Trouble at Home

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The New York Sun

What a great idea for Myriad, the restaurant entrepreneurs behind Nobu and Montrachet, to open a high-end Vietnamese place. At Mai House, chef Michael Huynh works in a semi-open kitchen lined handsomely with fish sauce bottles, while honcho Drew Nieporent patrols the floor. Mr. Huynh’s modern Vietnamese-American dishes, almost identical to what he serves at the East Village’s Bao 111, are distinctive, but Mai House is not a Vietnamese Nobu.

Just around the corner from that estimable new-Japanese landmark, the cavernous newcomer aims considerably lower. Mr. Nieporent, who singlehandedly made TriBeCa a dining destination, seems content these days to act more as a curator than as an innovator. This, his latest restaurant, is essentially a relocation and repackaging of Mr. Huynh’s own venture, with the introduction of some brand-new foibles.

Mr. Nieporent’s restaurants are typically known for a precise control of details, but Mai House’s approach is a bit scattershot. It wasn’t the first restaurant (nor the second) to tell me that I have a two-hour time limit to choke down my food and free up the table for another paying mouth, but it rankles every time. A fleet of charming servers do their best to smooth the interaction with what seems like a sometimes chaotic kitchen, and the attractive dark wood surfaces make for a painfully noisy restaurant — they might have named it Mai Graine.

The cooking ranges in style from elegantly simple combinations of a few great flavors to forcibly upscaled elaborations with little impact. The spring rolls ($10) are an example of the former: narrow, piping hot tubes of juicy pork and crab-meat with crunchy shells. They’re not overstuffed, under-inspired, or victims of the kind of fancy that fills rolls with unwonted fruits and meats. Likewise salt-and-pepper cuttlefish ($11),a plate of batter-fried ringlets that are tastier and moister than squid, with just enough spice, and a kiwi dip to cut it.

But a beef salad ($12) doesn’t have much to offer: Where well-browned beef and lime juice classically abound in flavor, the rare meat and milder pomelo citrus here provide considerably less. In a recurring quirk of showmanship seemingly geared to make dishes sound more special than they are, the menu gives billing to an exotic-sounding ingredient that’s quite ancillary to the dish — in this case rau ram, a sort of Vietnamese cilantro. Similarly, did we need to know that pandan is that faint flavor in the onions under a rib dish, or see all those wild mushrooms itemized?

Main courses are priced in the sub-$25 zone, which is moderate as these things go but hardly competitive with the excellent $5 Vietnamese fare to be found just a few blocks east, on the outskirts of Chinatown. The menu again makes a point of ingredients like shark’s fin and beef cheeks; small wonder many tables order the nice, plain clay-pot chicken ($18). But some of the showpieces, including black cod ($25) with various high-end accessories, are very good. A big filet of the mois-tfleshed fish is steamed till it flakes handsomely under the fork, and shares a bowl with flavorful but tough mushroom stalks, chewy slices of sea cucumber, and crisped bits of ginger. Shark’s fin consommé is poured over the top. Considering that shark’s fin is a flavorless ingredient used only for its texture, and that its distinctive texture was undetectable in the consommé, one suspects it was added to the dish just for its name — a strategy that backfired somewhat at the table next to mine, where four would-be diners made an educated comment about the black market in fins of endangered sharks and left without ordering.

Short ribs of beef, a tough but flavorful cut of meat, are braised at every other restaurant in town, but Mai House slices them thinly crosswise and serves them browned, spiced, and sizzling on a platter ($22), to be eaten off the bone like spare ribs. As you might anticipate, they take considerable chewing. Laksa, a staple of Singaporean cuisine, puts in a very welcome cameo here ($23): The coconut-based soup is hot and heady with spice, filled with puffy noodles and one giant whole prawn. It certainly overshadows the Vietnamese noodle soup bun bo hue ($16), whose noodles are limp and bland, meat authentically fatty and coarse, and broth spiceless.

One unquestionable advantage of the fine-dining approach to Vietnamese is a great improvement in the desserts (all $8). A thick panna cotta is seasoned along savory lines with nutty, subtle pandan leaf, and topped with a firm curry-flavored gelatin: an unlikely but successful treat. Banana cake smothered with tapioca excels as well. Cocktails are the rage here, spiced-up “Maihattans” and “Maijitos,” but a couple of dozen varied bottles of wine, from fine Burgundies to affordable New Worlders, provide a choice.

Elevation into the Myriad pantheon is a good thing for Mr. Huynh but hardly a triumph for us diners. Bigger is not necessarily better.

Mai House (186 Franklin St., between Hudson and Greenwich streets, 212-431-0606).


The New York Sun

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