The Year in Reviews

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The New York Sun

New York’s restaurant scene has always been volatile, but the rate of change seems to be accelerating. In 2007, I wrote about 50-plus new restaurants, of which a dozen have already, before the year is out, closed or changed chefs. I kicked off the year at Gordon Ramsay at the London, the New York palace of the eponymous Scottish celebrity chef, where I was fairly unimpressed. In March, Mr. Ramsay dismissed the restaurant’s chef, Neil Ferguson, who is now at the helm of Allen & Delancey.

Mr. Ramsay wasn’t the only reality television star to make a mark. “Top Chef,” the Bravo show in which cooking contestants vie for honors from judges including Tom Colicchio of the Craft empire (Craft, Craftbar, Craftsteak, ‘Wichcraft), has spawned its share of chefs. The winner of the show’s first season, Harold Dieterle, opened Perilla, a West Village restaurant that serves an accomplished, if narrow, menu to a crowd of television fans. Dave Martin, also from the first season, opened Crave On 42nd, a casual American bistro — not to be confused with Crave Ceviche Bar, where practically everything on the menu is cured in citrus marinades, to surprisingly good effect. Chef Sam Talbot, another “Top Chef” contestant, was slated to cook at beer-centric Spitzer’s Corner, but that wound up not coming to fruition.

It was a rough year for experimental cookery. I enjoyed Varietal, a sleek, wine-focused restaurant with artistic leanings and avant-garde touches — food served in gel capsules and shiitake mushrooms for dessert — that opened in December 2006. But the offbeat restaurant couldn’t find its following; it went through a couple of chefs and closed midyear, a victim of too many different ideas crammed into one space. After years of hype, a former pastry chef at WD-50, Sam Mason, opened his own boîte, Tailor. But the restaurant, which uncomfortably straddles the sweet and savory realms, doesn’t encourage repeat visits, except to its stylish bar.

Instead of experimentation, tradition was trendy in 2007. As at many new establishments, Tailor’s yellow-lit, woody decor evokes the early part of the 20th century, when light bulbs were new and cocktails were stirred with care. Indeed, “pre-Prohibition cocktails” has become a hackneyed phrase denoting the detail-oriented mixing of recherché drinks. They can also be found at 2007 newcomers Belcourt, Death & Co., and PDT, among others.

E.U. looks a lot like Tailor, with the same carefully rough-hewn hearkening back, but its lubricant of choice is not cocktails but beer, because E.U. is another trendy phenomenon: a gastropub. In England, the gastropub concept is a simple upgrading of the food in an everyday pub setting; in New York, real pubs are thinner on the ground, so the setting has to be fabricated from scratch. At E.U., Alchemy, Inn LW12, and others, it starts to look a little boring, although the food is always inspired.

That’s not to be confused with “market-inspired,” which, as it continues to be a buzzword, gradually leaks meaning. Borough Food and Drink, which is inspired not by the fertile glories of the greenmarket but seemingly by a dusty corner grocery, sells a variety of goods at its front counter; so does Market Table. So does BLT Market, the latest in Laurent Tourondel’s thriving BLT franchise. I didn’t realize there had been a demand for restaurants that make you feel like you’re eating in a store, but evidently more than a couple of the city’s restaurateurs did. In recent years we’ve seen restaurants that looked like bedrooms, factories, space stations, and innumerable rustic farmhouses; what’s next is anyone’s guess.

For which of the restaurants that opened in 2007 do I have particularly high hopes? Klee Brasserie, for its artful, casual pan-European comfort food, and 15 East, a Japanese restaurant that really explores the possibilities inherent in fresh fish. I tried both the upscale and downscale new Greek emporia of Michael Psilakis, but Kefi, the downscale one, is the one I’d return to. Belcourt gets just about everything right, in a quiet, competent way. Toloache comes as close as I’ve seen this year to the fine Mexican cooking in which the city is chronically lacking.

It’s a tremendously competitive field, so what we can expect in 2008 is more restaurants going to elaborate lengths to set themselves apart from their competition. That means new heights of silliness and new clichés, doubtless a new smattering of failures, as well as, one always hopes, a handful of successes.


The New York Sun

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