Secondary Market

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The New York Sun

Barcelona’s bountiful Boqueria marketplace is the gastronomic heart of the city. Its stalls vend every sort of food imaginable, and the bars and kiosks that surround it serve a cuisine of skewers and fritters that could hardly be more fresh or more casual. Naming a restaurant after another city’s world-class gastronomic destination is a brazen maneuver, but the proprietors of a new restaurant in Chelsea have done just that.

A fast-moving parade of excellent chefs has passed through the kitchen door of Suba, Yann de Rochefort’s Lower East Side modern-Spanish spot. At Boqueria, Mr. de Rochefort has partnered with chef Seamus Mullen, who is fresh from a stint in Spain, to replicate the Barcelona marketplace’s winning formula in New York. It’s a noble attempt, at least, and the sleek new restaurant is crowded every night despite certain shortcomings in the execution.

At some tapas restaurants, it’s easy to make a meal of a few small plates. At Boqueria it’s an uphill battle to fill your belly with minuscule $6 bites, while the interminable wait between dishes makes you even hungrier. Fortunately the menu, written in Catalan, Basque, and Spanish, offers plates in medium, large, and extra-large as well.

The tapas cover familiar ground: olives, Spanish tortilla, Serrano ham. Padrón peppers, quick-roasted until their skins crisp, and served hot with a crunch of coarse salt, might be the best for their simplicity. Plump skewered dates pull off the trick of tasting deliciously like dates despite being stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in fatty bacon. But another skewer, of anchovies, pickled little peppers, and olives, tastes primarily of salt. Fried patatas bravas — “feisty potatoes,” the classic tapa with the spicy sauce — are far from feisty. Their tepid temperature is standard, and fine, but the potato chunks are soggy, not crisp, and the aioli adds nothing but a festive orange-pink color. Deep-frying is usually a quick route to savor, but the brown-fried croquettes could have been pre-frozen. Their crusts enclose three fillings in a creamy suspension — mushrooms, chicken, and ham — but of the three only the ham has flavor.

“Media raciones,” medium plates, cost $11 each. Choices include a good terrine of boar liver that’s rich, savory, and so coarse and firm it has to be heaped, not spread, on the stingy couple of toasts that come on the plate, along with a big scoop of sweet caramelized onion. A good fresh egg, to which poaching in oil gives a nutty taste, is laid on top of a helping of pisto, a ratatouille-like, oniony medley of cooked tomato, peppers, and asparagus. The yolk runs down pleasingly amid the vegetables. Like the terrine, this dish would benefit from a little bread on the side, but none is served at the beginning of the meal and, even early on a weeknight — at least when I was there — the servers are too busy pushing through standing-room-only crowds to deal with special little requests like that.

Full-sized raciones, which run $19, include a hefty lamb shank with a sweet, dark glaze that flatters the tender but slightly dry meat. An accompanying yogurt sauce on the side perks it up, but sadly the kitchen could only spare a teaspoonful or so to season my whole shank. Suquet, a Catalan seafood casserole, incorporates a dense monkfish filet as well as a couple of clams and fingerling potatoes in a shallow tomatoey broth. It’s tasty, especially the fish, but too meager to be satisfying.

The largest satisfiers come in the para compartir category: for sharing. Here one finds classic paella, larded with chicken, shrimp, and mussels and served in a flat pan, as well as a variant dyed sepia with cuttlefish ink, and featuring both that mollusk and braised rabbit (each $29). The rabbit meat is so soft it’s almost undetectable amidst the rice, but the pale cuttlefish provides good chewy contrast to the rice, and especially to the crisp bits crusted onto the bottom of the pan.

Desserts ($7) are a high point: A peach is fried in batter, then sliced and served, under the misleading name “beignets,” with honey-flavored ice cream. Richer and even better is tocinillo de cielo, a regional custard in which sugared egg yolks are cooked just to the dark, translucent phase, before they become fluffy and opaque. The thick golden mass is set off by a light bath of melon ice. Sixty Spanish wines, with more than a dozen poured by the glass, wash down the food nicely. They’re arranged by region, so adventurers can compare four txakolis from the Basque country, say, or a handful of Riojas.

Most of the dishes are fine, but none are scintillating, and the hardships of the meal — crowds, waits, disproportionate prices — make the restaurant a questionably worthwhile destination. If the comparison to greater things were drawn less explicitly, I could take Boqueria on face value, as a showy tapas bar.But I’d rather put the money toward a plane ticket and see the real thing.

Boqueria (53 W. 19th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-255-4160).


The New York Sun

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