Today's review roundup includes: Masa, Le Quinze, Anna's Corner, Wolfgang's Steakhouse, Taboon, Franny's, Casa La Femme North.
NYTimes Restaurants Amanda Hesser writes her last review as interim critic, giving Masa "four stars when dining at the sushi bar and three stars at the tables" (The Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle; 212-823-9800):
While you settle in, Mr. Takayama sets his Aritsugu knives, with water-buffalo-horn handles, on his chopping block and begins assembling bowls and urns. His wife, Saemi Takayama, who acts as maître d'hôtel, waiter and sommelier, pours sparkling water into narrow-rimmed tumblers. There is no menu, so the courses just begin appearing, starting with a tiny salad of fiddlehead ferns bathed in white miso and scented with kinome, an herb that tastes of lemon and mint with a peppery kick. Next might come a tiny coupe glass, filled with a dollop of toro, a heap of osetra caviar and a squeeze of sudachi (a variety of lime, tiny as a kumquat). You are given a red lacquer spoon to spread it onto crisp toasts cut into perfect dominoes.
A few courses later comes tempura. On one visit, it was fried wild watercress, sent by Mr. Takayama's mother in Japan, and shiroki, a tree bud encased in a feather-light shell of batter. On the side was a dish of salt and sancho pepper for sprinkling.
This is just the warm-up. Mr. Takayama serves a lot of food, often more than 12 courses. Even if you do not eat for 10 days before you go, it is still too much, and at a certain point it takes away from the magnificence of the food.
. . . Mr. Takayama is entertaining but he is not a showman, and he never loses pace with your meal, even though he is serving everyone in the room. After the parade of salads and cooked foods, the sushi begins to arrive. Sometimes it is a wisp of halibut, a fish distinguished by its crunch, brushed with nikiri sauce. Or calamari, sprinkled with sea salt, and yuzu. On various visits, I have had shiitake; grilled scallop; sweet shrimp; mackerel; and ume, shredded shiso and sesame seed rolled into a slender and crisp sheet of toasted nori. All of it has been pristine, vibrant and utterly delicious.Hesser also explains her take on the often debated question, "What is the difference between a three-star and a four-star restaurant?" She writes,
No matter how exquisite its food, a three-star restaurant does not have this power to transport you. What elevates a restaurant to four stars is the intangible delight occasioned by a chef's meticulously fashioned vision. At El Bulli in Spain, one of the top restaurants in the world, the room is casual, but the sense that you are on Ferran Adrià's planet, eating Ferran Adrià's creations never escapes you."
NYTimes $25 and Under Eric Asimov reviews Le Quinze (132 West Houston Street; 212-475-1515):
I remember my first meal on a trip to France as a student, a simple plate of grilled steak and haricots verts, and wondering how everything could possibly taste so good. I wondered the same thing one afternoon after tasting Mr. Liberatore's mushroom soup ($6), a creamy broth that was deep and rich, with fat slices of mushroom occasionally floating to the top. The humble croque-monsieur ($8.50) seems almost majestic in his hands, like French toast encasing ham and cheese. It is the best I have ever had.
Mr. Liberatore's tuna and avocado rillettes ($8) win points for creativity, though calling them rillettes is false advertising. The tuna, thin as carpaccio, is layered across a sort of Venezuelan avocado sauce. The union of rich tuna and pungent avocado, with bursts of sweetness from strips of apple, is superb.
. . . Not everything is a hit, and Le Quinze's main courses are more inconsistent than the appetizers. Monkfish cannelloni ($17) is brilliant — the meaty fish is wrapped not with pasta but almost transparent strips of zucchini. It is then served over a ragout of tiny black lentils in a smoky, creamy sauce, which pulls the dish together. Roast duck fillet ($18.50), crisp around the outside, is the centerpiece of an excellent composition, including sautéed endive and a delicious little prune tart.
But lamb slices crusted with thyme ($19) make an awkward, grating combination, and roasted chicken ($14.50) is dry. On the plus side is salmon ($15), cooked slowly to retain the fish's rich delicate flavor, which is so often lost to clumsy grilling.
BEST DISHES Mushroom soup; croque-monsieur; fried calamari with mint tabbouleh; oxtail terrine; snails; roast duck; slow-cooked salmon; pot de crème; cherry clafoutis.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews Anna's Corner (23-01 31st Street, Astoria, Queens; 718-545-4000):
The central delight of the menu is arni—spit-roasted baby lamb presented in a fragrant, boxcar-shaped pile, the crisp skin only micrometers thick, glistening with fat and flecked with oregano. One of the designated eaters raised the plate to his nose, sniffed and smiled, sluiced the one-pound plate ($19.95) with greenish olive oil, then dug in. We quickly ordered another portion. Almost as good was the roast pork, delivered in bite-size chunks. Occasionally, suckling pig is available. Also worth ordering are loukanika xoriatika ($8), a massive heap of savory grilled sausages sided as in Crete with pieces of toast.
Despite a complete lack of finned fish, seafood is available. The octopus ($12) is particularly distinguished, a pair of tapering tentacles that arrive charred and bathed in red-wine vinegar, obligingly sliced up at your table by the gruff but lovable waiter. The many short dishes called mezze make Anna's a good bet for vegetarians, of which our party included two—though the stench of roast meat hanging over the table required a certain intestinal fortitude on their part. The abundant plates of dandelion leaves and beets served with their greens, both bargain priced at $4, are wonderful when irrigated with olive oil and vinegar and vigorously salted. The french fries are killer, but skip the unbearably dull mashed fava beans. Among meat-bearing mezze, the stuffed romaine rules (maroullontolmades, $8), a quartet of dark leaves enfolding a stuffing of ground meat, bathed in a lemon-and-egg-yolk sauce called avogolemono.
NYMag reviews Wolfgang's Steakhouse (4 Park Avenue; 212-889-3369):
So, will someone please explain to me why the porterhouse at Wolfgang’s Steakhouse, which opened a little more than three months ago on a hectic corner of midtown, tastes so fresh and familiar and so, well, Peter Luger–like? The unlikely answer, it turns out, is Wolfgang himself. As all the city’s steak hounds know by now, Wolfgang Zwiener toiled at the original Luger’s in Williamsburg for 41 years. As a waiter and then the headwaiter, he was privy to all the secrets and quirks of that great institution, many of which are now on display at his own eponymous establishment. There are the dangerously hot steak platters, all scuffed and burnt around the edges from incessant cooking. There are the waiters, many of whom are Luger transplants, who rush through the crowd wearing long aprons and slightly askew snap-on bow ties. There is even a “Wolfgang’s Steakhouse Old-Fashioned Sauce,” which is a near-exact facsimile of the famous Luger’s Steak Sauce, only it’s slightly sweeter, and contains a touch more horseradish. I took an old Luger acolyte to Wolfgang’s, and when he tasted this apostate sauce, he closed his eyes for a minute, as if taking a communication directly from the steak gods, then whispered, “It’s actually better.”
You can’t say that about the beef at Wolfgang’s, but it’s awfully close. At least that was the consensus among the Luger faithful on the evenings I visited. . .
NYMag also reviews Taboon (773 Tenth Avenue, at 52nd Street; 212-713-0271):
Taboon means “oven” in Arabic, specifically the ancient, arched-stone oven used to bake the Middle East’s numerous varieties of flatbread. And the bread alone is reason enough to visit this tidy, whitewashed restaurant, which opened for business a few months ago in the wilds of Hell’s Kitchen. . .
Not surprisingly, most of the food at Taboon is cooked fresh in the stone oven. This includes, among the entrées, a trio of savory ground-lamb kebabs, an impressive lamb osso buco, and a rich helping of oxtail stew heaped over a mound of fat, slightly crisped gnocchi. My taboon-seared lamb chops were tough and gnarly (they’re heaped over artichokes, fava beans, and yogurt), but a piece of barramundi came out of the taboon steamy and fresh, with a crackling slip of skin on top. This kind of delicate fusion technique (the fish was served on a pile of sorrel with mashed chickpeas) extends to exotically named desserts like malabi (baklava and berries all bound up in a rose-infused whipped cream) and silan, which consists of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with tahini, caramelized pistachios, and date honey.
NYPress reviews Franny's (295 Flatbush Avenue; 718-230-0221):
You'd think if a pizza joint got the crust right, the rest would fall into place. That's not the case—at least not so far—with Franny's, a new brick-oven restaurant on Flatbush Ave. Near the 7th Ave. stop, technically in Prospect Heights, the place tilts, culturally, too far in the direction of the hippie-snooty capital of White Brooklyn: the Park Slope Food Co-Op. This is someone's flighty Upper East Side aunt's idea of what Brooklyn pizza should be.
Yet there's absolutely no arguing with this crust. At Franny's, you start from the pillowy thick edge because the pies are not sliced (more on that later). It's bubbled up just a tad higher than an electric-oven pizza crust would be. The irregular domes flake and steam when torn. The first taste sensation is a floury crispiness, then comes chewy—and the planet of pedestrian pizza recedes to a tiny point in the galactic distance. Fresh-bread flavor ripples satisfaction down to the DNA.
New-restaurant jitters, sure, but even a quick gander at the pizza menu reveals something amiss. Olive oil, rosemary and garlic—great. Tomato and mozzarella—wonderful. Meatballs and/or pepperoni—we're almost golden. Just need sausage. But there is no sausage, just house-smoked pancetta with ramps and fontina. Read that again, and note (as per the back of the menu) that the pancetta is made from Niman Ranch pork, and the ramps "…come from the meadows and woodlands of the Finger Lakes Organics Farm Cooperative."
. . . Franny's needs to acknowledge that New Yorkers' special love for pizza manifests at the intersection of simple and familiar. Major concessions to convention are necessary. Especially in Brooklyn.[Related: Slice weighs in on Franny's]
NYPost Steve Cuozzo reviews Casa La Femme North (1076 First Avenue; 212-505-0005):
It's weird enough that owners Medhat Ibrahim and Anastasios Hairatidis packed up their tent, as it were, and moved their sultry SoHo boite to this plain-vanilla neighborhood. Weirder still, it works. Casa La Femme North, one of the city's few Egyptian restaurants, pulls off the tough feat of being as decent as it is adorable.
Try not to giggle at this burning-sands oasis out of a Rudolph Valentino silent movie. The gauzy tents — where only a $55 tasting dinner is served — let you eat and smooch on the floor. The less amorously inclined opt for plush round booths and tables bathed in soft light from leather Moroccan ceiling lamps.
A belly dancer makes her rounds through a zoo of rugs, mirrors and tropical plants. The waiter waltzes us through a list of potent drinks like "Arabian Night" and warns, "Because we make everything from scratch, some of our dishes take up to 40 minutes to prepare."
He isn't kidding. But the all-pervasive freshness — both of raw materials and preparation — makes Casa La Femme more than just another too-cute exotic eatery.
The menu draws on traditions of northern Egypt: dishes wood-grilled over a low flame (mashwaya), abundant herbs and spices, and pita, the classic Arab wheatbread. The kitchen does justice to the pleasures of this simple cuisine while respecting its limitations. A spell takes over and whisks things, magic-carpet style, to a higher plane.
