Boulud

Cafe this time. The scene is vastly different from that of Daniel: a bustling, busy dining room with men in suits at every available table. Our server bills it as a "neighborhood restaurant," but that's probably only applicable if you own an 8 million dollar townhouse on Park. Which, I determine by a quick glance around the room, some of these guys do.

Our amuse bouche is a tiny, hot arancini filled with black truffle. It does its job. Bread service, like that at Daniel, is precocious and I convince myself to stick to just one roll this time around. Spring has finally sprung, which means ramps and white asparagus and snap peas. I start with an appetizer of thick white spears with a scotch egg and creamy unpasteurized cheese. A take on Hollandaise, our server tells us. Another appetizer of artichoke tortellini was as delicate as the version served ten blocks downtown. A midcourse of foie gras torchon was a minor misstep--too much liver and too little accompaniment. It begged for something more crunchy than the measly helping of rhubarb batonettes and pistachios that dotted our plates.

An entree of truffle-stuffed squab was crispy and delicate and medium rare and came with two tiny empanadas filled with ground offal. The highlight of a duck entree--a breast over black rice--was a confit leg in a rich sabayon. It could have functioned as its own appetizer. Roasted radishes with sugar snap peas were bathed in a sauce that also tasted a lot like Hollandaise.

A cheese board was fine, with no real memorable touches. What was memorable, though, was a dark chocolate mousse with brandied cherries. I could have skipped the rum bananas and the gratis almond biscuit with raspberries and mango entirely. It was a precious meal, and from the looks of things, the Upper East Side appears to be doing quite well, indeed.

*

Cafe Boulud

20 East 76th Street

New York, NY 10021

212.772.2600

Flexing My Mussels

On the train to meet my friend for Friday Night Lights, or whatever you want to call it, I flipped to the 'Tables for Two' section in my most recent (ahem, unread) New Yorker.  The week's review was, somewhat surprisingly, for the very restaurant I was meeting my friend to explore, a newly opened seafood joint on the upper east side by the name of Flex Mussels. 

The name sucks, it really does.  It may be one of the worst names and best concepts currently operational in the City.  Flex is actually a Canadian import, eh.  The original Flex Mussels calls Prince Edward Island, the source of the restaurant's ample mussel selection, home.  

If you are truly a mussel lover--the kind that even eats the half-opened ones, the kind who drinks the broth with the mussel's shell, the kind that's in it for the seafood and not the butter--you will like (nay, love) Flex Mussels.  The conceit is successful because it is focused and because it does not veer off into the territory of other bivalves.  Flex offers six oysters on the half-shell, hailing from both the east and west coasts.  They offer a crab cake, a "fish of the day," a steak, and a few nondescript appetizers.  They offer one very good plate of smoked salmon that comes with dressed arugula, chivey sour cream, and a caper tapenade.  

And then there's the mussels. 

I lost count of how many mussels Flex actually offers, but they come in three or four separately priced categories, from about $16 to $20 per pound of mussels.  They range from simple to sublime (the most elaborate and opulent dish we sampled was the Champagne and black truffle variety), but the offerings never trick you into believing that the dish is about anything more than the mussels.  

My friend preferred the obvious luxury of shaved black truffles in our pricier mussel dish, while I gravitated to the rich southern-style suckers, which swam in a broth of ham, grilled corn, butter, and cream.  The night's special was a miso-based broth with sliced duck and ginger, a tempting alternative to my pork-based option, but my friend felt uninspired by the Asian influence, so we stayed more local with our choices.  

Of course, the best part of mussel-eating is the leftover broth and Flex does justice to this byproduct by providing perfect bread with charred edges and a chewy interior, great for absorbing all that butter and wine and who-knows-what-else at the bottom of the pan.  

Desserts were classic, indulgent, and tasty.  I could easily have eschewed restraint and ordered all four, the blueberry-stuffed doughnuts, the red velvet cake stuffed with cream cheese frosting, the caramel apple brioche, and the chocolate float with salty caramel.  But that would have been kind of gross.  So we settled on doughnuts and red velvet cake.  The doughnuts were soft like beignets, piped full of warm blueberry jam, and floating in a pool of vanilla cream.  Red velvet cake arrived looking more like a jelly roll.  The ice cream at its side, butter-and-sugar flavored and topped with salty-sweet pecans, couldn't have been more perfect for my particular palate. 

The restaurant's greatest failure was its wine by the glass program.  Sure, they ordered Muscadet by the glass; not to would have been a criminal offense.  But where were the off-dry rieslings, the chenin blancs?  By the glass, they were nowhere to be found, leaving me and my bivalves to slurp through adequate domestic pinot gris.  

But judging by the line and bar-crowd that had accumulated during the course of a meal, such menial quibbles do not make or break a restaurant.  

*

Flex Mussels

174 E. 82nd Street

New York, NY 10028

212.717.7772