French
Africa in Little China
Worldly, well-cooked food–heat included.
Les Enfants Terribles
37 Canal St. (Ludlow St.),
212-777-7518
Asiate
80 Columbus Circle, 35th fl.
212-805-8881
A lot of hip restaurants offer delicious-sounding fruity cocktails. You can always tell which ones are owned by people who have a lot of experience selling such drinks, because the walls are painted a dark color and there are ferns. No other factors make cold-climate dwellers more likely to want to sip something cherry-red, with mottled herbs. Les Enfants Terribles, a French-African newcomer in Chinatown, is a fine place to see this weird truth in action.
The restaurant is actually quite good. I can’t help but poke fun, because Les Enfants Terribles is also terribly hot, and hotness makes New Yorkers act silly. People talk about the place like it’s in some tumbleweed-strewn corner of ghost-town Lower Manhattan. It’s actually half a block from the East Broadway "F" station. And who thinks there’s never before been a candlelit hipster fern bar in Chinatown–who, I mean, besides the New York Times reporter whose recent feature about the neighborhood suggested with a straight face that we start calling it "LoLES"?
To those of us a bit more over ourselves, the buzz about Les Enfants amounts to lively background music for some very solid, worldly cooking.
Among the highlights is some beautiful magret canard. It’s billed on the menu as "Duet of Duck" ($18), but an accompanying roll of shredded confit in cabbage with balsamic chutney was outweighed and overshadowed. The two hefty slices of breast at center-plate, meanwhile, were perfectly cooked–a textbook execution that left the thick skin spicy and the medium-rare meat lean and moist.
The chef behind Les Enfants is from the Ivory Coast, and on one recent night the special was moqueca, a fish stew from the Bahia region of Brazil. Yet the restaurant’s primary asset might be the chef’s command of French-culinary fundamentals. Another entree-list main-attraction is filet de loup de mer: bass crusted in potato, on a rosette of autumn vegetables ($16.50).
Korhogofefemougou ($18.50) is said to be "in a marinade of special spices from Ivory Coast," but we found it to be nothing more special than an expertly grilled slab of sirloin, served with crispy cassava instead of steak frites. Tasty enough.
Flashier seasoning action occurs on the appetizer side of the menu, though again the pinnacle flavors aren’t as ethnic as, say, just to take an example, Chinatown. Ragout d’escargots ($8) came topped with a dome of buttery pastry. Underneath was a heady broth of roasted tomato with pastis, delightful to mine for prime, tender snails.
A deserved Les Enfants favorite is the grilled calamari, calamar bois bende ($7), served on a few spoonfuls of roasted tomato sauce with crushed dried chilies. Strong grill flavor in the supple squid plays beautifully off this sweet-hot salsa, while a side of cool chickpeas with cilantro rounds things out.
A soup of the day made from yellow lentils and pureed root vegetables ($6) was probably the least European thing we tried. Its slow-simmered spices conveyed more mellow patience than one commonly tastes in a meatless dish.
The cocktails, by the way, are fine. One called maracana is something of a house specialty. It’s a caipirinha with grape juice. You can’t taste the grape juice–all you get is that caipirinha flavor of jet fuel and candy. At least the price ($7) isn’t trendy-restaurant ridiculous.
Les Enfants Terribles does, in the end, lapse into ridiculous trendy-restaurant behavior: charging for coat check and hiding the fact until you’re ready to leave. I mention it not because it’s a big charge (in fact it’s the same as a standard coat-check tip), but because it put a last-minute damper on the experience of my first visit. Note to the owners: In New York, the tip is standard, the charge is not, so charging without informing is just obnoxious.
Asiate
It’s a given that world-class chefs greatly value the chance to design their own restaurant spaces. Still, it’s surprising that the opportunity is so important to so many that they’re willing to house their establishment in a mall. Or do Keller and Vongerichten and the rest subscribe to the belief, propagated by its designer, that the new Time Warner Center is not a mall? You could put a Spencer’s Gifts and a waterfall in there and it wouldn’t be more of one.
Since the problem with upscale restaurants on the Upper West Side was already that they tend to come off as nouveau riche and tacky, the whole project strikes me as insane. So for my first visit to a new Columbus Circle restaurant, I tried the one 35 floors above the mall, with an up-and-coming chef. It’s in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and it’s called Asiate.
There’s an awesome view, and a very tense staff whose job seems to be to make sure no one who isn’t dining at the restaurant gets to see it. When my party arrived for Asiate’s prix fixe brunch, our table wasn’t ready, and we had a tough time convincing the girl at the velvet rope to let us sit in the airport-lounge-esque bar while we waited. Thankfully, Asiate’s high-modern dining room and French-Asian food are significantly less tacky. It’s not like eating in a mall. Problem is, it’s a lot like eating in a hotel.
Brunch started with incredible muffins, followed by a four-dish tasting plate. It had an espresso cup of duck soup, two cream cheese and lox maki wrapped in crepe, some shrimp cocktail and a jumbo grilled scallop in sticky-sweet Chinese peanut sauce. Decent preparations all, but they had nothing to do with each other.
For entrees, diners choose a pair, perhaps so that the continuing lack of harmony might seem to be their own fault. Again, the feel was bountiful, with nothing sub-par for the price range (brunch is $48). Filet of wild striped bass came with a complex hot pepper paste in its side of sticky rice. It clashed with the sugary scallion sauce in my chicken omelet. Braised veal shank, stewed until it tasted like pot roast, wasn’t a better match for either. One in our party gave up trying to blend and chose the crepes with banana and chocolate sauce for one of his entrees. He was most disappointed in the only choice for dessert: banana crepes.
