at the sign of The Pink Pig: The Attractions Of Atera

[Pigging by Wilfrid: August 6, 2012]

See, I looked up the name "Atera" when I first heard that the itself ill-named Compose was re-booting last year. My research led me to the Hebrew word for "pray." Good luck, I thought. But I was wrong.

Apparently the name is derived from a Basque word meaning "to go out." Go out? I could go steady with this place. Critical reactions to chef Matthew Lightner's adventurous, there-and-back again cooking have been all over the place, although the restaurant garnered three Times stars.

The bottom line is simple, however. Behind all the neo-Nordic hooey and foraging phooey lies some true gastronomy. Go out and enjoy it.

Although booking a seat and the dining counter is easy (it's on Open Table), initial interactions filled me with foreboding. I had to modify my first reservation, and was threatened with ghastly sanctions (which were then withheld). There was a phone call and another email about allergies, and I was solemnly warned that dinner could take up to three hours. With me, it usually does anyway.

The sanctimonious aura thus generated, the sense of "Specialty of the House" seriousness, is dissipated not immediately upon one's arrival (an unmarked door, a saturnine gatekeeper), but soon after one sits down. Unlike at Momofuku Ko, there's no sober hush around the altar of the kitchen. Diners are chatty, servers are uncommonly warm, sprightly jazz and funk forms the aural backdrop. I could see large hunks of beef in the kitchen, and gorgeous loaves of bread. Momentarily, I regretted the impossibility of ordering a steak sandwich.

But the procession was about to begin.

Dinner consists of about twenty courses, beginning with so-called "snacks," advancing through slightly more substantial plates, and closing with half a dozen desserts. The staff works seamlessly to deliver the food. There's a captain, I suppose, on the chef's side of the counter, together with a bar manager. Several besuited servers, including a sommelier work on the customer's side. One might receive drinks or dishes from any of them, or from one of the chefs; but there's no confusion, not a stumble. This is terrific team work.

The evening street's resemblance to a steam bath led me to the beer list, rather than sparkling wine, to start, and I swallowed a chilled Kölsch. From there I moved to a Muscadet from the magnum, and then a Riesling with the first part of the meal. The Riesling was the best accompaniment to the food.

In his Times review, Pete Wells disliked some of the small bites which form an overture to the meal. I had braced myself accordingly, but faced only one disaster: a malt crisp, flat and black, which was a salt bomb and couldn't be finished. Otherwise, the tidbits were tasty as well as playful. The flax seed cookie, batting lead off, was musty and smoky in a good way, and had the temperature and texture of ice cream (note: I did not photograph everything I was served). A second pair of dark crisps, correctly seasoned, had a sweet smudge of aioli pressed between them.

The salty malt crisp had been served on a rock. Much more pleasant was a fake pickled quail's egg (some fiendish concoction of aioli and milk skin) which was as good as most real pickled eggs I've eaten. It was served in a box of grass. Foie gras was folded with peanut butter and served in the shape of a peanut. The whimsical presentation is, of course, de rigeur.

The ink-infused baguette which forms "shell" of the razor clam could have been a bit less soggy -- but I imagine that's what happens when you infuse bread with ink.

The horseradish parfait, spectacularly messy to eat, is only for those who like horseradish (I do, very much). I could have eaten a dozen of the tiny lobster rolls, served in a sort of meringue roll. I was limited to one.

The bite which served to introduce the main themes of the meal was the sunchoke crisp. If you've eaten potato skins with sour cream, there's nothing unfamiliar about this, although the sunchoke skin was decidedly crunchy. It was distinguished, however, by a sort of rockery of the most exquisitely pretty, even ravishing, wild flowers and herbs. Not for the last time, I wished I had brought a magnifier with me. The photo only hints at their loveliness.

In the case of the sunchoke crisp, the flavor impact of the herbs was muted. It was to grow by strides as dinner progressed.

The use of herbs transformed, in fact, what would otherwise have been a relatively pedestrian serving of lumpfish roe over a sourdough base. The roe was okay, nothing more; the garnishes raised the stakes to "dish of the year" level. This was one of the best things I've eaten in some time.

There was amaranth; there were little green beads which turned out to be fresh coriander seeds; there were even small green beads which were actually fresh peas -- and which exploded with pea flavor; and there was something called yarrow playing a deep, organizing bitter note. This was fabulous.

Lightner -- who seems mainly to supervise the tweezering at the rear of the kitchen -- turned down the volume for the next course: green almonds in almond milk, in a milk-skin wrap. Cautious, soothing.

Then some finely chopped diver scallops, their sweetness balanced by sharply pickled green onions, as well as sesame-studded disks of, I suppose, green tomato ice. With each dish came new species of unheralded herbage. I learned the names from a menu provided at the end of the evening. Oxalis here, fringed rue there, over there some purslane. I am a diner, not a botanist, and I don't give a mission fig whether the herbs are "foraged" or bought from a grocery store: what matters is Lightner's use of them to turn single or dual note dishes into resonant gustatory chords.

He's good at it.

Peeky-toe crab (fresh, good) was layered at the bottom of a deep bowl. A sort of smooth buttermilk "flan" was plastered to the side of the bowl. A server poured a herb infusion from a jug. It all started to float together. Wonderful, and one of only two dishes which bore any resemblance to Wylie Dufresne's cuisine. Dufresne and Lightner might both be modernists, but Dufresne isn't ruled by a herb patch.

The second dish which made me think of WD-50 was the ramen - actually thin noodles of squid (or cuttelfish; they never told me). Where Dufresne manufactures noodles from lobster roe, Lightner simply cuts them, but he serves them in a rich, clear broth, flavored with three little plastic "packets" which dissolve in the heat, one of which, containing caramelized onions, played the bass tone here.

The wine-lists half bottle program is outstanding; surely the best I've seen, with dozens of selections organized by region. After some discussion, I took a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which I correctly surmised would have the floral and mineral notes to match the succeeding dishes. It was a 2009 Maucoil, reasonable at $40 the half.

So far, so good, but the next dish turned my head completely. A Washington morel -- a big, fat one -- stuffed with veal boudin and sea bean, baked and served hot.

Never mind molecular gastronomy, hunting for rare mosses, and stages at Noma. This is gastronomy. Brillat-Savarin would understand; would enjoy. Sea bean or no sea bean.

Another hit, the much discussed "beet ember." Okay, it looks like a lump of coal, but that's not what's important. What's important is the aroma; this is a smoked beet, which is a great idea in itself.

Pairing it with a shellfish cream, vibrant with sea urchin, didn't plunge me into the culinary future; it actually put me on rewind, back to the smoked fish dishes of my youth - Finnan haddies with lots of butter. Interesting, but really comforting too.

The final meat courses brought out a few mis-steps in technique. The single piece of veal sweetbread, punctuating a curl of garlic scape, was glazed with rather ordinary sweet sauce -- hazelnut toffee -- but more importantly, wasn't very well prepared. It had surely been trimmed, but not thoroughly; and it adhered to the current preference for cooking sweetbreads rare. Not a great idea, and in fact for this kind of dish, reverting to the traditional practice of pressing the sweetbread firm before cooking would have been a good idea.

The Four Story beef too was underdone; almost rare. In theory, this should highlight the meat, but it's not to be forgotten that the application of heat causes the production of sugars, which make for nice, toasty flavor tones. They also make the fat edible. It looked a picture, but I'd love to have thrown it on a grill for a couple of minutes. I didn't get much out of the marrow and smoked onion garniture, interleaved with a series of crisps.

Cheese is optional, and seems to add ten bucks to the $150 entrance ticket. This tomme-like contender from Wisconsin is called, I was told, "Square." Square cheese. I was also told it was hard-to-get, and certainly I haven't been able to find out any more about it. I liked it, and also the wild blueberries which formed a simple encouragement.

Then the monstrous regiment of desserts, all enjoyable enough -- except that my teeth began to worry over the number of frozen components.

A wildflower sherbert with rosewater, formed as a white rose. Chilly.

A segment of poached peach with a very convincing praline ice cream stone. Colder.

A marvellous hunk of frozen strawberry shortbread dough. Super-icy, but I loved this, and could have eaten it all night. Wild strawberries were excellent, nestled in a raw milk ice cream. Below zero now.

Then a warm churro to shock my mouth. Sweet, sticky, and a but chewy, with cardamom and cinnamon accents; a Nutella-like hazelnut-chocolate paste on the side.

Then, smack, the temperature went down again, with a final bourbon-ice cream sandwich. Oak somehow featured in this: I am not sure how.

Final, that is, apart from more chocolates and foliage, and offers of coffee, tea and digestifs.

The price of dinner at Atera is steep: $150, and drinks, tax and tip take it way past $200. For a twenty-plus course dinner of high standards, this no longer seems an impossible tag. As I've observed before, it's hard to eat in a very ordinary neighborhood bistro for much less than sixty or seventy dollars these days.

I applaud the comfort, hospitality and ambition of the place, and advise you not to be put off by some of the wilder discourse which surrounds it.

Website here.