NYC: Review Roundup
Today's review roundup includes: Pace, Pho Tay Ho, The Blue Mill Tavern.
NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Pace one star (121 Hudson Street; 212-965-9500):
In a city where so many restaurateurs vie showily to stand at the top of the culinary heap, Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams are refreshingly content with a lower, but just as worthy, patch of ground.
. . . Now comes Pace, the duo's fourth restaurant, following the Mermaid Inn. In many ways, Pace (pronounced PAH-chay) fits the Bradley-Abrams archetype to a T. It does not give diners something new. It gives them a compendium of what they have already indicated they want, in its case channeling inspiration and lifting ideas from the city's most popular Italian restaurants. It feels instantly familiar, abundantly friendly and immediately comfortable. From the moment you walk through the door at Pace, which means peace in Italian, and see all the happy, garrulous people around the long, handsome bar, you find yourself unwinding.
But Pace is by far the duo's most ambitious restaurant, as a glance at the menu reveals right away. That menu is divided into 10 categories, not counting dessert, with scores of dishes small and large. It offers salumi, crudi, vegetable antipasti, salads, panini, pasta, risotto, meat entrees, fish entrees and side dishes.
Mr. Abrams, who supervises the dining room, and Mr. Bradley, who supervises the kitchen with his executive chef, Joey Campanaro, are juggling a greater volume and array of food than they usually do. They are also tethering themselves for the most part to a given tradition, Italian, instead of working under the more forgiving banner of American or new American, the phrases sometimes used to define the cuisine at the Harrison and Red Cat.
Pace represents their greatest challenge. And for now at least the strain of rising to it shows in a few too many unremarkable dishes and a few too many disappointing ones.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Assortment of salumi; vegetable antipasti; spaghettini with anchovies; risotto bianco; seafood stew; lamb; vanilla gelato with espresso.
NY Mag also reviews Pace this week:
. . . Any one of these dishes might have tasted quite fine served in a tinier restaurant, on a smaller menu, but in the indistinct confines of Pace, their cumulative weight had a deadening effect. It didn’t help that most of the entrées seem designed almost exclusively for heft. There were big cigars of stuffed wild boar (leather-tough when I tried them), gristly, almost inedible slabs of pork liver, and fat sweetbreads rolled in blankets of prosciutto and seasoned like breakfast sausages, with too much sage. The meaty chicken fricassee was better (it’s served in a peasant’s pot), and so was the delicious veal chop, smothered in radicchio simmered with balsamic vinegar and pancetta, but the chicken breast I sampled appeared to be a heavy, Italianate version of chicken cordon bleu (it’s batter-fried, with cheese and prosciutto inside). Among seafood items, the cod and bass are served over vegetables in the standard restaurant way, the red mullet seemed overly mild despite a hearty olive-and-tomato sauce, and my fish stew was so loaded down with fishy items (lobster, seared scallops, etc.) that its soupy bouillabaisse element tasted less like nourishing broth than like watery gravy.
NYTimes $25 and Under reviews Pho Tay Ho (2351 86th Street, Bath Beach, Brooklyn; 718-449-0199):
This restaurant, Pho Tay Ho, which opened in 2001, stands out for its commitment to fresh ingredients and high-quality meat for its pho, the big bowls of beef soup, rice noodles and meat that also contain the soul of the Vietnamese kitchen.
. . . The pho served here goes a long way toward explaining why the dish is so central. Spiced with star anise and whole cloves, with a profound beef flavor, the broth itself keeps you dipping back into the bowl. Fresh cilantro, scallions and rings of mild white onion top the pile of rice noodles and tender meat. Branches of Asian basil, rau que, are placed on your table, there to be torn, leaf by leaf, into the soup.
With innumerable options for cuts of beef, pho can be perplexing. How do you decide among bowls with either well-done eye of round and rare flank steak, or with tripe and tendon, or even with six different kinds of brisket? Eye of round is the most basic and, Mr. Nguyen says, the most popular, even among Vietnamese.
Beyond pho, the menu appears standard, but the difference again is a notable interest in fresh ingredients: flavorful beef, fat shrimp, crunchy cabbage, fresh garlic. Lashings of melted butter don't hurt the flavors either.
BEST DISHES Pho; chicken salad; crispy squid with garlic sauce; grilled pork chop; shrimp with fried butter; crispy fish with tomato sauce; flan.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews The Blue Mill Tavern (50 Commerce Street; 212-352-0009):
. . . Since the '30s, when it was a speakeasy, the charming interior has remained nearly unchanged. Mahogany booths trace a sinuous path around the floor of the mirrored dining room, where you can spy on dating couples as you eat your dinner, like flipping channels between reality TV shows. The new menu continues to evoke supper clubs past. If you thought you couldn't get prime rib without driving 50 miles into Jersey, think again. This roadhouse favorite ($27), really just a slice of rib roast, is a hard hat's dream—oozing red and nearly eclipsing the plate. A side of creamy spinach orbits like a planet's tiny green moon. But who bothers to gaze at it before the beef has disappeared?
Curiously, the best selection is a holdover from Grange Hall. Succotash ($18) is the real, unreconstructed thing, a fistfight of sweet-corn kernels and tender baby lima beans refereed by big chunks of smoky bacon. The bacon juice mixes with the native moisture of the vegetables into an irresistible fluid. As if the succotash weren't tasty enough, five large scallops—the ostensible stars of the plate—are seared to caramelization on one side and hunkered in the succotash. Other entrées are no less impressive.
