UNTITLED at The Whitney

Just the name Michael Anthony sets its own bar very high- a good thing for a restaurant that kind of doesn't have a name of its own.   In collaboration with iconic restaurateur Danny Meyer and situated in the renowned Whitney Museum, though, I could hardly keep my expectations from soaring.  The early word, however, had been hit and miss- most confoundingly, as it were, for the service.   But if those premature critiques had any merit to them at all, they would be attributed solely to opening jitters.  The service was as adept as the restaurant is lovely, and the food worthy in both taste and appearance of the masterpieces displayed in the museum adjacent.

The walls are glass, creating only nominal divide between indoor and outdoor seating (of which there is both).  By the time prime dining hour rolled around, not a table was empty in or out.  The waitstaff, flitting about briskly between the open kitchen and numerous tables, are smartly clad in black aprons and crisp white shirts: just like Chef Anthony himself, who was intent on quality control of everything coming out of the kitchen, and simultaneously keeping a watchful eye on diners and staff alike.

It's hard not to be distracted by the glory of the room itself, however, befitting of a restaurant in an art museum.  It is a lofty space, open and airy, beautiful in its simple lines.  As the sun sets, still at a rather late hour on this particular mid-summer evening, the mood changes significantly, adopting a magical effervescence that twinkling lights and dimmed lighting always does.

Pickly wonders.

Peas, please.

The food follows that same aesthetic, merging a whimsical artistry with Chef Anthony's signature seasonal focus and masterful technique.  Even a simple bowl of peas seemed special; toothsome orbs of brilliant green just kissed with fresh mint atop a thin swath of creamy, dense yogurt.  This was all about the peas, no bells and whistles, because they sang by themselves.  A small dish of lightly cured vegetables varied with each

litle bit, jicama with a sweet-sour bite, carrots with a pickly snap, and (the best) pale yellow beans with a zippy kick.  Another snack of zesty chickpea puree was served with crispy flatbread planks and  halved heirloom cherry tomatoes that leaked their luscious juices into the mix, creating rich and umami-laden mouthfuls that most hummus only dreams of.

The one dish I tried that night that didn't thrill me was a beet melange with verbena and yogurt, with  a surfeit of lush summer berries tipping the scales from salad to sweet .  It would work marvelously as a palate-cleanser, however, or a pre-dessert course. Keeping on the light and refreshing side, a slightly more substantial dish of cucumber, smashed and ribboned, lolled in an verdant,  oniony broth delicately elevated with a murmur a soy and sesame to enliven earthy buckwheat soba noodles tangled furtively

 underneath.    Fluke with radish, sorrel and lime was inarguably gorgeous enough to merit consideration for the Whitney's collection were it not so delightful going down: a study in the ethereal lightness of an ocean breeze.





As our entrees arrived, the sun bowed out, that magical ambiance filtered through the room.   The cupped overhead lights take on a lunar glow, and the spots refract off the steely glass creating a discernibly different feel.  It will be interested to see how winter temperatures will be handled: one wonders if that thick plate glass will be able to hold out the cold.  But on this balmy summer evening, that was the least of our concerns.  The focus now was on our main plates, my favorite
 being the tilefish served in a buttery corn puree and topped with diaphanous coins of summer squash- balancing
indulgently rich with the purity of summertime.  I wondered out loud where tilefish-such a wonderful fish (also recently sampled at Benoit) - had been all my life, and our waiter quickly interjected "In the Long Island Sound", verifying the local/sustainable aesthetic by which their seafood is procured.  On a meatier note, four big spare ribs were hearty and juicy, smoked in a peppery rub and kissed with the sweetness of an apricot glaze.  Alongside the entrees, we tried the pole beans with calamari and hazelnuts.  The beans, yellow and green, were cartoonishly long and fun to eat, a long, flat bean you have to cut into pieces to attain manageable bites.  They achieved a blistered char from an ephemeral pass on a ripping hot grill along with tiny, tender calamari, scorched until the tasted like bacon of the sea, all beach smoke and gently ocean salinity.
   And just when I thought things couldn't get any better, there were the turnips with green beans, pecorino and guanciale: a salty vegetable carbonara that countered the hearty decadence of that sauce with mild summer produce, taking it from much-too-much to lick-the-bowl clean.





Our dessert shared that characteristic, a simple sounding strawberry-poundcake ensemble, but the cake had been toasted so it's buttery edges crisped to golden, the berries so magnificently flavorful they shoudn't have been real, and all of this slathered in smooth ricotta puree bedecked with tiny pansies.  There are other similarly tempting dessert items, all of which tended away from the meticulous precision of the entree plating and focused on pure pleasure: a thick wedge of peanut butter cake drizzled with syrupy blueberries, or a crowd-pleasing megalith of a chocolate chip cookies served with its own little jar of gently sweet vanilla milk.   I mean, even in an art museum, pretty can only go so far... fortunately here, they've nailed both.   Untitled won't need to worry about finding a name- it has already mastered everything that counts.

 99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014
212-570-3670
info@untitledatthewhitney.com

Beauty & Essex

The name of this place is as indulgent as its food. Rolling up at dusk on an early spring evening, blazing yellow lights scream out from the brick facade like an "EAT HERE" sign outside a 1950's diner. You enter through a faux-beauty shop facade, and through a pale blue painted door an entirely different scene unfolds. And what a scene it is. This is, undeniably, the hot-spot of the moment, where bodies dressed to be noticed cram shoulder to shoulder from the bar to the dining room and beyond. I'm not sure anyone of note actually WOULD come here, but necks are craning and heads swiveling not to miss one if they did. Upstairs, the bustle continues, and without advance reservations, the best you will do is to enjoy the full menu in the lounge or bar (both are actually livelier and more situationally appropriate than the actual dining room, which is a bit subdued)... unless you acquiesce to the dreaded 5:30 or 10:45pm.

After a bit of confusion as to where we might be settled, we ended up on the second floor (the lounge, I believe) on squishy velvet divans with knee-height mirrored tables. This is less comfortable than a proper dining table, but it had a much more buoyant atmosphere there. The room is as dressed up as its
patrons, ropes of pearls loop from the ceiling and mirrors everywhere reflect fluffy white feathers, flickering votive candles and preening girls in tottery shoes. And it is loud. Even without the screeching laugh of the girl in the far corner, the music is thumping, glasses clinking and conversation requires diaphragm support to be heard. If reading up to this point has you intrigued, keep going. If not, please dine elsewhere. The food, for what it is, is quite decent in a yummy, grubby way, but if the sceneyness is going to cause any vexation, the vittles aren't going to be worth the effort. There are some flounces on the menu, but for the most part the cooking is pretty straight-forward.

They started us off with a little amuse of Caesar salad-topped crouton which did amuse me- tasty enough as it was, the complimentary gesture seemed a little upscale for the environs. We ordered quite a bit (probably too much), but thus got a pretty good feel for what the kitchen is doing. The menu starts of with varied raw options from oysters to tartare. Next up are designated "Jewels on Toast", of which I think the Caesar thing could've qualified, but wasn't listed. These, and the "Accessories" side dishes try to enforce the beauty parlor theme, but not that successfully, thus rescuing it from excessive kitsch. Charred shishito peppers are a huge mound of emerald beauties, well seasoned but inconsistently cooked. Some are still raw inside, others perfectly shriveled, but there are enough of 'em to share with at least two other eaters. There is another untitled category witha mishmash of option, including lots of little starchy and fried things: spring rolls, General Tso's monkfish, and oysters with bacon-braised spinach and apple, the oyster in which was all but undetectable amongst the crunchy breading, and the spinach had the flavor cooked right out of it. That said, had you not known the ingredients, it was a tasty little morsel (as such friedy-fried, saucy little tidbits so often are).

Under this same heading fell what we ordered as entrees, though I can't figure out why a Flintstone-sized portion of baby back ribs didn't qualify for "Prime Meats", but anyways. It arrived three hulking chunks of super-sauced meat, so tender as to
fall completely off the rib with just a nudge of a fork. Besides them on the wooden plank was a tower of concentric tempura onion rings, which were pretty wonderful in terms of onion rings. The meat's cloying tangerine barbecue glaze, on the other hand, disguised any flavor it may (or may not) have had, but made for some amusing finger-licking antics for an innocent bystander. Branzino a la plancha was three diamonds of skin-on fish, plated with a silky potato puree surrounded by a hedonistically rich moat of bone marrow gravy, a nod
to its gremolata component, a typical accoutrement of osso bucco. The fish, narrowly filleted as it was, surprisingly escaped overcooking with a edibly crispy skin and tender flesh. Paired with ... oop, pardon me... accessorized with some roasted brussels sprouts made for a solid meal. The sprouts are tossed with bits of roasted tomato and anointed with a lemon-thyme butter, but not excessively so. You could still appreciate the veg itself. There was supposed to be pancetta in there as well, but I couldn't detect it. Simply Roasted Mushrooms are pretty delicious, too, although heavily saline- but this place isn't about nuance and panache. The ambiance provides enough of that. It's more about assertive flavor and crowd-pleasing food: nothing too overwrought or fussy, nor requiring too much of the diner's attention that might distract from people-watching and conviviality.

Wrapping things up, we took our Halle Berry-look-alike waitress's suggestion of the black bottom butterscotch pudding. Its arrival in a dainty glass bale jar was deceiving. This stuff is so dense that the crisp little biscuit-shaped spoons that accompany it don't stand a chance. It's not immensely sweet, nor tremendously butterscotchy, but with the rich layer of pure fudge below, cheesecake-like density and ample size, it'd be hard to finish even with four people. You could try, though, with a cup of their mediocre coffee to go with, and still feel pretty content. For any of its missteps, Beauty & Essex still has a lot going for it. Who says that sometimes its not just about a pretty face?

Beauty & Essex
146 Essex Street
(212)614-0146