Peels Slowly and See

At lunch on any given Tuesday, light streams in through a glass storefront onto the communal table and bar seats filled with New York’s leisure class. They sip lattes and maybe indulge in a shandy—a not-sweet mix of ginger beer and modello, from the afternoon drink menu. At night, the upstairs is bathed in a golden light that makes it easy to forget how long you’ve been sitting or how many drinks you’ve had. It’s not sexy. There’s nothing romantic or dark about the space, and the dreamlike elements of Freemans (and, thankfully, the taxidermy) have been left behind in the place where they belong and work.

This is Peels, the new offering from Freemans’ honcho Taavo Somer and company, which is located on the corner of Bowery and East 2nd Street and part and parcel of the upscale development of the once infamous neighborhood that DBGB, John Varvatos, Whole Foods and Pulino’s are already capitalizing on.

It’s a different space from Freemans (rightfully so) and the look is more Dean & Deluca than secret aspen lair. The scene varied each time I went. On the first night of Fashion Week, the space was packed and frenetic; beautiful people squeezed into banquets together, jockeyed for positions at the bar or just stood in amorphous cliques. It was that low roaring ambiance you have to be in the right mood to enjoy. On another evening I easily found a seat at the bar and sipped cocktails in relative peace, having arrived after what had been a brisk but not insane night for the staff. Lunch wasn’t busy and the light was good; I could have spent the afternoon there. Brunch is as crazy as you’d expect.

The menus at Peels are extensive. There are baked goods and cocktails, dinner, lunch and brunch, dessert and a soon-to-be-released late night menu. There are soups and sandwiches, fried chicken with waffles, boozy milkshakes and a great coffee program. That is to say that Peels is a lot of different animals, many of which can constitute the entire scope of less ambitious restaurants. Perhaps surprisingly, most of everything is good, some of it excellent.

The food is a vaguely Southern, or “Yankee Southern” if you will. At dinner I had crudité with radish, carrot and a smoked trout dip, that, in the right quantity, made eating raw vegetables exciting. The quinoa salad was tasty if overdressed for my date’s taste. Fresh-kill fried chicken came crispy on the outside and moist on the inside, the balance so well executed that, were I a chicken, I might consider suicide if I could guarantee that this was how I was going to be prepared. The catfish, sadly, was undercooked, but the hush puppies that accompanied it were what other hush puppies aspire to be. Dessert is worth staying for, especially the sundae with pretzels.

It was the catfish that sums up the experience most concisely. For every step that is missed, every dish that might be off, there are two more that you’d come back for. At lunch, the Gobblecado sandwich, house smoked turkey and avocado, seemed bland, but it might have been simply because the poblano corn soup I’d just eaten, with pickled carrots, onions and just the right amount of fire, was so good. A brownie from the bakery was forgettable, but I ate the St. Louis Gooey Cake so quickly you might have thought I’d unhinged my jaw and swallowed it whole.

There’s nothing bad to say about the cocktails. The list, from Yana Volfson, is inventive but approachable. The drinks, well crafted by some of the best bartenders in the city, feature seasonal ingredients and go down faster than is healthy or reasonable. The Joey Ramone, with apple jack and concord grapes, is a lighter, brighter Jack Rose, and the dark rum Corn ’n Oil was perfectly sweet and viscous.

In general, the food and drink are accessible while fundamentally creative and, when not creative, essentially well-prepared. Peels is a place I’ll be returning to not specifically for lunch or dinner or a late night drink but when the spirit moves me. Once the initial growing pains have passed, it’s easy to imagine Peels becoming the kind of neighborhood spot that sticks around for a decade, not a small feat in a city where restaurants come and go daily.

>> Peels 325 Bowery (at E. 2nd St.), 646-602-7015.