Where To Eat Now: Mid-Winter Edition
Who has two thumbs and loves to eat out? This guy.
As even a cursory glance at my fridge and credit card bill will reveal — one barren; the other intumescent — I eat at a lot of restaurants. Because of the nature of my work, and the media landscape in general, I end up not always having a place to write about where I eat. This is a bummer for everyone. So I’m writing about them.
Best Glistening Prawn (and People) Watching: Upon the Palace
I used to babysit a little girl in Tribeca named Mahong. Now she’s in her 23. Yikes. All this to say that I spent hours at Duane Park in Tribeca, with rich little white kids who spoke with the same heavy Caribbean accents as their mothers. There’s nothing like watching a little Casper greet his friend Amelie with a hearty “Wagwan?” That memory came flooding back to me on a recent evening at Upon the Palace. A vast 7,000 square foot restaurant on the east side of the park — it used to be Salaam Bombay, where I once force fed then UFC champion Cody Garbrandt murgh makhni for GQ— Upon the Palace is a throwback to chic Sichuan institutions like Shun Lee Dynasty and Lo Huey Yen‘s Sichuan on 95th and Broadway. The menu is exhaustive, numbered and includes classics Kung Pao Chicken, Beef with Broccoli, and xiao long bao. Because this is Tribeca, average income of $879,000, the classics are augmented by fancy people shit like foie gras with filet mignon cubes and black truffle lobster fried rice. That’s cool. Gout is cool. Economic inequality is cool. But my favorite item is the Walnut Shrimp, which come glistening in a mayonnaise Grand Marnier sauce, as glossy as the affluent hands that grasp them. The vibe is like a coke-fueled eighties bar mitzvah party, which somehow seems appropriate. The walls are red and everyone was tanned, despite it being the taut witch’s nipple of winter. Sometimes you just want a mondo dinner that nevertheless crackles with nostalgia eaten in a room with people whose bathrooms are probably bigger than your whole apartment. Uponthepalace.com
Best Non-Fussy Tasting Menu: Acru
I understand the argument against tasting menus: a diner should have free choice to construct a meal as he or she chooses. We are not acolytes of the lone genius chef who knows better than us what we should eat. On the other hand not all tasting menus are the product of egotism. Sometimes a tasting menu is simply a logistic necessity. In order to execute food at an extremely high level, while maintaining reasonable food costs, a chef may decide to offer a tasting menu experience. So it is, I think, at Acru, the new Australian fine-dining restaurant by Daniel Garwood. Garwood, who was the sous at Atomix for years — JP and Ella are partners in Acru — presents a taut six courses inspired by his Antipodean upbringing. Look, we’re already in treacherous territory with a tasting menu. It would be fatal if each dish was premised with an elaborate contextualizing of what each course is a riff on, often puns drawing from the chef’s poorly understood culture. It’s pure Aussie amiability and Garwood’s tremendous execution that saves the night. A Carpet Bag steak — a dish originated in South Wales in the 19th century but popular in Australia in the mid-20th — was traditionally a sirloin with an incision cut into it, stuffed with oysters and grilled. Here Garwood updates it, using s a 7-year-old dairy cow — see, we olds have uses yet! — frying the oysters and serving the whole thing in a striking tamarind-lemon juice steak sauce. A scalloped potato, a play on a potato scallop, a corner store staple in Australia, is a fried potato topped with scallops and uni. To end, Garwood nods to a Golden Gaytime, an Aussie-only popsicle. He calls his Golden Haytime, caramel ice cream infused with hay then bruleed. You don’t need to get the reference to recognize its brilliance. Tasting menu $95 Acru.nyc
Best Fussy Tasting Menu: Restaurant Yuu
But sometimes you want the pretension. That’s actually not quite right. Pretension implies a delta in the presentation of the thing and its quality. A certain falsity, or rather, a lack of genuineness. But at Restaurant Yuu, the ostentation is backed up and it doesn’t feel performative. Christ. OK, it is performative but in a good way, like ballet is performative, not like how IG posts are performative. It’s just fancy as fuck and self-serious and that’s fine. Chef Yuu Shimano, a tall handsome man with side-swept bangs, is the Van Halen of the kitchen. The meal begins with a dramatic reveal of the kitchen, hitherto hidden by a curtain. What follows are a dozen courses of impeccably executed fine dining. A mushroom consommé that tastes how tiger’s eye looks. A swirl of homemade soba noodles under a lobe of foie gras and black truffle. At the climax of the meal — course 11 — as Shimano cuts into a perfectly constructed duck pie of 45-day dry aged duck breast, minced duck leg, mushrooms separated into layers and baked in a golden crust, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the opening credits for Chef’s Table, blasts from unseen speakers. It would all be gag me with a spoon except fuck if Shimano doesn’t nail it all. With its attendant foie gras and port reduction sauce, the duck pie is a slice of heaven. It’s an ode to craft and tradition and the pleasures of going for it. Tasting menu $300 Restaurantyuu.com
Best Club Restaurant: Chez Fifi
I just finished Stoner by John Williams. It’s a 1965 campus novel about a not-very-successful English professor at the University of Missouri in the first four decades of the 20th century that was republished by NYRB in 2013. It made me think a lot about marriage — no book since Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose bummed me out more about the matrimonial mis-matches - and about success, or lack of it. Stoner dies at the end. Spoiler. In the waning moments of his life he, still lucid, contemplates how meaningless the measurements of own success had been. For me, it’s a secular version of Atisha’s Nine Contemplations on Death:
Death is inevitable.
Our life span is decreasing continuously.
Death will come, whether or not we are prepared for it.
Human life expectancy is uncertain.
There are many causes of death.
The human body is fragile and vulnerable.
At the time of death, our material resources are not of use to us.
Our loved ones cannot keep us from death.
Our own body cannot help us at the time of our death.
Another powerful contemplation of death is a visit to Chez Fifi, the new French restaurant from David and Joshua Foulquier of Sushi Noz. Housed in a Upper East Side townhouse — the layout is almost identical to Le Veau d’Or, fourteen blocks south — the restaurant is all wood-panelling, starched tablecloths and golden glow. The 40 seats are the hardest to score in New York City so even sitting down is admission into an empyrean of privilege. As for the menu, it is billed as “a love letter to Paris and San Sebastian.” The love is unequally distributed; the offerings are more Parisian than Basque but more comfort than anything else. The whole affair is rather neophobic though there’s no surprise in that. Since those who eat here are winners, why would they want anything new?
As Derek Thompson write in Hit Makers, “The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.” And you’ve seen everything on the menu at Chez Fifi before. There’s the already famous $160 chicken, a rich yellowed bird in a silky foie gras jus, accompanied by chunks of fried potato and a nicely tart salad. I’m a sucker for an omelette at dinner. This one is barely visible under so much shaved black truffle it looks like disturbed blacktop ($38). A dover sole a la plancha ($162) is flown in from Europe daily, from sea to plane to plate. The pleasure here is the confirmation of the status quo. This isn’t meant to be snarky at all. If you’re eating at Chez Fifi the status quo is pretty damn good.
The pleasure is both magnified and muted by sadness with the knowledge that the status quo — this status quo, all statuses quo — will never last. These laughing diners, so comfortable in their skin, so lucky to be here, so august and secure, will soon be corpses as I too will soon be a corpse. No filet mignon shall save us or stave off sickness, old age and death. This is profoundly not my scene and yet I can’t help but feel camaraderie and compassion with the munificent few dining in this room, glowing gold. It might look like dawn but it’s actually dusk, whether we acknowledge it or not. Like everything else at Chez Fifi, the thought is not new but it is nonetheless welcome. ChezFifi.com
Assorted Other Things
Check out this front-page WSJ piece I did about crazy pasta. Kudos to Beth Kracklauer for the hed. “Shock of the Noodle.” Well-played.
My book with David Nayfeld, Dad What’s For Dinner? is now available for pre-order. I’ll write more about this soon. It’s out May 27. You should order it now.
Interested in a kimchi pairing? Read my preview of Raon, the first restaurant in America to have a kimchi pairing. Also, NYM spells kimchi kimchee.
Julia Rothman and I visited the Westminster Dog Show for Town & Country. She drew; I chatted. It was a blast.
Oh and for the love of Christ, pay for this damn thing.