Restaurant review, Swimming Against the Tide.

During these dark and tenuous times, there are certain qualities in a new restaurant that all but guarantee sparsely filled dining rooms, skimpy profits, and inevitable doom. Location is one, especially when the establishment in question is on the ground floor of a lonely townhouse building, next to a deserted parking lot, on a bleak stretch of sidewalk above the Holland Tunnel entrance. In this age of a cheeseburger on every menu and hyper-ecoconscious dining, building your restaurant around ambitious high-end seafood dishes is also a high-risk proposition. Intricate emulsions and archaic, formerly trendy foams interspersed with not one but two amuse and intermezzo courses is another dubious, potentially fatal, idea. And in an era when bars are replacing tables, and the most fashionable new restaurants tend to resemble bomb shelters, classically trained waiters sporting silk vests are still another possible kiss of death—not to mention the presence, in the front of the house, of a bow-tie-wearing maître d’ who speaks with a refined French accent.

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