Garment District Dinner

The NoMad. Will Guidara and Daniel Humm's latest joint foodie project. A dark bar leads to a formal host stand, where a maitre'd with an anemic sense of humor takes my coat and leaves me to fend for myself to meet my guest: through the carpeted dining room, into the back bar, and back into another room aptly called The Library, where books line the walls of a dark-paneled room. Instantly, it's a scene. Ben Leventhal of Eater saunters in; the black-clad cocktail waitress will not let us sit at a table for two, since tables "with books on them" are reserved. Except, it's a library. There are books everywhere.

Cocktail lists come in books, but the system is flawed, with pages sticking out every which way. Cute idea, if you can make it work. Cuter is the mythic bottles of booze, hiding in fat books on The Library's walls. Find one, and it's yours, but it's gauche to look with so many people staring into cocktails.

We are exported back into the dining room, which feels empty and full at the same time. Too many staff members. Too few diners. Too many people tripping through the room and knocking our chairs. We order a three course meal: two snacks, a seafood tower, and an entree for two with another appetizer in lieu of a side. Snacks arrived in seconds, thin pastry cigars stuffed with sweetbreads and a rillette jar of beef tartare with brioche squares. Our wine came. Seconds later, the seafood tower--a staggering $25 per person--came, too. It was, perhaps, the star of the evening. Uni in a sweet gelee with a brunoise of apple hit all the right notes, as did a clean oyster with a similar apple garnish. The fat from cubed hamachi was cut by shaved fresh white horseradish. King crab benefitted from lemon and lobster benefitted from just a hint of mayonnaise and fresh tarragon. A scallop shell played host to a chopped raw scallop with crunchy accoutrement.

But we still had another bottle of wine to tackle and food was coming with a surprising ferocity. And so we tacked on an additional course, which arrived shortly after our bread service, a soft and salty onion and potato flatbread. Next, tagliatelle with more king crab and perhaps a bit too much butter, mitigated only by a salad of chiffonaded sugar snap peas with pancetta and parmesan.

Then the entree arrived, a whole chicken brought for us to see first--lacquered brown skin, and a plume of fresh herbs. Minutes later, the chicken reemerged as a butchered, plated thing, a breast apiece, a smear of truffled pommes puree, three spears of white asparagus, and a medley of morels and chicken thighs in butter for us to share. A bone marrow appetizer, topped with croutons and anchovy paste, provided the heft necessary to sop up all that spare fat.

We reached the end and ordered dessert, a weird if impressive rumination on milk and honey (milk ice cream with honey, crisp meringue) and a peanut butter bar that brought to mind a sophisticated s'more. NoMad is still negotiating sea legs--uneven service, an abruptness when it comes to pushing food out--but the food itself isn't the problem. Nor should it be.

*

The NoMad

1170 Broadway

New York, NY 10001

212.796.1500

Recap

It has been a week of worldly food adventures and I have stayed away from my computer too long. Alas, I come to you, dear reader, with a post about my week's dalliances.

On Tuesday, it was down to TriBeCa for Jewish food, Kutsher's, an import from the Borscht Belt. It's a quirky, often fun take on Jewish classics: crispy latkes served with creme fraiche and caviar; pillow-light meatballs in brown gravy; a pickle platter of sours and half sours and green tomatoes; airy halibut gefilte fish, not suspended in gloppy goo. A take on a traditional Jewish meat platter is a thing of beauty, with fatty duck pastrami, chalk-less chopped liver, soft tongue, and even softer corned beef. Served with brown mustard and rye, it reminded me a little too much of deli lunches set forth by my paternal grandmother, back when we all still congregated at her plantation in New Jersey.

A matzo ball soup was light and fluffy, nothing at all like the sluggish specimen my own grandmother makes. But entrees took a less enticing turn. A roast chicken for two was depressingly dry (and in this respect, maybe the restaurant nailed my family's home cooking dead-on). Kreplach were gummy and filled with walnuts, a contrasting texture that I couldn't seem to make work. Duck schmalz fries were a gimmick and tasted like regular fries. The black and white cookie sandwich served for dessert was rock-hard, closer to shortbread than the yellow cake I love so much. A rainbow cookie ice cream sundae was strangely gelatinous, appealing only to me and not to the rest of my dining crew. But a chocolate egg cream brought our table back to 1950s New York and the soda fountains that have long since stopped pouring. So at least that was a resounding success.

My Wednesday meal could not have been more different from Tuesday's. At Kajitsu, the vegetarian Japanese restaurant in the east village, I ordered an eight-course tasting menu, known as this month's Tanenoko Special. Think you can't be satisfied by vegetables alone? Think again. The meal was mostly stunning, undone only by one clunky course. Plum sake to start was cold and sweet and served on ice. Coasters were made from tiny slips of paper, or embroidered pucks of cloth. A carafe of a junmai daijingo came in a cold metal pourer with delicate etched glasses and, later, green tea arrived in handmade ceramic pots.

We started with a salad of spring vegetables--fiddlehead ferns made their first seasonal appearance--in a salty soy gelee. It was delicate and beautiful and important tasting. So, too, was a kohlrabi soup with a grilled patty of something unidentifiable. Creamy and rich, it made the absence of meat unimportant. Next: a bento box of contrasting items. Here, a piece of smoked taro on a skewer. There, a single Brussels sprout with bean paste. Spring scallions and white wood ear mushrooms in a mustard miso, served over a lime. A plum dipping sauce. Magnificent.

Our soba course was springy and chewy and perfectly seasoned. On the side, we were offered scallions and wasabi paste and three perfect bamboo shoots, still toothsome and fried in hot tempura batter. Our "main" course was an unfortunate misstep: phyllo-wrapped gluten with no taste or texture; a weird-tasting worcestershire sauce; tasteless grilled cabbage; snap peas over a deplorably underseasoned parsnip puree. The plate's only star was a mix of glass noodles and mushrooms and leeks cooked in a corn husk.

But a clay pot rice dish brought us back to center, with its sheer delicacy. It was studded with bamboo shoots and accompanied by one of the finest tastes of the evening, an umami-filled red miso soup with mushrooms and a tiny side of pickled Napa cabbage and daikon. Dessert was a mochi filled with red and white bean paste and wrapped in a strange and interesting pickled cherry leaf. Then, tiny candies, one in the shape of a cherry blossom, the other not identifiable, served with two hot mugs of frothy green tea. It was a breathtaking meditation on the importance of putting vegetables in a starring role.

*

Kutsher's TriBeCa

186 Franklin Street

New York, NY 10013

212.431.0606

*

Kajitsu

414 East 9th Street

New York, NY 10009

212.228.4873