Comfort Food, Upgraded
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With their year-and-a-half-old restaurant packed to the gills, some restaurateurs would be content to let things be for a while. Not Gabriel Stulman and Joey Campanaro, whose tiny West Village place Little Owl is still hard to get into a year and a half after it opened. Customers who sit facing the big plate-glass window at Market Table — the duo’s new venture, situated a few blocks from the first — can see the energetic Mr. Stulman sprinting across Carmine Street in his nightly patrol between the two restaurants.
The gimmick at Market Table, indicated by the name, is that the space is a hybrid restaurant and market. In the back room, people eat and drink. In the front, they can buy ready-to-eat or heat-at-home food from the restaurant’s kitchen, as well as a selection of canned and boxed goods, sauces, salts — and, somewhat unappetizingly, bleach and Ajax — from the shelves that line the room. Mike Price cooks a straightforward American menu along lines that are familiar to anyone who’s been to Little Owl, or indeed to any of the city’s current crop of similar eateries. There’s a breaded calamari starter ($9), crunchy and salty as it is standard. The rings of ordinary squid, though, are interspersed with surprises: paper-thin, deep-fried rounds of lemon, whose chew and tang offer excellent contrast; and fresh whole anchovies, tender miniature fish that brighten the dish. A pair of big, meaty scallops ($13) are capped with bacon and seared in lots of butter — but they can be shoved aside almost rudely to get at the delicious, creamy grits underneath, the secret highlight of the dish.
“Comfort food” is a much-bandied phrase, but when I need real solace, the pillows I plan to cry on will be Mr. Price’s gnocchi ($12). They come in a deeply savory broth with shreds of grated cheese, tart leaves of escarole, and a refreshingly restrained use of beef short rib meat, pulled off the bone and stirred into the warming mix.
For all its big successes, the cooking has shortcomings, too. A salad based on nicely chopped romaine lettuce ($12) in a peppery dressing is mystifyingly complicated with breadsticks and slabs of raw tuna laid on top, as well as a puddle of somewhat musky-tasting hummus. As my dining companion observed, “It’s like a salad of whatever was left over in the fridge.”
There are no main courses with as much appeal as the best of the starters. A massive, thick strip steak (at $29, the priciest of the mains) is juicy but — like its sibling at Little Owl, which is flavored with pancetta and vinegar — over-seasoned to a fault. The meat’s brown crust practically sparkles with salt crystals, and after I finished it, my head hurts for a while. Tomato — and plenty of salt, too — enlivens a seafood stew ($22) full of shrimp, mussels, scallops, and the like, but not enough to set it apart in a city full of similar dishes.
The opposite problem dooms a giant lamb shank ($20), a club-shaped mass of meat and bone that’s braised till tender, but winds up with very little flavor. (It’s not just that the steak numbed my palate — this was on a different night.) A salty Gouda gratin that accompanies the lamb, however, is delicious. It’s too bad the front counter doesn’t sell that alongside the shrink-wrapped, reheatable shanks.
In addition to a lengthy, well-annotated wine list, Market Table offers a list of cocktails made with beer and wine, in the classic stopgap maneuver of a restaurant without a license to serve hard liquor. The list includes the refreshing, surprisingly complex “pisac” ($8), a shandy-esque concoction of Pabst beer, bitters, and sparkling lemonade.
Looking around at other tables is a popular pastime at the restaurant, facilitated by a friendly, casual atmosphere, as well as a furniture arrangement that’s a little close for comfort. When dessert comes, every table seems to get the same thing: an unmistakable fragrant pile of bread pudding ($7), moist and banana-studded, over which the server pours just a little dark, bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup (available in the store for $14 a bottle). Two other desserts, a crumb-topped bowl of apple crumble and a chocolate-marbled cheesecake that the menu credits to dessert guru Maida Heatter, lack subtlety (both $8): The crumble tastes mostly of butter, and the cheesecake is painfully sweet, without the complementary tartness that makes cheesecakes worthwhile.
Market Table (54 Carmine St. at Bedford Street, 212-255-2100)