When exactly did lowly tubers become so hip?” one of my slightly startled uptown guests wanted to know as we examined the “Soil” section of the menu at the buzzing, indisputably hip new downtown brasserie Acme, which opened a month or so ago in the old Acme Bar & Grill space on Great Jones Street. On this evening, there were vividly colored salt-baked beets in the “Soil” section, and knobby black-skin heirloom carrots cooked with pine and garnished with lardo and sprigs of rosemary. Most eye-catching of all, however, were the great, plum-size sunchokes, which looked like they’d been unearthed from some rocky organic garden just hours before. The sunchokes were wreathed in a creamy foam laced with winter truffles and Gruyère cheese, and brought to the table by waiters dressed in hip-hugging jeans and skinny black ties. The vegetables had a delicate char on their exterior, like roasted marshmallows, and when I asked one of the skinny-tied waiters why, he said it was because they’d been delicately smoked over little pyres of hay.
Two of the four owners of Acme have been running downtown-scene restaurants for two decades (most notably Indochine and BondSt) and are adept at imbuing even the most earthy dining trend with a sense of glitter and hype. There’s a giant thatch of cherry blossoms propped at the entrance of this chic hunter-gatherer lounge, and the bar is set off by a long mirror-backed wall of glimmering liquor bottles that would make Keith McNally proud. The weathered roadhouse tabletops of the old Acme Bar & Grill have been replaced with elegantly worn Parisian-style café tables, and the old divvied-up bar and dining-room space has been hollowed out into a single large hall. Like the waiters, the mixologists at the bar are dressed like members of an eighties-era rock band, and the room is outfitted with tastefully curated downtown art (prints of Playboy bunny–inspired skulls by Richard Prince and a neon sculpture by Hanna Liden) and rimmed with moon-shaped banquettes studded with black leather.
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