Today's review roundup includes: Geisha, August, Megu, Citadelle, BLT Steak, Gaia, Landmarc.
NYTimes Restaurants Amanda Hesser gives Geisha one star (33 East 61st Street; 212-813-1113):
Once you reach the table, your oasis, matters improve. Somewhere beyond the labyrinth of narrow, claustrophobic rooms is a kitchen in which some very good cooks toil. From them, you can have slivers of fluke folded into a thick creamy sauce of coconut milk, ponzu, scallion and a dash of ginger oil and orange zest. You can have dumplings bathed in a green curry broth rich with kaffir lime. Stuffed inside the dumplings are black tiger shrimp that pop in your mouth. And you can have skate that is poached (so much better than sautéed), then laid in a pool of browned butter infused with ponzu and sake. Chinese broccoli, sautéed and draped over the skate, adds just the right note of bitterness.
What you can't get is the attention of the maître d'hôtel, and what you can't do is think straight, because it is a place designed for sensory overload. My advice is to get in early, say around 6:30 p.m., and enjoy the scene ramping up as you nibble on petits fours. Hope for the deft waitress with the brown hair who works in the back dining room, and hope there isn't a fire so you won't have to push through all the drinkers by the door. Then you'll have an almost very good dining experience. (And if you go at lunch, it's serene.)
The kitchen is run by Michael Vernon, who was sous-chef at Le Bernardin for four years. His former boss, Eric Ripert, is the consulting chef at Geisha, approving Mr. Vernon's menu items. There is a sushi chef as well, Kazuo Yoshida, who worked at Brasserie 360 and Jewel Bako.
. . . Many other dishes work well — so well that I would be tempted on my next visit to skip the sushi and stick to the cooked dishes. The sushi is prepared competently, but the fun lies elsewhere on this menu.
Halibut is sautéed and served with spinach in coconut milk, curry and garlic butter. As you eat it, it collapses into a shrimp sauce, so that it ends up as a rich fish porridge. The lamb chops, dark and caramelized, are served with a buttery taro root purée and tiny rounds of spinach wrapped in Napa cabbage, shaped and cut to resemble maki rolls. The chicken stuffed with mushrooms, a bit salty, is paired with a scattering of young beets, carrots, parsnips and pea shoots, each just cooked and lightly glazed with butter.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Baby mussels; miso consommé with cockles; coconut-marinated fluke; crab salad; Caesar yellowfin tuna salad; poached skate; sautéed halibut; coconut blancmange; yuzu millefeuille.
NYTimes $25 and Under Eric Asimov reviews August (359 Bleecker Street; 212-929-4774):
August's promise is often fulfilled. After a turbulent beginning, its operating partner, Jason Hennings, hired Tony Liu, who had cooked at Babbo, as chef and brought in Harold Moore, a former chef at Montrachet, as a consultant. They have worked out the kinks in August's menu, called regional European — a more inviting term, I suppose, than continental. The small menu is appealing, even as it mixes Alsace with Rome with Belgium. The dishes are classics — no fusion — and are generally prepared with precision and care.
Sea bass crudo ($9), cut into thin strips and tossed with fennel, Ligurian olives and lemon, is a clear, tangy and refreshing appetizer. In a completely different way, an Alsatian tarte flambée ($11) — a large flatbread topped with creamy fromage blanc, crumbled bacon and soft, glistening onions — is equally satisfying and big enough to share. Thin, gnarled tentacles of octopus ($9), grilled perfectly, are paired with chickpeas marinated in vinegar and lemon, which softens them and makes their flavor more nutty. Six good-size shrimp ($11) are served Basque style, a la plancha, in the iron skillet in which they were just grilled; they are dressed only with olive oil and vinegar, which help bring out their shrimpy flavor.
But the kitchen is not yet consistent, and appetizers can misfire, particularly when the restaurant is packed, between 8 and 10 p.m. . .
The odds of success are better with main courses, like a superb skate grenobloise ($17), with lemon and capers in brown butter, a careful preparation that coaxes out all the subtle flavor. Bass à la grecque ($17), with orange sections and olives, is also a small, moist, flavorful triumph. I enjoyed a special one evening of pappardelle in a soulful ragout ($16), with shreds of buttery rabbit meat. Even better, and worth the splurge, is the Alsatian grilled rabbit ($21), a mustard-coated haunch in an oblong skillet, stuffed with bread and plenty of bacon drippings. Also a good value is a large portion of carbonade ($22), the Flemish stew of tender beef, flavored with tangy mustard and abetted by delicious little spaetzle.
BEST DISHES Sea bass crudo; tarte flambée; octopus; shrimp a la plancha; skate; bass; rabbit; carbonade.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo gives Megu two stars (62 Thomas St.; 212-964-7777):
Mammoth Megu is fabulous, fun and full of spectacle. Its menu is rich with marvelous dishes new to New York, like tender Noto Sazae conch. But it's just as full of clunkers and muggings like $25 edamame and spice-breaded asparagus at $6 per spear.
Three teams of chefs deliver "modern Japanese," sushi and charcoal grilled dishes. Many offerings from sushi chef Gen Mizoguchi are flown in from Japan - like luscious, prized hon maguro or blackfin tuna. They're wonderful and masterfully cut, but watch out! A platter of 15 pieces plus a half-dozen small tuna rolls rings in at $120.
Skip the charcoal grill line-up. Three bites and you're out $16 for a skewered morsel of leathery, "kobe-style" beef or $28 for an even smaller brick of tuna.
Move on instead to "Gems" and "Jewels," the menu's heart. Triumphs include crunchy sakura shrimp nestled atop rock shrimp shinjo ($15). The dried shrimp poke out of a hemisphere of minced rock shrimp steamed to an ethereal consistency.
Don't miss salmon toro tartare with salmon roe sauce and wasabi-soy mousse ($23). The waiter used a charcoal log to melt the mousse over the tartare, compounding the salmon-on-salmon pleasure brought to an exclamation point in shards of candy-crisp skin.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews Citadelle (28 Newkirk Avenue, Brooklyn; 718-421-9807):
. . .It's also one of the most outsider-friendly Haitian restaurants in the city, with comfortable, well-spaced tables in a room where the extensive wood trim still gleams with freshly applied polyurethane. The menu, too, is friendly, with selections listed in English as well as Creole. Only a few are typically available at lunch, but the list grows as the day wears on and the cook completes her culinary projects.
On a recent chill afternoon, a pal and I enjoyed an extended lunch that began with a boulets sandwich ($3), which seemed like a respectful emulation of the meatball hero at the pizza joint across the plaza. A kaiser roll had been carefully hollowed out, and inside could be seen a row of meatballs, looking like ball bearings inside the wheel of a roller skate. "These remind me of the meatballs I had in a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich recently," my friend noted, and it was easy to imagine they contained a dash of fish sauce, or at least some Maggi or Worcestershire sauce.
The menu offers only a handful of sandwiches. More profuse are the big feeds, such as the grillot we enjoyed on that first visit. Taking a cue from Jamaican takeouts, this entrée is offered in two sizes, $6.50 and $8. Grillot is one of the highlights of Creole cuisine, pork nuggets that have been marinated in shallots and sour orange, boiled in the marinade, and finally fried in rendered lard, a true French confit. The nuggets provide a vigorous chew and are richly flavored. Alongside comes a perfunctory salad with bottled Italian dressing, a couple of twice-fried plantain Frisbees, and either white rice with a black bean puree, or Haitian "rice and peas"—combining rice, red beans, and coconut milk.
NYMag reviews BLT Steak (106 East 57th Street; 212-752-7470):
. . . But what makes a good steakhouse, of course, is lots of good meat, and there’s plenty of that on the menu at BLT Steak. First, the chef prepares the ground with a barrage of giant popovers—steaming Yorkshire puddings as big as elephant knuckles, and weighted on their tops with crusts of Gruyère cheese. After manhandling one of these, I sampled the steak tartare, which is presented as an appetizer, with a little twirl of thin, crinkly frites on the side. The small patty had a smooth, pasty texture, and tasted the way good steak tartare does, of capers and egg yolk and a mysterious hint of spice. If you’re a steakhouse traditionalist, you can bolster this dish with plates of oysters on the half shell, a robust (though not especially fresh) shrimp cocktail, or a baroque creation called a “Grilled ‘BLT’ with Foie Gras” (at $22, it’s Tourondel’s nod to Daniel Boulud’s famous burger), which consists of apple-smoked bacon, iceberg lettuce, tomato, and butter-smooth slabs of foie gras terrine, squeezed between two pieces of grilled toast.
As for the steak, it’s cut width-wise, in delicate slices (to facilitate fashionable “family-style” sharing), and it comes in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a suitably enormous porterhouse for two (40 ounces for $72) to a thin, surgically sliced flatiron cut of Kobe beef oozing with fatty, rich flavor. In between, there’s a tough but tasty cut of hanger steak, an absurdly tender filet mignon, and a classic twelve-ounce New York strip. It’s charred and salty on the exterior, so that when you take a bite, the result is a pleasurable candylike crunch.
The only unhappy beef dish I encountered at BLT Steak was an oversize Kobe strip-steak special, which oozes a great slick of oil when you press it with your fork. The rack of lamb (double-cut and sealed in a blanket of chopped herbs) was properly tender and lamby, however, and the rib eye (for two) was properly tender and huge.
Citysearch recommends Gaia (98 Avenue B; 212-358-1166):
This is a meyhane, the Turkish version of the universal tapas bar concept, so a seemingly endless parade of small plates serve as a complete meal. Crisp pan-fried anchovies, pastry "cigars" filled with salty cheese, and mussels stuffed with a savory rice mixture titilate. A marvelously rich yogurt crops up in various contexts: as a garlicky dip, dressing spicy wilted spinach, and swathing a perfectly poached egg. For those who prefer a more substantial plate, entrees are available, including a fine grilled lamb loin served with lamb kidney, and a succulent choice of whole grilled or fried fish.
Citysearch recommends Landmarc (179 W Broadway; 212-343-3883):
There's nothing daring about chef Marc Murphy's modern American fare, but his cooking is so spot-on that even the most familiar dishes are remarkably satisfying. Start with warm profiteroles filled with melting goat cheese, a bowl of grassy spring asparagus soup or a large pot of steaming mussels in dijonnaise sauce with excellent fries for dipping. Entrees, from the incredibly tender braised lamb shank to the monkfish with olives, fennel and tomato, are excellent. Steaks, however, are overly-fatty. For dessert, the affordable sampler is the way to go.
