Today's review roundup includes: Sripraphai, Thomas Beisl, Tia Pol, Applewood.
NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Sripraphai two stars (64-13 39th Avenue, Woodside, Queens; 718- 899-9599):
Sripraphai has been around for more than a decade, and the most committed restaurant adventurers from outside Queens have long made pilgrimages to it. But plenty of less obsessive food lovers who would gladly venture to Woodside for something special do not know that this delicious destination awaits. They should. Sripraphai is to your corner Thai takeout what P. D. James is to Mary Higgins Clark: the real deal, well worth the extra time and effort.
I ordered that roasted duck salad on two occasions, rationalizing that I was performing a vital check of the restaurant's consistency and almost believing my argument. The truth: I was wild about this dish, and only partly because the ribbons of duck were more tender and flavorful than meat at many similarly inexpensive Asian restaurants, which tend to stint on the quality of flesh. What struck me even more forcefully were the variety and coordination of vegetables, herbs, spices and accents in the salad. Scallions, red onions, cucumbers, tomato, cilantro, lime juice, fish sauce, dried chili peppers and ground peanuts were all present in perfect proportion and perfect counterpoint, something tangy yielding to something soothing, a burst of cool mellowing a bit of fire.
The balance of sweet, sour, salty and hot is what is often praised about Thai cooking, which focuses on bold flavors in blissful harmony. But at too many Thai restaurants in this country and this city the heat is tempered and the sweetness amplified as concessions to American palates. The spices are muted, the herbs less fresh than they could be and the lemon grass permitted to run roughshod over all else. Not at Sripraphai. Here the star anise, coriander and galangal sing clearly, identifiable voices that swell and recede as they hew to their carefully calibrated roles in a broader chorus.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Roasted duck salad; sweet sausage with cucumber, chili and lime; pickled barbecued pork; sautéed drunken noodles; sautéed crispy pork with Chinese broccoli; barbecued chicken with coconut rice.
NYTimes $25 and Under reviews Thomas Beisl (5 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn; 718-222-5800):
Imagine that a chef with a four-star review under his belt packed his bags and headed south to open an affordable bistro in Brooklyn. Imagine it served a democratized take on the cuisine that earned him those stars and had burger and fries on the menu. Imagine the media crush, the impossible reservations.
Thomas Ferlesch is that chef. Almost 24 years ago, when he was 24, Mimi Sheraton awarded Vienna '79, the nouvelle Austrian restaurant where he cooked, four stars in The New York Times. He left Vienna '79 and spent most of the 90's at Café des Artistes. Last year he opened Thomas Beisl — beisl is Austrian for bistro — in Fort Greene, opposite the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
. . . I separated the main courses into three categories: schnitzels, stews and bistro dishes. The bistro dishes include roast salmon ($15), a strip steak ($18) and the burger, and are all competently executed or better. Their undemanding appeal helps make Beisl a crowd pleaser; even your fussy aunt will not have trouble finding something to order. But if your evening's subway ride or avant-garde dance performance has not sapped your appetite for adventure, you should push ahead.
The best of the stews — or more fashionably put, of the braised dishes — are both based on cheek meat. Pork cheeks cooked in sauerkraut ($16), boldly seasoned with caraway, garlic and marjoram, are spoon-tender; beef cheek goulash ($16) has an almost chocolately suavity.
And then there are the schnitzels, each accompanied by a sprightly side of vinegared cucumbers and potatoes. The Wiener schnitzel ($16), sadly and obviously made from pork instead of veal, did not match my hopes and left me dubious about the other offerings. Luckily I was wrong. The remarkably thin cod schnitzel ($15), accompanied by a mostly-mayonnaise tartar sauce, is deliciously crispy, with none of the sogginess that sometimes plagues thicker pieces of fried fish. The celeriac schnitzel ($12), golden fried finger-thick slices of lemony celeriac, was the come-from-behind winner of the schnitzel-off. It was one of the best things I had eaten in months.
BEST DISHES Palatschinken; all charcuterie; roasted pork cheeks; celeriac schnitzel; cod schnitzel.
NY Mag reviews Tia Pol (205 Tenth Avenue., near 23rd St.; 212-675-8805):
The open kitchen is small and so is the appealing menu, built around a core of traditional tapas. You’d be forgiven for thinking, Tried one tortilla española, tried ’em all—forgiven, but wrong. Tía Pol’s is light, almost fluffy, and served warm with a delicious dab of aïoli, which also makes its garlicky presence known, in slightly different, red-pepper-tinged form, drizzled over a cazuela of hot, crisp patatas bravas, which might be better even than cheese fries. Tangy marinated lamb comes on a skewer stuck into a hunk of juice-absorbing bread. Fried chickpeas are nuttily addictive. So are battered and fried whitebait, served in a paper-lined glass with a lemon wedge. Thick slices of rich, garlicky real Spanish chorizo are just that: nothing more, nothing less, and utterly delicious.
This (along with silky hams and nicely garnished cheeses) is simple stuff—Tapas 101, you might say, and the perfect complement to the short, affordable, all-Spanish wine list. Rarely, though, do the basics taste so good. That’s largely a function of great ingredients (note the greenish tint of the fragrant olive oil, the imported Spanish tuna in the lively mixed salad, the sweet char of the grilled, sea-salt-speckled shishito peppers) and careful cooking. In proper Spanish fashion, chef Alex Raij, who runs the kitchen with her Basque husband, Eder Montero, manages to honor tradition (Marcona almond, anyone?) without forsaking innovation. She folds Serrano ham into small triangular packages stuffed with manchego and artichokes, and makes a montadito, or Spanish-style bruschetta, from prosciutto-thin slices of chorizo, melted dark chocolate, and wispy threads of Korean peppers. Odd as it sounds, the combination works—just as well as the natural, flavor-packed marriage of chewy-tender squid stewed in its ink and served with a disc of sauce-sopping white rice.
Ideal Meal: Green peppers, lamb skewers, chorizo al jerez, patatas bravas, squid in ink with rice, carpaccio of king oyster mushrooms, duck breast with lentil salad, almond cake.
Village Voice Robert Seitsema reviews Applewood (501 11th Street, Brooklyn; 718-768-2044):
Applewood is a new restaurant that marries ideas about local sourcing of ingredients and sustainable agriculture with modest portions of sturdy farmhouse cooking dressed in stylish modern raiment. Often, it works. One strong point is the daily soups ($6). One night it was rutabaga—an ingredient that, in its naked state, tastes like loamy earth. Applewood sends it spinning in a Jackson Pollock direction, trailing colorful basil and saffron oils across the puree's smooth canvas. Another day the soup's focus was orange winter squash, fashionably foamed with a hand foamer, but a shade on the sweet side. Illustrating similar principles on a menu that's been changing week by week since the September opening was an entrée called, in a flurry of punctuation, "end-of-summer vegetable" fricassee (quotation marks theirs, $15), a dun hotchpotch of roots in a roasted-onion sauce. It was the hit of the table.
Some evenings the single vegetarian entrée misfires, though. The grand-sounding "potato-root vegetable-mushroom pave, black peppercorn–goat cheese fondue" turns out to be a couple of small off-white squares, a lasagna of potatoes and cream sauce, more like a side than a main course. A pavé is a French paving stone, and the dish was just about as tasty. In fact, rather than focusing on vegetables as a farm-driven place might tend to do, the menu makes a fetish of meat and fish, leading another friend to complain, "Where are the veggies?" The best entrées have consistently been a rib-eye steak sliced thick on a pincushion of mashed potatoes, and a deliriously good lamb loin ($23), fanned on chard and polenta. "Not enough polenta," my critical pal sniffed.
