How do you capture that elusive mix of style, inventive spirit, and pixie dust (known to sociologists and stodgy critics as “the Zeitgeist”) and put it in a bottle? If anyone knows, it’s Taavo Somer, the designer, entrepreneur, and all-around downtown tastemaker whose wildly popular back-alley restaurant Freemans launched a thousand dining fads when it opened, five years ago. Before Freemans, trendy New York restaurants tended to advertise their trendiness in all sorts of standard, conspicuous ways. After Freemans, the fashionable new joints (Waverly Inn, Minetta Tavern) went underground. They served variations of the retro club food that came out of Freemans’ tiny kitchen (roast trout, bacon-wrapped prunes, curry soup) and slavishly decorated their rooms with the kind of carefully distressed New Vintage tchotchkes (tattered hunting prints, deer antlers, stuffed owls) that Somer and his friends scavenged for their restaurant at flea markets.
Now Somer and his partner have opened a second, slightly more populist venture in their old East Village stamping ground called Peels. Unlike Freemans, the new restaurant is located on a tricked-up stretch of the Bowery, which is fast becoming lower Manhattan’s answer to the Champs-Élysées. The spacious, airy two-floor space is clean and featureless (as opposed to cluttered and full of character) and fitted with familiar farm-style wooden tables and the kind of giant twig arrangements you see at tonier establishments uptown. In accordance with today’s (or last year’s) dining fashion, the kitchen serves southern grub (fried chicken, ham, eggs and grits, etc.) and a selection of grass-fed-beef steaks, which are butchered in-house. The obsessively constructed cocktails have catchy, slightly tortured names like the Joey Ramone and the Chocolate Julep, and as you sip them, waiting for your bowl of hush puppies to arrive, you can’t help thinking that you’ve seen this particular version of the Zeitgeist before.
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