Core Competency
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One sign that the young, energetic New York cocktail lounge is a firmly established genre is that it has evolved its own cuisine. Call it lounge cuisine: a light, modern mélange of clever finger foods, sauces in vibrant colors and flavors, and chic technique. This food’s mission is to be exciting and glossy enough to sustain a fun mood, but never to be the main attraction.
Core 191 is an oddity: a proper restaurant where lounge cuisine occupies center stage. It has yet to find its groove; stumble in looking for a party and you’ll be let down. The colorful Orchard Street space that was previously Heirloom has been largely drained of character, filled with staid taupe-on-beige rows of tables, quietly upbeat music, and efficient, impersonal servers. The cooking, not the scene, is evidently the main draw, but only some of it lives up to that responsibility. One difficulty of transposing lounge food to a restaurant is that the quick-bite cuisine isn’t really designed with meals in mind: Here, you can order à la carte, or pay $48 for a six-course tasting menu that’s quite filling, if you don’t mind fixing yourself a sandwich at home afterward. But the 20 small plates that Stephan Boissel cooks at Core are dashing little compositions, as vibrant as they are small. If you don’t like one of them, don’t worry — another will be along soon.
No small-plates menu is complete without fried snacks, and the category is well represented here. Calamari rings ($6) have a mildly spicy aioli dip; three breaded shrimps’ deeply reduced orange sauce is much better ($11). Big, salty Sicilian olives ($5), stuffed with garlicky chorizo and fried in breadcrumbs, add up to a little less than the sum of their parts: a plain bowl of non-fried olives would have more appeal.
Mr. Boissel, who worked with avant garde pioneer Paul Liebrandt at Gilt, brings a similar sensibility of experimentation for its own sake to a number of the dishes. Strips of raw tuna ($10) are dotted with confited orange peel and accompanied by fluffy “olive oil sorbet” on a praline wafer. The combination might be brilliant, or cacophonous, or anything really, but all the morsels are so small it’s hard to really get a sense of how they taste, together or separately, before the dish is gone. The thin beet chips that stand in for true beets in a goat cheese salad ($8) have a similar tendency to fall between the taste buds.
The best dishes are the most substantial, meaty ones, which makes me suspect that Mr. Boissel’s art would do better in a more traditional setting. Slices of lamb ($10), whose texture is tender but not pusillanimous, get a superlative Mediterranean treatment, doused with a savory sauce of fresh marjoram simply chopped in olive oil. Leafy shreds of roasted artichoke add depth and crunch. Duck ($11) has a Moroccan tingle, with rich yogurt to offset the spice, and a layer of sweet wine-poached pears.
The pistachio foam enfolding a peach-colored, crunchy-skinned lozenge of salmon-like arctic char ($9) is another Gilty pleasure. It melts away to uncover delightful, tender little apple dumplings that set off the fish very tastily indeed. Along similar lines, a pair of scallops ($9) get a savory, buttery kick from a froth of hazelnut and sherry vinegar.
The chef also capitalizes smartly on the neighborhood’s bounty, offering pastrami-cured salmon from Russ and Daughters ($9), which he complements with (again untastably) paper-thin slices of toast and a luscious caviar-strewn warm potato salad. A $16 platter of five American farmstead cheeses from nearby Saxelby Cheesemongers is the priciest and largest menu option, and a great final satisfier if the meal up to that point has been skimpy.
The best of the desserts (all $6) is a simple pot de crème that’s big and deeply chocolatey, without unnecessary elaboration. A cold, creamy passion fruit gratin offers refreshing tartness for diners who want something lighter.
Tall, creative cocktails are a must for this sort of cuisine, even when they’re the most colorful thing in the place. Sake, lemon vodka, and pineapple juice make a Jizaketini; a sugar-bomb called Apples and Oranges contains orange juice, orange vodka, apple schnapps, and Grand Marnier. Twenty wines in the $40 range offer more variety than depth, with bottles from Greece, South Africa, Austria, and Chile dotted among the rest of the wine-producing world. A featured bottle of Core 163, a Rhone-style California red blend ($56), provides delicious companionship to the complications of the food, even if it only makes the list by virtue of its name.
Core 191 straddles two worlds, with the numerical name of a lounge, enough culinary gravitas to be a restaurant, but the certainty of neither. I’d be heartened to see it lean in the restaurant direction, offering bigger portions of those great plates. But it could just as easily crank up the music, relax the mood, and clarify that it’s not a food destination after all.
Core 191, 191 Orchard St., between Houston and Stanton streets, 212-228-9888.