[Pigging by Wilfrid: June 16, 2014]
Drew Nieporent's Myriad restaurant group may be on cruise control when it comes to the Nobu family of restaurants, and Tribeca Grill, still packing in celebrities and celebrity-gawkers after twenty of more years.
It's that little space, that L-shaped room, at 239 West Broadway, which seems to endure as the canvas for Nieporent's experimentation and creativity: David Bouley's (and Harold Moore's) Montrachet; Paul Liebrandt's Corton; and now Markus Glocker's Bâtard--some of the jewels in 239 West Broadway's crown.
This neighborhood is part of the city's restaurant history. It was interesting to look down West Broadway--the McNally brothers' Odeon still doing a good dinner business; the distinctive Bouley/Bouley Bakery space now a Citibank.
Nieporent is remains very engaged with the 239 location (he nearly bowled me over bursting out the door of the restaurant as I entered). And his enthusiasm gets a response from the New York dining crowd. All sorts were present when I visited, from conservatively dressed older diners who surely remembered Montrachet's early days, to casual young things (including a guy in bicycle shorts and a ghastly pink jersey).
The restaurant is clearly a winner, although I could pick finicky little holes in elements of execution.
The room is almost unchanged since the Corton incarnation. Those same glowing white walls, the green-ish banquettes. The ceiling has been dropped, but the wooden floor and the bare tables (cloths have gone) make the room an echo chamber. This is a loud restaurant. Service remains formal (plenty of suited managers and sommeliers), but there are no amuse-bouches, and prices--presently at least--are far short of the three figure entry level which signals a serious Manhattan restaurant these days.
You can order flexibly from the menu, which is divided into unlabeled sections featuring dishes you'd expect to be smaller, dishes you'd expect to be larger, and desserts. Prices are fixed: two courses, $55; three, $65; four, $75. I was tempted to order five, to get to the green pea soup.
As it was, I started with three plump oysters, cooked then cooled. These were paired with crisp, pig-feet croquettes, and bedded on very finely diced pickled vegetables. I know the days when oysters arrived in multiples of half-a-dozen are long gone. This was, however, a dish which vanished quickly, because you could only tie together the cool, smooth-soft bivalve, the hot, crunchy-savory pork, and the acidic garnish, by popping everything into your mouth at once. Separately, the elements were less interesting.
A nice additional touch, though: there's smoke in the dish, which on very close examination indeed turned out to come from tiny lardons mixed in with the veg.
The baked turbot plate was composed of elements which came more readily together. The buttery champagne foam was everywhere, and a good thing too. Roasted pumpkin seeds added a nutty accent. The fish was bedded on flavorful spinach, but there was a bitter disc of puréed greens too. My server claimed it was a different preparation of the spinach, but when I looked again at the menu it said parsley coulis. I believe the menu, but it reminded me unpleasantly wheatgrass (if you like wheatgrass, you'll love it).
This is a personal thing, but for me, the fish was undercooked. I like raw fish, but I'm less a fan of white fish in that glassy, transluscent state between rare and cooked, and the turbot was like that in the center.
If you're with someone who likes red meat, you should clearly consider lamb cooked several ways for two. I wasn't, and in any case I was curious about the rabbit "bouillabaisse." The most obvious components of this dish were rack and loin of rabbit--and a rosy kidney too--sitting with carrots and turnips (I adore turnips) in a mildly tomatoey broth. A crisp crouton dabbed with rouille (slightly spicy) underlined the bouillabaisse reference--which remained, really, a whimsy.
The rabbit was good, though, and I eventually found the leg meat, ground up and filling two fat ravioli at the bottom of the dish. These were described as "saffron" ravioli, and I could have used more saffron in the dish.
Cheeses were well chosen, and served at a nice temperature too. The Bleu d'Auvergne was positively melting, the Bonne Bouche nice and oozy, and the pine-scented Winnemere was treating a spoon like a hammock.
Chef Glocker, who visited my table, and a few others, seems as pleased as Drew with the venture. He's worked with Gordon Ramsay a lot--with Charlie Trotter too--but at Bâtard he already seems set on developing as an auteur. That's a fancy way of saying that the food here is far from the anonymous haute-French cuisine which dominated Montrachet in its latter days. Glocker is Austrian-born, and although this isn't an Austrian restaurant (as Bouley's Danube was), it is a restaurant which will offer chicken schnitzel as a special, with lingonberry jam too.
It's also a restaurant where Sachertorte has just made its debut, and since I was comped a slice I got my five courses after all. It comes with unsweetened sour cream, and--much better--a rum-flavored cream. This is going to be a menu to watch.
Here's the web page.
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