A DINING FRENZY
Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK -- It’s 6:30 on a Tuesday night and the Spotted Pig in Greenwich Village is not a restaurant but a scrum. Every seat in the swine memorabilia-infested place is taken, the hefty hostess is threatening a 90-minute wait for tiny tables and the guy wedged next to me at the bar barely can lift his fork from his shepherd’s pie without hitting my eye with his elbow. It’s like eating on the A train but with better wine, not to mention more suits and cell phones per square inch.

It’s the kind of scene you would expect to find five minutes’ walk north, at the sprawling new Spice Market in the meatpacking district, where two of the most admired names in fusion food are turning away heat-seeking throngs. Or two minutes’ walk west, at the new Italian restaurant Barbuto where California legend Jonathan Waxman is overseeing the underventilated kitchen. But the fact that it is playing out in a self-described gastropub with no deeper credentials than backing from celebrity chef Mario Batali and cooking by an alumnus of the River Cafe in London says everything about how the Manhattan restaurant scene has risen from near death by timidity and comfort food.

These days it’s almost as if 9/11 never happened and the Eighties are back as unabashedly as Donald Trump’s hair-like appendage. The city is still struggling economically, but credit cards certainly appear to be melting down on every corner as new restaurants open with ambition, energy and wine lists where soave starts at $50 and bottles do not top off under four figures. Greed might not formally be good again, but no one’s saying it’s bad, either. If you want to light up at DavidBurke & Donatella, there’s actually a smoking section in the white stretch limousine waiting right outside.

After a bleak couple of months when all the news seemed to be closings of musty legends -- Lutece, La Cote Basque, Gage & Tollner -- suddenly the focus is on the shiny new, and not just at the fancy food court in the mall, as snarkier Manhattanites dismiss the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle.
Some of the best young name chefs are reinventing themselves, as Laurent Tourondel has done in casting off his reputation as the seafood wizard of Cello and opening heavy-on-the-red-meat BLT Steak in midtown. He still serves fish, including an outstanding tuna tartare, but he makes his money off the $72 porterhouse for two, with all side dishes extra (gnocchi as good as any in Italy, superlative braised collard greens, heart-stopping potato gratin).

Some of the best older name chefs are finding new perches, as Christian Delouvrier has done since his two new ventures failed to materialize after Lespinasse closed and he decided to join Alain Ducasse at ADNY in midtown.
And many chefs whose names are not exactly household words are packing their dining rooms by focusing on midlevel, midpriced dishes that are just creative enough, as Marc Murphy is doing at the new Landmarc in Tribeca. His oversized menu offers up everything from warm goat cheese profiteroles to boudin noir, with steaks, mussels and salade nicoise in between.

As fast as these restaurants open, they have to run to keep up with new competition. Gray Kunz, a groundbreaking chef who held four stars at Lespinasse, is set to open Cafe Gray in the TWC any day, maybe even by the time Thomas Keller gets the fire damage repaired at his ill-fated Per Se. Steve Hanson of the huge BR Guest group is opening his first venture in the meatpacking district this week, with the chef from the highly rated Fiamma overseeing the kitchen at Vento.

It all represents a sea change on this small island. For the longest time after the darkest days of late 2001, heavily residential neighborhoods were where Manhattan restaurateurs went shopping for space. New Yorkers were clinging close to home, and chefs including Charlie Palmer and Tom Valenti catered to them, opening nonthreatening places on the tame Upper West Side, for instance.

But now the tectonic plates seem to be shifting under the city, and the map is being redrawn. Diners here, after all, can get just about anywhere by subway, for the same $2 whether they’re heading for Times Square or deepest Harlem.
And so the grubby meatpacking district, just on the edge of Greenwich Village, is now the prime destination for chefs looking to feel literally on the cutting edge, partly because hotels like the Gansevoort House and snooty clubs like the Soho House are opening on the brick streets just east of the Hudson River. The Lower East Side, where so many streets still look straight out of “Crossing Delancey” with Spanish subtitles, is just as much a hot property now, with its own hotel, superb movie theater, cheap rents and singular atmospherics.

Even the bleak streetscape of far-west Chelsea has attracted restaurateurs who believe that if you design it, they will come. Right across from the housing projects is the Biltmore Room, with famously creative Gary Robins plying his crossover cuisine, and it’s doing so well I have yet to snare a reservation (it’s my fault: I just don’t want to eat at either 5:30 or 11). Not only is it drawing from all the art galleries displaced from Soho but it also pulls from a huge pool of free spenders working at the Starrett-Lehigh building, home to upscale companies including Clicquot wines, Assouline publishers and the ultimate style setter, Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Huge waves of tourists, especially of the flush euro- and yen-spending variety, are also changing where and how New York eats. Several of the newest hip restaurants are in hotels willing to invest in that little edge only a name chef guarantees. Incongruous as it sounds, Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit is now serving sushi (foie gras with tuna, for starters) and green tea doughnuts at Riingo, in the Alex in midtown. A handful of refugees from the gilded four-star Lespinasse have transformed the restaurant at the Time Hotel off Times Square into Oceo, where the Champagne-roasted striped bass arrives under artichoke mousseline and over a ragout of horseradish and cubed brioche (and where appetizers run $19).

Asiate, on the 35th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in the Time Warner Center, is the ultimate hotel restaurant, one that feels like Chicago or Hong Kong although it looks right down on Central Park. The vertiginous view almost detracts from Noriyuki Sugie’s creations, such as grilled muscovy duck breast twisted into a hot dog-like cylinder and served with white beans and duck prosciutto, which are not quite as wild as those at his last job, at Tetsuya in Sydney. Tim Zagat of guide notoriety was one of the few diners at a recent lunch who was not taking souvenir photos with either his digital camera or a cell phone.

(The tourist impact is even felt at grubby street level: a friend whose companion runs a Soho bar unchanged from the Seventies swears not one patron on a recent Saturday spoke English he could eavesdrop on.)

For stay-at-home New Yorkers, too fear-ridden to get on a plane anymore, many of the new restaurants could pass for vicarious travel. Spice Market is so overdesigned to look like somewhere else, complete with straw suitcases wedged near the rafters in the subterranean lounge, that it would feel at home in Mall of America. La Bottega, in the Maritime Hotel, struggles mightily to evoke a seaside bar in Italy (big cans of tomatoes stacked to the ceiling don’t quite do it, though). And Spotted Pig tries so hard to be English that it speaks with a Madonna accent.

New Yorkers have always been suckers for faux, with bistros like Balthazar knocking off Paris, but never more than today. Spice Market, opened by Jean-Georges Vongerichten with Gray Kunz consulting, has gotten mixed reviews for its interpretations of Asian street food, including mushroom egg rolls with galangal sauce, steamed lobster with chilies and durian ice cream. But surprisingly sophisticated people all seem to be taken in by the design. It looks like Asia, all right, but only if you’re thinking of a theme restaurant like Indochine 1929 in the yuppie area of Hong Kong.

The first three restaurants to break out of the post 9/11 bleakness apparently set the tone by putting as much, or more, emphasis on design as food. The Biltmore’s decor relies on walls and wood and marble salvaged from the famed hotel of the same name; it could be a Rockefeller room in the Metropolitan Museum. Lever House, in the groundbreaking Sixties skyscraper on Park Avenue, looks like a very sleek first-class lounge in the old Pan Am Terminal at JFK Airport. (The heavy-on-the-crust fruit crisp completes the aura.) And Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side, cousin of Balthazar, is a designed-to-the-last-crazed-tile restaurant posing as a restoration of a neighborhood landmark. (One clue not to believe your eyes: The Heimlich “poster” is screened onto the busboys’ T-shirted backs.)

But at the best of the new places the scene fades once the first plate lands. DavidBurke & Donatella is in a townhouse on the Upper East Side that blends elements of both Versace and Brooke Astor, with an old-style chandelier and voguish white leather chairs. But the cooking has its own singular style, courtesy of Burke, one of the most fearless chefs in New York, who made his name at the River Cafe in Brooklyn and was clearly itching to return to those wild and crazy days when he could send petits fours out still baking on a hot little cast-iron stove.
A meal there might start with shotglasses of foie gras mixed with steak tartare and progress through lobster-Sauternes flan served in a brown eggshell with a quail breast and beggar’s purse of the leg on the side. For main courses, there are veal the size of a haunch, cut like filet mignon, and lobster that’s labeled steak and is about as big as a sirloin. The signature dessert is a “tree” with cheesecake lollipops perched at the end of each branch, perfectly silly but somehow just the right finish for right now.

A meal like this would have been unimaginable only six months ago, when so many chefs were reluctant to risk being mildly creative, let alone wildly whimsical. Now even a place like the Spotted Pig can do more than grill up burgers and ladle out smoked haddock chowder. It can offer sauteed veal kidney with turnips and still attract longer lines than a new Krispy Kreme outlet. The fear factor may not be completely gone in this city, but it’s faded for now.