Today's review roundup includes: Zona Rosa, Cafécito, Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar, Mancora, Mas.
NYTimes Restaurants Amanda Hesser reviews Zona Rosa (40 W 56th Street; 212-247-2800):
The chef, Adrian León, is originally from Mexico City and clearly has ambitions for Mexican cooking. For the most part he is following through with stimulating ideas that do not take the easy route of blunt fusion cooking — if you have ever had mashed sweet potatoes with chipotles, you know what I mean.
Mr. León's efforts are more subdued, and in most instances, more sophisticated. His hamachi tostadas came on two crisp curled tortillas spread with refried beans and a habanero marmalade. On top was a pile of raw hamachi cubes and pickled onions, blanketed with a tiny dice of tomato, cilantro and queso fresco. The hamachi padded each crisp and spicy bite with a burst of fresh fish.
Sometimes Mr. León's ideas are small but effective improvements on familiar dishes. It was pleasing to find quesadillas that weren't a wad of melted cheese. These were thin, delicious tortillas wrapped around a scant but powerful filling of Oaxacan cheese, almonds and spinach.
His empanadas contain mushrooms, huitlacoche and corn and are wrapped in masa harina, or corn dough, so delicate that when fried, the outer layer puffs up like a lace veil. Enchiladas are filled with pork ropa vieja and a fruit mole.
NYTimes $25 and Under Eric Asimov reviews Cafécito (185 Avenue C; 212-253-9966):
The food is very good — not great, but enjoyable. The restaurant, two adjoining storefronts that have recently been connected, is always pleasant. On one side is a counter, a fine place to sit with a café con leche ($1.75), served in wide cups practically the size of bowls. The other room, brick-walled with softer lighting, accommodates both romantic couples and boisterous groups.
It is all very nice, but sometimes the combined forces of weather, mood and food can turn Cafécito into an ideal spot. On a recent sunny spring day, a friend and I sat down at a table in the front of the dining room for a late lunch. The big front windows were opened to the warm breezes, and as we watched the neighborhood passing by, listening to the shouts of schoolchildren, high school flirtations in Spanglish and other lively sounds of the city, we agreed that we could not possibly have anything better to do at that moment than sit there. Of course the mojitos ($5) we were sipping, none too sweet with plenty of mint, helped matters considerably, but they merely amplified what we were already feeling.
Tostones or maduros, fried sweet plantains, come with most of the main courses, along with rice and beans. The best selection is masitas de puerco ($9), chunks of pork marinated in mojo, the Cuban garlic-and-citrus condiment, and then quickly sautéed until the exterior turns crisp, leaving the inside juicy and tender. The pork is topped with grilled onions and served over a delicious sweet mash of corn and boniato, a tuber like a sweet potato but with a stiffer texture.
Close behind is a dish I've rarely seen in New York, vaca frita ($9.75), flank steak marinated in mojo, fried until its strands begin to separate into crisp tendrils, and topped with pickled onions. It's got far more personality than either the thin grilled skirt steak ($9.75) or the slender grilled sirloin ($8.75). Ropa vieja ($8.75), the classic Cuban dish, starts with a routine piece of beef like these two grilled steaks, and then adds the flavor they lack, in the form of a light tomato-and-wine sauce, mixed with onions and peppers cooked until soft, and plenty of cumin.
[I have to admit hoping this charming spot would remain a secret a bit longer, but Asimov's review is spot on -- the food is good but not great, and elements can come together to create quite an enjoyable experience.]
NYPost's Steve Cuozzo reviews Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar (246 E. 5th Street; 212-673-0338):
The short menu - a harmonious cuvee of French bistro, American raw bar and New Orleans influences - is cheerfully explained by suave French captains against a seductive soundtrack steeped in Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
But diners who may spend $300 for two with wine should know what they're in for. The cozy-looking dining rooms make you feel you're in a house where Vines-Rushing is cooking just for you. But they hurt - especially the knee-knocking banquettes on the main floor, with its oft-photographed gingham walls.
The upstairs room, where only the $75 tasting menu is served, is a dollhouse-scaled New England attic where Mini-Me would feel oversize, and where it takes just one loud voice to drive you bananas. There were, on my last visit, two of them.
And this after what may be a 50-minute wait for your table. The ground floor (with à la carte entrées up to $36) has little room to stand and none to move. I felt like a calf in his pen - and on such nights, Jack's Punishment Oyster Bar would be more like it.
Once you're seated, though, things proceed like clockwork. The "luxury" is all on the plate, and it flows irrepressibly from Vines-Rushing's eensy second-floor, walk-through kitchen.
"Deconstructed" oysters Rockefeller shun traditional breading for a single pancetta crisp atop a lush oyster mounted on a pillow of spinach and watercress. A swirl of mustard oil reconciles the disparate voices of wine-tinted onion soup pungent with pickled shrimp.
You expect great shellfish and you get it: a nightly changing array that might include flawless shrimp, bay scallops and littleneck clams anchored by succulent Malbec oysters.
From there, it's on to lush lobster with roasted garlic cloves embraced in New Orleans-style Creole spices, or the juiciest pan-seared halibut I've ever tasted, attended by morels and suffused in their broth. Or supple lamb with dreamy lima bean purée.
The sensuality rolls on in desserts like rum baba topped with caramel foam, onto which the waiter pours New Orleans rum - a guaranteed, third-date deal-sealer. But be warned: Jack's is not for icebreaking.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema also offers up a review of Jack's:
I was devastated when the menu changed recently and the wonderful risotto disappeared—I was counting on eating it again. At one time it was the menu's only entrée, a suckling pig risotto ($32) rife with shreds of tender young piglet and topped with featherweight cracklin's and black truffle shavings. The new menu substitutes three entrées, including a halibut filet with bourbon sauce, a lamb tenderloin cushioned by lima bean puree, and—in a tour de force rich enough to one-up the risotto—a baby chicken in a cast-iron kettle poised on pucks of pied de cochon ($28), the latter entrée so good that it had me rephrasing Bessie Smith's famous song as I contorted myself to get out the door: "Give me a pig foot, and a bottle of Bordeaux."
NYPress reviews Mancora (99 1st Avenue; 212-253-1011):
To reiterate, the ceviche romps. Mancora offers eight distinct kinds, in main-dish portions priced, like all the restaurant's entrees, in the $10 to $15 range. Each is a cold wave of fresh lime with unique seaside aftereffects. Take the tiradito. Bite-sized pieces of halibut filet leave behind a spray of yellow pepper; a note of passionfruit is a tropical birdcall off in the distance. It's not just that the dish is acidic enough to conduct an electric charge, it seems to be actually doing so.
Ceviche de papaya is even better. The whitefish here is cut into strips, intermingled with chunks of fresh papaya on that lime-galvanized plane. Even the yam, plantain and roasted corn that bulk it up get all sparkly from this bath. One might think that cold-cooking with citric acid is not a delicate operation. Yet Mancora makes abundantly clear that plenty of pro cooks don't get it right.
Apart from its cevicheria, the restaurant is rarely spectacular. Such was the case with Mancora's other pan-South American offerings and, even more disappointingly, with its versions of distinctly Peruvian specialties as well. Nothing was bad enough that I wouldn't recommend the place. And the panache of the ceviches does manifest elsewhere, most notably in some of the grilled items.
NYMag reviews Mas (39 Downing Street; 212-255-1790):
Combined with the restaurant’s studied décor, this kind of precious, ambitious cooking brings an air of high-pitched, almost feverish quaintness to the proceedings at Mas. By the time the entrées arrived, I found myself taking tiny bites and talking in hushed tones about the quality of the parsnips in my soup. Zamarra’s lobster (gently poached, with sea beans and ramp bulbs, among other esoteric items) elicited further murmurs of approval at our table, and so did the lamb loin, which was wrapped in ramp leaves and cut in tender, pink medallions. All of the seafood entrées I sampled were good, particularly the wild Alaskan king salmon (also tender and pink) and the monkfish, which is inventively rolled in a black-olive paste. I liked the duck breast (it’s flavored with pistachio nougat) better than the scrawny, overly precious clay pigeon (the pottery is ostentatiously piled on the plate), and my favorite of the aggressively seasonal entrées was the lasagne, which is arranged in a little tower and layered with oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, more ramps, and fresh ricotta.
It hasn’t taken long for the word to get out about Mas. Open a little over a month, the place is already overrun with West Village dignitaries (Sandra Bernhard, one evening, wearing tangerine-colored Pumas) and hordes of beady-eyed food aristocrats. I imagine a few of them thought Zamarra’s cooking was good, but not mind-blowingly good, and at this early stage, they may be right. But it’s difficult to deny the happy buzz circulating around the room, that elevated sense, which you get in the best restaurants, of being in the right place at the right time. The desserts, which include many suitably arcane, American-produced artisanal cheeses, don’t always add to this ambience, but they don’t detract from it either. The best of them is a bar of soft Guanaja chocolate, served with a scoop of Guinness-stout ice cream. The most emblematic is a bowl of grape-flavored granité with fresh-cut strawberries, poured nearly to the top with champagne. It’s a fizzy, refreshing, pleasurable dish, and like many things at Mas, it even leaves you a little high.
