Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Restaurant review, Vandaag Tries for a New New Amsterdam.

Phillip Kirschen-Clark mutates in the kitchen.
I've always believed there's no such thing as Dutch cuisine. As a Dutch-surnamed American, I've had to live with that. Especially if you don't include the cooking of former colonies such as Indonesia, Surinam, and South Africa, the food of the Netherlands is basically just rubbery cheeses, boiled potatoes, meat stews, and pickled fish. Which explains why, even though the Dutch have had a profound effect on modern New York (just drive through Bushwick and read the names of the streets), one of the ways is not gastronomic. If you're going to start a Dutch restaurant, you can go one of two ways: play up the bland, starchy, comfort-food aspects, or mutate the hell out of it till it's barely recognizable. Vandaag ("today" in Dutch) has chosen the second route. As if trying to reclaim lost territory, the bistro recently bivouacked at the corner of East 6th Street and Second Avenue, just down the road from St. Mark's Church (built by Dutchman Petrus Stuyvesant in 1799).

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