[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: January 14, 2014]
It seems a lifetime and a world ago, but an opening like Asiate created great buzz at the turn of 2003/2004. A skytop restaurant in a new luxury hotel attached to Lincoln Center; a marble lobby (my leather soles skidded); a lush setting by Tony Chi, with wine-storage towers and steel-covered menus.
The chef, Nori Sugie, came with a sparkling resumé: L'Aubergade, Charlie Trotter, Tetsuya. It was also a harbinger of the super-deluxe restaurant porfolio then planned for Lincoln Center proper.
My dinner there, with someone who was then an obsessive upscale restaurant-goer, was pretty good. We were shocked by Amanda Hesser's one star review in the Times, and although Asiate is still open, it's never glowed so brightly on the NYC food-scene radar again.
We ate:
Gougères with seaweed
Cauliflower and pumpkin velouté/Caesar salad soup, bacon foam
Foie gras and venison terrine, foie gras torchon, vino cotto sauce
Côte de boeuf, oxtail jus, smoked potatoes
Quince tart with walnuts
Champagne to start, then Rotllan Torra 'Amadis', 2000
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