Restaurant review, Blink and the Menu Changes.

I can’t believe they’re serving food in this chicken coop!” cried one of my grumpy, slightly disoriented guests, as we sat crouched in our little white café chairs at our rickety, farm-style tables, waiting for events to unfold at John Fraser’s radical new exercise in experimental dining, What Happens When. Fraser’s latest restaurant, as you may have heard, is not really a restaurant at all. At least it’s not a restaurant in, say, the static, prosaic, everyday way that Fraser’s critically acclaimed Upper West Side establishment Dovetail is. According to the notes on the back of the menu, this is a “temporary restaurant installation,” which means that the menu will change completely every month, along with the décor and music, the drinks program, and even the waiters’ outfits. A similar experiment in perpetual reinvention has been under way at Park Avenue Winter (a.k.a. Park Avenue Spring, Summer, Autumn) for years, but there’s another twist here: Fraser’s whimsical “culinary, visual, and sound experiences” will last only nine months (which is how long Fraser holds the lease on his chicken-coop-size space), after which the restaurant will go dark forever and everyone will go home.

On my first visit to Fraser’s culinary performance space, the little room (which in more conventional times housed the popular Nolita bistro Le Jardin) was painted all in black, with white lines drawn on the walls and floor, like on an architectural rendering or a chalkboard. Various builder motifs dangled here and there (empty windows, a mirror, a ladder), along with the kind of temporary, bare-bulb lamps you normally see illuminating suburban garages or construction sites. A month later, this tabula rasa theme had been replaced with an assemblage of red birdhouses, several of which were suspended above our heads in a thatchlike installation made of little green sticks. To encourage what the menu described as “a whimsical romp through our fantastical forest,” deer and bird tracks were painted on the floor, and the air was filled with the ambient sounds of what might have been rustling leaves, or popping popcorn, or bongo drums.

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