During the recently vanished go-go era, it was relatively easy to hire an eccentric fusion chef from Bangkok, say, or Lyon; hang a chandelier (or a disco ball) from the ceiling of a warehouse downtown; and call your restaurant “cutting-edge.” But in these stripped-down, monochromatic times, it’s more difficult to separate yourself from the pack. Which may explain why the proprietors of Vandaag are marketing their interesting new East Village restaurant in all sorts of eclectic, slightly confounding ways. The name means “today” in Dutch, but the food isn’t Dutch exactly (“We call it ‘Northern European–influenced,’ ” a waiter told me). Vandaag is also a gin bar (cocktails made with old-fashioned Dutch “genever” gin are a house specialty) and a boutique farm-to-table restaurant (ingredients come from “the bounty of the Hudson region,” according to its website), and if you want first-class baked goods (gingerbread, macarons, fresh rye bread), the restaurant has those, too.
Vandaag’s inventive executive chef, Phillip Kirschen-Clark, is an acolyte of Wylie Dufresne (he also worked briefly for Paul Liebrandt at Corton), and he has a penchant for madcap, slightly obsessive locavore experimentation. Pickles are brined on the premises and adjusted according to the season (our $5 pot contained okra and pickled cherries), the excellent bread basket is made from scratch (Kirschen-Clark forages for the flour in local markets) and served with butter and a pat of mashed red lentils, and the salty-sweet Pine Island oysters are doused in white-wine vinegar and genever, in accordance, our friendly waiter intoned, with a recipe from 1840s Manhattan. The dense, strangely addictive house burger is wrapped in smoky bacon and made with a combination of beef and artisanal pork, and my Dutch-fusion version of Caesar salad was garnished with a crumbling of sausages and pistachio and spritzed with a subtle herring vinaigrette.
Read more at http://nymag.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment