prosecco, white rum and lavendar) while server 2 tried to tie down my food order - "Anything catch your eye?" Relax.
Fortunately, the menu reads well. Busy as the place was, I was hardly surprised to find my first choice of entrée - the veal breast with tripe - eighty-sixed, but by the time my server reached the kitchen with my order, my second choice - rabbit? - had gone too. Third up, the lamb loin, and they hadn't yet sold out of it.
The bread for Craftsteak has been retained - addictively salty soft-rolls served in a lawsuit-hot skillet. A small smoked fish amuse did not command my full attention. The first course did - an ambitious amalgam of pasta, pork and cephalopod.
This had been a tough choice. I was tempted by the sea urchin-crab fondue, which recalled the delicate uni-potato stew he put on the menu at Gramercy Tavern years ago. Butter-poached oysters sounded good too, and it was only my so-what attitude to gnocchi that deterred my from ordering them with chestnut, bone marrow and black truffle.
As for the pasta here - agnolotti, or little packets of white bean purée enlivened by a lemony citrus shot. Slices of tender octopus mingled with the pasta in a broth which had a true Spanish paprika glow. Chorizo was incorporated into the dish, but had been demoted to tiny, diced fragments, cooked crisp and lurking at the base of the bowl. A straightforward slice or two would have been preferable. The pork belly was fine, but it's hard for the cut to be revelatory these days. Not a bad start, although I was slightly disheartened by the wine pour.
A Languedoc red, rough enough to tackle the pork fat, but (pictured here untasted) I do think a $13 pour should make it above the bulge in the glass. This was a tasting pour, I'd say, and I am still not sure whether it reflected haste on the part of my server, or restaurant policy.
While the servers couldn't have been nicer, nothing about their general approach reflected the experience and knowledge one finds, for example, at Craft. I noticed nobody checked with me about my cooking preference for the lamb, and it's just as well I like rare meat. The core of the loin was near raw, but my main objection was to the fat being raw too. By all means, retain the layer of fat to keep the meat juicy, but make sure it's consistently crisp and seasoned. One patch of fat had some salt, and I think some paprika flavor, and I suppose it was all supposed to be like that; but most of it was cool, uncooked and blubbery.
As for the merguez sausage mentioned in the description on the menu, I guess it got eighty-sixed. The lentils were fine. And the Nebbiolo I drank with the dish made it a little further up the glass.
Cheese seemed a safe haven at this point (you can spend extra by choosing six cheeses, just as you can add to your check by choosing a foie gras appetizer). It was typical of the evening that a server stopped by to name my cheeses, but ignored the condiments. There was a Blu di Bufala. I had also ordered a creamy cows milk cheese - Oma - made by the Von Trapp family in Vermont, and the Ancient Heritage farm Adelle - another soft cheese. I am not at all sure that's what I got, as one of the cheeses on the plate was decidedly firm and crumbly. I was just thinking that the sweet wine jelly was excellent, when I had one of those spit-it-out moments. A mouthful of cheese had an unexpected and unpleasant crunchy texture...
Flipping the cheese over, yes - I had been given a hard, crunchy, cut end, served moist side up presumably in the hope I wouldn't notice. Wrap the cheeses, guys; just wrap the cheeses.
Not the best finish, then, and objectionable indeed as the last in a series of elementary mishaps in a restaurant run by one of the most experienced and accomplished teams in town. Hence the unforgiving review. Pour the wine with some generosity; don't run out of so many dishes, and make sure the dishes left are complete when they leave the kitchen; and for goodness sake wrap the cheeses.
Otherwise, you see, the problem is that one can get a better dinner at Craftbar, and prices there are steeply lower. And P.S., I was just reminded that there's a $125 tasting menu too.