Today's review roundup includes: Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Pacifico, Alain Ducasse, and three African restaurants in the South Bronx.
NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Blue Hill at Stone Barns 3 stars (630 Bedford Road, Pocantico Hills, Westchester County; 914-366-9600):
The restaurant, which opened in Westchester County three months ago, is attempting something special — something more than its fairly thorough adherence to the ethic that a restaurant's food should, as much as possible, be seasonal, local and the result of sustainable agriculture. Blue Hill not only gets many of its vegetables and some of its meat from the surrounding land, which was part of the Rockefellers' Pocantico Hills estate. It also gets to exert control over how those vegetables are grown and how the meat is fed.
This reality, which goes beyond mere novelty, is one compelling reason for people near and far to pay attention to the restaurant, an offshoot of Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, where Mr. Barber also supervises the kitchen. But there is another, better reason: most of the food here is terrific, and some of it is flat-out wonderful. The premium that the restaurant places on immediacy has a culinary purpose, a hedonistic payoff.
On a recent visit, tomatoes were just coming into season. Mr. Barber and Michael Anthony, the chef who works by his side, had used them for a rough purée that, Mr. Barber explained later by telephone, was hung in cheesecloth, with a container beneath to catch the drip. This nearly clear liquid — the distilled essence of the fruit, closer in spirit to a potion than a juice — came to the table in tall glasses, as an amuse-bouche. If early summer could be said to have a taste, this was it.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Salad of 11 mixed greens and herbs with egg; green gazpacho; pea cannelloni with crab meat; white king salmon; wild striped bass; duck; roasted pig; chocolate bread pudding with caramel sauce.
NYTimes $25 and Under reviews Pacifico (269 Pacific Street, Brooklyn; 718-935-9090):
The menu — created by Joe Pounds and executed by Dan Hall — culls inspiration from across the Mexican map. But Pacifico does not strive for serious composition and regional focus, though fresh flavor and indigenous ingredients inform most dishes. Their Tex-Mex is appreciably messy and cheesy, and fish tacos offer the hot-cold crunch you would hope for on a beach in Baja.
Jim Mamary, one of the owners, built Pacifico on a former parking lot. Like many of the restaurants of which he is an owner (among them Schnäck, Gowanas Yacht Club, Patois and the new Sweetwater, all in Brooklyn) this one, too, has scenic shtick, from the black velvet bullfighter paintings to the repurposed liquor bottle water pitchers. But unlike La Rosa and Son, his kitschy Italian joint on Smith Street that ingeniously shares Pacifico's kitchen, the retro motif does not dominate the meal. Any irony worked into an oversize, gooey plate of bean-and-cheese nachos ($8) is overpowered by dozens of diners enjoying them.
. . . If I were a regular here, I would make a habit of the inexpensive Taco Stand section of the menu, which provides easiest access to Pacifico's succulent pulled pork carnitas, braised in Coca-Cola and cooked in La Rosa's pizza oven. You pick your medium — quesadillas, soft tacos, saucy enchiladas or rice-and-bean-stuffed burritos ($6) — then fill them with the likes of pork (sweetly tinged from the cola), beef or vegetables.
BEST DISHES Grilled pork ribs with chipotle glaze; queso fundido; pork carnitas enchiladas and quesadillas; flan.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo revisits Alain Ducasse and loves it, 4 stars (At the Essex House, 155 W. 58th Street; 212-265-7300):
It took four years, but Alain Ducasse has finally blossomed into a great New York restaurant. The joy that flows from new executive chef Christian Delouvrier's kitchen justifies spending $150 on a prix-fixe dinner. It's the place to splurge when that special occasion - a big birthday, or the call you've been waiting for from Harvey Weinstein - comes around.
Or go for no occasion at all, other than the joy of a dining experience that's a seamless magic carpet of pleasure from start to finish. Alain Ducasse (the restaurant) has got its act together even if Alain Ducasse (the man) is increasingly distracted by 17 restaurants the world over.
Forget everything you've read or heard - the goofy knife-and-pen presentations when it opened in 2000, savage early reviews (my own among them) and a four-star Times review 18 months later that no one believed. New Yorkers never embraced the place the way they do Le Bernardin, Daniel and Jean-Georges, and it has never been hard to get reservations.
But that might change. Since Delouvrier took over the kitchen two months ago, the food is phenomenal - as refined as it is approachable, as inventive as it is disciplined. And the gilded setting is better than ever, with muted lighting that takes the edge off the room's miles of gold trim and sumptuous overkill.
Give Ducasse credit for being secure enough to bring in a chef very much his equal, even if some dishes - like exquisite, deceptively simple poached wild Alaska salmon topped with Osetra caviar - are Ducasse's inventions. Although the relationship is billed as a "collaboration," it's Delouvrier running the kitchen.
. . . Although Delouvrier is known more as a classicist than an innovator, his style here is sexier than it was at ponderous Lespinasse. Bluefin tuna carpaccio would look at home in Wylie Dufresne's WD50 - the circle of paper-thin tuna mounted on a square of vivid green asparagus "marmalade" made with ginger-garlic mayonnaise. It's a palate-thrilling masterpiece.
A few dishes draw on Lespinasse favorites without copying them. Truffles chopped and mixed with hardened butter are deftly tucked under the skin of roast organic chicken; the truffle tastes as ingrained as if the bird were born with it.
A world away, Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews three South Bronx restaurants that "take you to the heart of Africa" (see review for restaurant addresses):
Bronx African Restaurant: "First, a cumbrous plate of Uncle Ben's arrived, looking as if each individual grain had been polished and arranged. Next came a modest bowl heaped with chicken wings and backs mired in red sauce. Though the actual quantity of poultry barely filled a serving spoon, the rich sauce was unutterably delicious, tasting of palm oil and bay leaf. We vigorously applied a fiery yellow condiment that looked like moist cornmeal."
God's Time Is the Best: "We skipped the appetizer and headed straight for the steam table. Behind thick Plexiglas, it runs the length of the restaurant and features over a score of dishes, mainly meat stews, veggie purees, and fried and steamed whole fish. What to order? For mash, it was easy—foil-wrapped loaves of kenkey beckoned. As for what to eat with that skunky cornmeal mash, we behaved like kids in a candy shop, selecting black-eyed peas, a dark lamb stew, and a thick sauce of crushed melon seeds called egusie."
B.B. African and American Restaurant sits almost directly beneath the Cross Bronx Expressway, making things easy for its gypsy-cab patrons. The proprietor is Guinean, but his wife (the cook) hails from Sierra Leone, and the menu is a combo of cuisines. While our beef in peanut sauce could have come from any kitchen in West Africa, the dense cassava-leaf sauce was unique. It didn't take us long to figure out the thickener: peanuts. Thanks again, George Washington Carver!