Lavo

Photos by Daniel Krieger for The New York Times

Lavo, on East 58th Street, is Italian by way of a steakhouse; portions are huge.

By SAM SIFTON

Published: November 9, 2010

Lavo

 

 

A New Sifty Fifty

Sam Sifton’s current fifty favorite restaurants have been updated for fall. See the list on The Scoop, The Times’s iPhone guide on what to eat, drink and do in New York.

A chocolate roulade cake, a kind of Lavo log, is probably the best way to finish a meal at the restaurant. Ho ho!

Q. I need you to recommend a restaurant. I’m a 35-year-old professional in Manhattan, and I am looking for a place where I can take my boys from the office to meet this smoking-hot girl I hooked up with at Lily Pond in the Hamptons this summer.

Me and my team, we’re big into that whole meatpacking district thing. We like steak, veal. Maybe Italian food? There’s one dude from Mexico City who eats only fish, which is weird. Maybe this girl would eat fish, too. I don’t know. We’ve been to something like 10 restaurants now, and I think her favorite foods are truffle fries and ketchup. But she drinks Champagne. So maybe bottle service?

Speaking of, this place has to be exclusive. I need a little exclusivity to offset the fact that I’m taking a girl to dinner with six dudes who do math for a living, and not six girls who look just like her. Usually, she likes to eat in a room with women who look like beautiful giraffes and dudes tall enough to look down on them.

Which is, by the way, a message I totally endorse: I’m a former rugby back, 6-foot-3, 220!

Finally, if there’s a guy in the restroom who could hand me a towel after I’m done doing my business in there and washing my hands, maybe give me a mint or something? I would be into that. Old school! I would tip that guy $5 just for being there, you know?

The dining room is crowded tight with customers and staff. You will never be far from the next glass of wine.

A. Broheim, let me set you up! Lavo is a large and almost luxurious new restaurant on East 58th Street, set above a nightclub, also called Lavo. It sits across the street from another nightclub owned by the same consortium, Tao. (You know Tao, Buddhaman. It’s where Kim Kardashian had her 30th birthday party.) The menu is Italian by way of a steakhouse, and if the food isn’t totally awesome, the portions are huge. You’ll love it.

Lavo opened in September. The socialites and reality television personalities Tinsley Mortimer and Kelly Bensimon were both there on the first night and apparently put some kind of spell on the place, because roughly 70 percent of the women who eat at the restaurant look like one or the other of them.

(An exception was the middle-aged woman in a teenager’s dress who smacked her older companion in the face the other night in the front dining room. She looked like Charo’s angry little sister and was immediately taken out to the street by two men in black suits.)

There is a bar in the front of the place that moves from empty to packed at 5:30 p.m. and stays that way until very late in the evening. It serves as a holding station for people waiting for their parties to assemble: men in suits who’ve removed their ties, guys who worked in Brussels and don’t wear ties under their suits but sweaters, or little scarves. There isn’t a soft surface in the place, and the noise is cacophonous: it’s all raging id up there, a bull market in confidence, everyone waiting for the women to show.

Beyond the bar, the room opens up beautifully, in debt to Keith McNally and his vision of what dining rooms in New York City ought to look like (imaginary Europe, with soft light and subway tile and old mirrors). There are tables everywhere, jammed one on top of each other as if to illustrate the concept of 110 percent, with a surprisingly high server-to-patron ratio.

Which means you’ll rarely have trouble getting another $19 glass of Veuve. But it can be tough making your way through the room if you want to go to the restroom and dance with the man on the taps with the towels and mints. (Tell your lady friend not to forget her purse when she heads back there — she’ll need tip money for the matron handing out Now and Laters in that restroom, too.)

The bar, up front, serves as a pen for those awaiting completion of their parties, and as a place to speak loudly without consequence.

The menus open up to almost the width of the table. You’ll want to get rid of these as soon as you can, if only to make room for wine.

Here’s a cheat sheet: No one’s eating baked clams in this scene, but they’re the best appetizer, and you should stand strong for them. Fat littlenecks drenched in butter and garlic, they sit beneath bread crumbs funky with oregano. There is good sliced prosciutto as well, 18-month stuff out of San Daniele, served with a strange cornucopia of fruits and vegetables.

Baked clams are among the restaurant’s best dishes: briny, garlicky, with crunch.

Salads: huge. The mixed greens are the size of a throw pillow and come with pears and a gallon of sherry vinaigrette; the heirloom tomatoes with mozzarella comes with a full head of really cold cheese, like a softball on a plate. (Once there was burrata as a special: $32, and served just as cold.) There is even a retro number, with roasted beets with goat cheese and a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette. These are cold, too. Everything at Lavo that is served cold is served really cold — fridge cold.

You want a meatball? You don’t, but they sell it as a signature item here, Lavo’s version of Nobu’s miso-marinated cod (not really!), a pound of Kobe rolled up into a too-salty ragu, or served with whipped ricotta or a salad. Better to order one of the oblong pizzas, which have a decent crust and which everyone at the table will eat. The lobster one, which unaccountably also arrives with roasted fingerling potatoes, is really not bad.

Neither are the steaks: aged prime beef, grilled on the bone, with a wide selection of classic sauces and infused butters. Even if the evening falls apart, you won’t regret a beefy ribeye with green peppercorn sauce, served beside a cone of russet fries and a plate of sweetly bitter broccoli rabe. This is an expense-account meal, right? All in that will run a player more than $60.

One half of a lobster pizza, adorned with fingerling potatoes: excellent with Champagne.

Other stocks rated buy include: The crisp chicken Dominic, with its dressing of white balsamic and chili flakes, and a wide footprint of veal parmigiano in a spicy marinara sauce. Avoid the rest, especially the gummy pastas, the shirt-cardboard veal Milanese. A roasted Chilean sea bass looks great going by under its sheen of sweet butter, alongside some tomatoes and a roasted portobello, and tastes good besides. But while I hate to say it, especially to you, we just can’t be eating those fish any more. Among other things, Jeremy Piven, they’re too high in mercury.

Desserts, however, are designed with parties exactly like yours in mind. There are the standard gelati and tiramisu, just like a real Italian restaurant, a panna cotta cheesecake, like that. Most groups seem to order a huge Lavo log: an elegant Ho Ho, basically, with a toasted marshmallow sauce. It’s big enough to serve your table.

They ought to be spinning music downstairs by now. Take your girl down and get some vodka on. Your boys as well. Courtney Love made an appearance last week. Cougar town!

Four menus at one table for four renders all conversation impossible. It is best to move them along quickly.

Lavo

FAIR

39 East 58th Street (Madison Avenue), Midtown; (212) 750-5588; lavony.com.

ATMOSPHERE The E-Trade baby gets a Balthazar all his own.

SOUND LEVEL And Duke beats Notre Dame in overtime to win the N.C.A.A. lacrosse title!

RECOMMENDED DISHES Baked clams, prosciutto service, beet salad, steaks, chicken Dominic, veal parmigiano, Lavo log.

WINE LIST Primarily Italian, totally approachable, with prices that start in the mid-$30s and rise steeply from there.

PRICE RANGE Appetizers, $14 to $24; pizza and pasta, $18 to $38; entrees, $26 to $48.

HOURS Daily, 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.

RESERVATIONS Recommended a few weeks in advance.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS A crowded dining room, including a few steps from one level to another in its center, makes passage to the restrooms difficult.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.

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Stopped into the Harrison for dinner; took a table in the bar. Jimmy Bradley, the restaurant’s owner and original chef, had returned to the kitchen after an absence of many years, and replaced the menu developed by Amanda Freitag, who left the restaurant, with his own.

It seemed a good idea to check on his work. Fellow might have lost a step on his game.

Had a shockingly cold and excellent martini. A waiter poured olive oil for the bread service from a distance of about three feet above the table, as if performing a circus trick, and everyone laughed.

The menu was vintage Bradley, modern-American bistro food cooked with a New England accent.

A frisée salad ($11) was excellent, bitter and salty, and it led into some terrific skillet-roasted chicken ($24) with lemon and garlic, with excellent skin and soft, flavorful meat.

And, of course, there was skate ($22). Seared skate wing has been a hallmark of Mr. Bradley’s menus since he opened the Red Cat in Chelsea in 1999. (He served it then with a ruby-red grapefruit emulsion and green olives.)

Now it comes with shaved brussels sprouts, potatoes scented with lemon and thyme and a duck-bacon broth: a soft, crisp and salty-sweet herbaceous

mixture that pairs well with weekday evenings and good friends.

All is well at the Harrison.

355 Greenwich Street (Harrison Street), TriBeCa; (212) 274-9310; theharrison.com.

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Hill Country Chicken

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: November 9, 2010

Opening

MILLESIME Between the original decorative elements (including a mosaic floor and a Tiffany dome) at what had been the upstairs dining room at Country, and the paneling that David Rockwell had installed, Laurent Manrique (left) and his partners did not have to do much beyond new lighting and red banquettes to turn the room into a seafood-centric brasserie. Mr. Manrique, who will commute between New York and his San Francisco restaurants, and his chef de cuisine, Alan Ashkinaze, serve raw bar offerings, mussel dishes and fish either grilled or seared on a plancha with a choice of sauces. They cede only a tiny portion of the menu to beef and poultry. Small plates, not all seafood, are served in the ground floor salon: 92 Madison Avenue (29th Street), (212) 889-7100.

IL LABORATORIO DEL GELATO Jon Snyder has moved his tiny original place a few blocks to a gleaming white industrial space: laboratory indeed. The expanded retail counter offers 48 flavors (of hundreds) at any time, plus coffee. He has closed the original place: 188 Ludlow Street (Houston Street; entrance on Houston Street), (212) 343-9922.

CAFÉ KRISTALL Kurt Gutenbrunner’s serene neutral oasis, with a waterfall chandelier, inside the Swarovski store in SoHo offers a combination of his Austrian classics with dishes like a Caesar salad, smoked salmon sandwich and octopus carpaccio. Dessert indulgences are Sacher tortes and strudel, among other choices. There is also a downstairs lounge. Opens Nov. 15: 70 Mercer Street (Spring Street), (212) 274-1500.

LYON François Latapie and his partner, Penny Bradley, have turned the former Café de Bruxelles into a three-part taste of Lyon, with the chef, Chris Leahy, going heavy on the pork and offal, Bouchon style. There is a bar, a cafe and a dining room, all handsomely dark- wood paneled: 118 Greenwich Avenue (13th Street), (212) 242-5966.

EMPIRE STEAK HOUSE A masculine cordovan setting is just right for meat: 36 West 52nd Street, (212) 582-6900.

BROOKLYN OENOLOGY Alie Shaper has opened the tasting room to sell wines made for it on the North Fork of Long Island with New York State grapes: 209 Wythe Avenue (North Fourth Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 599-1259.

CASELNOVA The food is Italian, with pizzas: 215 Columbia Street (Union Street), Columbia Street Waterfront District, Brooklyn, (718) 522-7500.

Chefs on the Move

NATE APPLEMAN, the San Francisco chef who opened Keith McNally’s Pulino’s Bar & Pizzeria, has left, by mutual consent. Mr. McNally has installed Tony Liu, the chef of his West Village restaurant, Morandi, as the replacement.

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After working for years in his father’s Manhattan food markets, Paul Likitsakos, above, has opened his own Greek prepared-food shop, Anthi’s. Named for his daughter, it’s the size of a doll’s house. Every inch is taken up with trays and platters of specialties, most of them from the store’s compact kitchen. Moussaka and pastitsio, under cloudlike béchamel, are from family recipes. There are also flaky spanakopita; dips like baba ghanouj and tzatziki; thick yogurt with honey or figs; and sweet pastries.

Anthi’s Greek Food, 614A Amsterdam Avenue (90th Street), (212) 787-1007. Most dishes, dips, spreads and salads are $4 to $6 a portion.

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The atmosphere at Peels, on the Lower East Side, is convivial and down home.

PEELS is a new venture from the alley-cat downtown scene makers behind Freemans on the Lower East Side, Taavo Somer and William Tigertt. It sits glossy and white behind thickets of potted green plants on the corner of the Bowery and East Second Street, a two-story restaurant located at the axis of punk and prep, a Vampire Weekend house.

The menu at Peels is vaguely Southern — fried chicken appears, along with shrimp and grits — but the South the restaurant invokes is really the one below Route 27 in Suffolk County, where identity is a matter of bank balance and there is no effective difference between artifice and fact. If you happen to be looking for somewhere to sit beside sleepy-eyed models not eating their oatmeal, or to talk over hamburgers and bourbon about how, if these wave reports are correct, you are definitely going to surf Montauk tomorrow, Peels is your restaurant. Just chain your Dutch bike to a streetlamp outside and stride on in for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The restaurant can even be enjoyable to the rest of us, though you may need to wait awhile for a table. Reservations are accepted only for parties of six or more. (Sleepy-eyed models don’t wait.) Peels was certainly excellent in the earliest days of fall, up there in the crowded second-floor dining room with its farm tables and distressed wood floors, its bare white mansion walls with flowers blooming here and there and the air outside on the Bowery pungent and heavy with exhaust. There was on the menu at the time one of the season’s best appetizers, a Baja salad of cut heirloom tomatoes, avocado and cotija cheese in a mild jalapeño vinaigrette. It was like a kiss that ends in a playful bite.

Eaten with a plate of seared Montauk squid rings with Padrón peppers and cilantro beneath a bright run of lime, some hamburgers and a bottle of extremely pricey, extremely good St. Julien (all still available), it made for a delightful restaurant meal, the sort of night that makes New York better than anywhere.

But to stray from those simple parameters is to court trouble. The magic is fleeting. The menu at Peels is not so stacked with excellence that it can withstand the loss of that salad. And anyway, expensive Bordeaux is a game to play only with friends who have made partner, who offer to treat. You need to be careful at Peels. It’s a dance with Daisy Buchanan, there.

At dinner, appetizers offer the best eating. Andouille corn dogs in a sweet corn batter are a delight, happily greasy beneath a dab of Dijon mustard sauce. (This is restaurant food now?) A salty, rich trout spread is even better, though there aren’t many “market vegetables” to go along with it on the appetizer plate, and the deficit can leave a diner feeling as if he is at a poorly planned housewarming party.

A platter of ham from Burgers’ Smokehouse in Missouri provides a different reaction: a lover’s postcard, sent from the Ozarks. (The Romaine Holiday salad, with buttermilk dressing and bacon, meanwhile, reads more like Dear John.)

The entrees, however, are a mess, and have been cycling in and out of favor, most egregiously as a “crispy pulled pork” dish, gone now, that put the lie to both adjectives. There is that hamburger, served in a good, cheap, spongy bun with a cap of cave-aged cheddar, pickles and thick, excellent French fries. But fried chicken has a dull, monochromatic taste, a crispness free of salt, an interior free of sweet. (“It’s fresh-killed,” reported a waitress, as if to explain.) It comes with boiled corn reminiscent of the Coney Island boardwalk, and a whopping big slice of watermelon that tastes, in contrast, as if fashioned by magic.

Braised lamb shank with mescal and mole, meanwhile, offers slow-cooker shank meat in a tame mole sauce that works best as a bath for its accompanying beans. The mescal may be in there somewhere, a hint of funk, but what is present collapses beneath the weight of the meat, and in the dry chalkiness of some charred onions strewn across the top of the dish.

The restaurant’s steaks are taken off grass-fed cattle, and butchered to the thickness of a Frisbee. This is a grim combination, leading to giant flaps of crust-free, overly chewy meat the flavor of nickels. Most people cut bits off, then push the rest around the plate as if it were a pile of napkins. At $45 for a rib-eye, this is a nasty business.

Breakfast, though, can offer some satisfaction, especially for those who avail themselves of the build-a-biscuit menu option, in which you can layer proteins and fats above the starch: scrambled eggs with sausage and pepper-jack cheese, for instance, tastes on its airy, salty host as if it had risen in a Mississippi dawn. It makes you want to hunt ducks.

Waffles are cloying, too soda-rich to be anything more than a nod to childhood appetites. (Good luck getting an actual child to eat one, even after a good long pour from the beautiful glass log cabin bottles the restaurant uses for maple syrup.) But the oatmeal is tiptop and nutty, and the grits and shrimp, with bits of bacon and a soft, luscious egg, are a treat. (This dish is also available at lunch and dinner.) So, too, is a selection of pastries, sweet breads and muffins.

Best of all, perhaps, is a simple glass jar of thick Greek yogurt and tarry granola, with fruit compote. In stark and welcome contrast to most New York restaurants, Peels serves complimentary sparkling water instead of $12 bottles of the stuff. It is simply gassed-up filtered New York tap water, and in a just world that would explode as a trend. Regardless, it is an ideal accompaniment to that yogurt, at least when alternated with hits of Stumptown coffee at one of the comfortable diner stools on the restaurant’s first floor.

It is something to sit down there reading the paper in the damp musk of an East Village morning as reggae plays and a waitress with chipped nail polish and the effortless beauty of a young woman in a Heaney poem glides around pouring refills. The aesthetic of the room is warm and welcoming, a diner put into a home, perhaps the kitchen at Hyannis Port. It is for this feeling that we go to restaurants.

Peels, on the corner of Bowery and East Second Street, brings Hamptons charm to a neighborhood not generally associated with it.

PEELS

★

325 Bowery (East Second Street),

East Village; (646) 602-7015.

ATMOSPHERE At the corner of Prep and Punk.

SOUND LEVEL Quiet early, boisterous later on.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Granola, build-a-biscuit; corn dogs, trout spread, seared squid, ham platter, hamburger.

WINE LIST Reasonably affordable, heavily domestic.

PRICE RANGE Dinner appetizers,

$8 to $13; entrees, $13 to $50.

HOURS Daily, 7:30 a.m. to midnight.

RESERVATIONS Taken only for parties of six or more.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS The restaurant is on two levels; the downstairs dining 

 room and restrooms are accessible.WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideratioconsideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.

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 388 Fifth Avenue (Sixth Street), Park Slope, Brooklyn; (718) 832-2970, kappasakehouse.com.

In Japan, kappa are mythical water monsters with a taste for cucumbers and human guts. They use flatulence in self-defense. Nevertheless, my friends from Japan say, they are lovable.

Hence the name of this low-key Japanese restaurant, formerly the elegant Sakura Cafe. The owner, Fumiko Akiyama, a native of Tokyo, shifted to a more laid-back vibe after the departure of her sushi chef two years ago. (He returns for special events.)

Posters of Japanese B-movies hang on the wall. The bar stools are upholstered in red and green florals, as if it were forever Christmas. In the backyard, mod plastic chairs perch on sand.

At night, the place is primarily a sake bar, with a limited menu of mostly small plates that conspire to incite thirst. Chilled creamy tofu gets sting from ginger and scallions ($5), shrimp shumai from hot Japanese mustard ($8). Mackerel ($12) and black cod ($12) arrive almost bare of ornament save for salt, and lots of it.

More substantial is lunch, which the restaurant began in September. Lunch sets come with salad and a mug of cloudy miso soup. (Spoons are available.)

Japanese curry ($8.50 at lunch, $10 at dinner) is mild, with the texture of an English stew. Like most Japanese curries, it is made from a prepackaged roux, whose secret recipe might include anything from gouda to cocoa powder. Here it has a faint, finely calibrated sweetness.

Best is the misleadingly named miso risotto ($8 at lunch, $9.50 at dinner), which is essentially congee with oomph. The rich soup — based on a broth of kombu and bonito flakes — comes in a cast-iron pot, roiling with tofu, shiitakes and scraps of egg.

This is deep Japanese home cooking, a dish thought too humble to offer guests. Be grateful it is served here. It is what you want to eat all winter. 

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Lowcountry in Greenwich Village is a nod to the South.

142 West 10th Street (Greenwich Avenue); (212) 255-2330, lowcountrynewyork.com.

In 2007, three Bouley alumni — Kiwon Standen, Didier Palange and César Ramirez — opened Bar Blanc to acclaim. With a sleek interior and inventive fare, it was one of a few restaurants (Perry Street, the Waverly Inn, P*ong, Sheridan Square, half of them now closed) with potential to elevate West Village dining beyond the usual bistro.

Then Mr. Ramirez, the chef, left; the market crashed; and Bar Blanc morphed into Bar Blanc Bistro, the type of place it had hoped to better. Now, it’s peeled off the dinner dress altogether, swapping it for overalls and taking the name Lowcountry.

But despite the name, it hasn’t exactly gone South; those overalls are Chloé, not Carhartt. The service is gracious. The candlelighted room’s nods are discreet: a cupboard of bourbon, pages from Faulkner plastering the restroom. (Vintage LPs stacked along a wall, while charming, aren’t really Southern.)

The chef, Will Sullivan, a sous chef at Bar Blanc Bistro, has just a few dishes specific to the namesake region of coastal Georgia and Carolina: flavorsome if lumpy shrimp and grits ($14); a warm, delicious Jonah crab dip ($14). Some of the food is great, made with small, smart twists. Field greens get a kick from sweet-tart green apple and toasty, salty pepitas ($8). The iceberg wedge’s “deviled egg dressing” is zesty with Tabasco and pickle juice ($10). Cornmeal-crusted catfish gets a remoulade with a chow-chow tang ($19).

The kitchen can confuse “Southern” with “sweet,” so avoid dishes with descriptions including molasses (the half-chicken, $19), brown sugar (flounder, $24) and sweet relish (baby octopus, $14). Beeline instead for the fried chicken biscuit ($15): a Bell and Evans breast in a snappy buttermilk-Dijon casing in a cheddar biscuit, with rich onion jam for argument and smoky country ham gravy to keep the peace.

It’s the kind of compact yet complete — and completely happy — meal on which a couple of restaurateurs, determined to survive yet seasoned by checkered times, could build a franchise.

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RESTAURANT REVIEW | XIAO YE

• Fair 0 4

Xiao Ye

by Sam Sifton – NYTimes

2 friends at Xiao Ye Restaurant, fighting over the last pan fried dumpling!

EIGHT in the evening at Xiao Ye, Eddie Huang’s new restaurant on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, and hip-hop was bouncing off the black-painted walls of the long, narrow dining room. Young men and women ate dumplings and slurped noodles, drank Taiwanese beer. They talked smack about football and architecture, smartphones and music.

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A moist, fairly bland Cheeto-fried chicken (you read that correctly) arrives as sliced breast meat, white beneath its orange coat, with a marmalade dipping sauce that’s been hit with chilies, but not very hard: tiger-hued stunt food for the Princeton homecoming, perhaps. It’s amusing, but perhaps best ordered only by the visibly intoxicated.

Fair 

198B Orchard Street (Houston Street), Lower East Side; (212) 777-7733; xiaoyenyc.com. 

ATMOSPHERE Your boy Eddie’s basement, with Hova on the stereo: Where the food at? 

SOUND LEVEL It can get loud, though not unpleasantly so, provided you like hip-hop. 

RECOMMENDED DISHES Dumplings, pork on rice, zha jiang mien, Hainan chicken, General Tso’s prawns. 

WINE LIST Some wines, some sakes, some cocktails (Hennessy and Four Loko!), but the smartest tack is beer: Taiwan Original. 

PRICE RANGE Appetizers, $6 to $10; larger plates, $9 to $18. 

HOURS Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday, 6 to 11 p.m.; Thursday to Saturday, to 2 a.m. 

RESERVATIONS Yes. 

CREDIT CARDS All major cards. 

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS A crowded, narrow dining room, but navigable. 

WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.