Funky Broome

On our way down to Chinatown we strolled past what until recently was one of Manhattan's greatest restaurants, Savoy. The evening would have been instantly identifiable as one of New York's late-summer's even if we'd been transported to it from another dimension. The air was pleasant, warm and dry with refreshing oceanic breezes that lucky tourists must think we get all year round. Those were picking up because it was getting dark, though it seemed alarmingly early for that. Summer tends to die a dramatic death here. Each year this month brings our best weather, but September's cool evenings can be difficult to enjoy. They elicit the standard human response to jarring change. I'm sure this is why I felt like crying upon seeing Savoy under construction, barely recognizable.

The restaurant is in the process of being reinvented. Sacrificed will be its main virtue, which proved to be too much of a market liability: unconventionality. Savoy's new menu remands the surprising combinations of fresh, seasonal ingredients that were its trademark to a rotating prix-fixe option. Everything else on the new menu is a current Manhattan standard. I'm sure they'll be done well. And the new upstairs dining room will be tasteful for Soho, if not as warm or unique as what it replaces. All in all, it makes sense to assume that Savoy's culinary brilliance was only demoted, not dismissed. The development falls short of depressing. Only the seasonal transition made it seem like a big deal, really.

Not very many blocks away, Funky Broome presents itself like a contestant in some unconventionality competition. You might think it was in Little Italy if you didn't know that the entirety of that theme park is within the borders of Chinatown. The restaurant's intentionally stupid name is indeed a standout, though, next to Umberto's Clam House and all the other pseudo-dignified signage of Mulberry St. It's been there two years and still looks as alien as one of those little red tree frogs. Funky Broome has glass walls on a busy dining room lit like an Off-Broadway stage. Obstructing the view are copies of positive reviews from several publications, all blown up to E-Z-read scale. The gist of them is that Funky Broome serves better-than-average Chinese food. Most also mention that the restaurant offers dishes its neighbors don't.

So in Chinatown the game is to break free of restaurant formula, while in Soho one must conform to succeed?is that it? Or is it that Savoy was excessively funky, while Chinatown fare is too routine, so both establishments had to set course, from opposite directions, for the same middle ground? Perhaps people don't know what the heck they want, and that's the only reason why people who sell things alter their product periodically. Stirred by similar late-summer winds a decade from now, Funky Broome might whittle its vast menu down to Column A and Column B, while Savoy reconnects with its sources for wild game and rare mushrooms. It's time that brings the funk.

Inside Funky Broome, the busy dining room is cramped, and the unconventional decor amounts to very little. The central motif involves pastel colors from a happily bizarre Asian lighting fixture splashing on white formica. There's a zebra pattern on the tiny back cushions of the small, metal chairs. The word "Funky" is built into the banister of a stairway that leads to an even sparer basement, where there is seating for large groups. You could be anywhere between Canal and Chambers, down there. Clientele is significantly middle- and upper-class Chinese.

We were determined to try some of the strangest items on the menu. But we started with duck, because most of the diners around us had chosen to. Funky Broome's crispy roast duck appetizer promises a good deal: a quarter of a duck for $5.95. The portion indeed proved generous, with a ratio in favor of tender breast meat. Its skin had been glazed with brown sugar and cinnamon?so much it actually tasted like a baked breakfast treat. The gravy under the bird had soy and scallion, but not enough to balance the sweetness. (Curiously, the portion of our quarter duck we had wrapped to take home was packed with sprigs of cilantro, which went a ways toward giving the gravy the extra kick it needed.) Funky Broome's chef did an admirable job navigating the principle challenge of duck roasting?achieving crispy skin without drying out what's under it. On the downside, too much fat had been left on the bird, so its browned exterior in places made for less of a luscious wrapper than some greasy fowl candy.

Chicken with jellyfish in sesame sauce ($7.95) tasted unlike anything I've ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant. The unforeseen part was how much it tasted like a lot of dishes I've eaten in Korean restaurants. The jellyfish was cut into ribbon strips and served in a pile, cold like sesame noodles, with the chicken tossed in. In the mouth they felt nowhere near as gelatinous as they appeared. The consistency is somewhere between that of a crunchy vegetable and rice-flour pasta, plus some characteristic seafood springiness, as if so you don't forget it was alive. The sauce on this starter was a thin sesame-vinegar dressing, very salty. A couple of wedges of excellent little pickles were supplied as garnish. Those really should have been featured instead of chunks of plain boiled chicken, which came off like an apology that the dish was otherwise so pungent.

I asked the waiter to explain to me what the "BFT" in BFT shrimp balls ($5.95) meant, and he did. It's Chinese. Service at Funky Broome is exactly as quick and cold as at any successful Chinatown restaurant, but our waiter did take the time to explain, in decent English, the cooking technique the phrase refers to. What didn't come across is the fact that the balls are of that fish-cake dumpling filler one encounters repeatedly at dim sum meals. I'm sure the recipe is basically the same as the one for gefilte fish. Personally, I kind of enjoy the mysterious stuff (I mean the Chinese stuff, though gefilte fish as well), especially with a good mustard sauce, but BFT shrimp balls didn't come with that, or any sauce at all for that matter. The unhelpfulness of our waiter's BFT explanation was compounded by his failure to let us know that the stuffed crab leg we'd ordered ($3.95) was basically BFT crab. It tasted just like the shrimp balls?as I imagine even a ball of BFT venison would. The gods of gefilte have a cruel sense of humor.

Popular at Funky Broome are its steamed rice dishes, which come in what appear to be an authentic cylinder of unadulterated bamboo instead of the usual woven steamer. We also saw a lot of people eating diced meats with various nuts or vegetables. Hong Kong-style noodles seem to be only furtively attempted; Funky Broome is primarily a house of rice. We selected main courses from what we judged to be the menu's most remarkable sections: "Mini Woks" and "Fruity Entrees."

Baked Portuguese stuffed tofu wok with shrimp paste ($10.95) seemed especially adventurous. It turned out to be a brown curry dish, not Portuguese in the least. Presentation in the small, stainless-steel wok was a nice touch, or would have been if the surface of the stew hadn't congealed into a skin by the time it reached our table. The flavor intrigued at first taste but bored by the third. Nutmeg and cinnamon in the mild curry was the curveball?not magic but a simple trick. Suspended in this one-dimensional sauce were some previously frozen peas and carrots, plus large cubes of tofu, which housed another surprise. The core of every cube was a spherical nugget of BFT shrimp. How they got in there it's tough to imagine. Tofu structure must have been built around them?a lot of work for a teeny payoff.

Fruity recipes from the tropical parts of China were probably left off the founding American Chinese-food menus for sound reasons, but surely those don't apply anymore. That's why Funky Broome's inclusion of cod with pineapple, shrimp with banana or pear, scallions with peaches and pork chops with orange is so welcome, especially if they're all as tasty as beef with mango ($11.95). A relatively simple dish, it was a lot better than our tofu mini-wok. Onions, beef, green and red peppers and spears of fresh mango had all been kissed by that most rapturous of summertime heat sources: the grill flame. There was also a light, clear garlic sauce. A lot of effort must have been put into prep: the five colorful ingredients were in perfect proportion and all cut to bitesize (the meat really had to be because otherwise it'd have been too tough). The cooking part, though, relied only on assembly-line expertise.

And that's what it all comes down to at reliably mediocre restaurants. Funky Broome is better equipped for the business than Savoy was, because it understands that the more things appear to change, yet actually remain the same, the more likely they are to be overrated. This process of snowballing confusion might explain a lot about America. In any case, citizens should expect strutting mediocrity every time they hear the word "funky." The adjective is usually shorthand for "disinclined to attempt excellence." To fully rid itself of aristocratic taint, in fact, the restaurant at Prince and Crosby Sts. needs only to reopen as "Funky Savoy."

Funky Broome, 176 Mott St. (Broome St.), 941-8628.