| best of the week |
 Saloon-Keeping
When P.J. Clarke’s reopens on February
20, the new owners—actor Timothy Hutton and
veteran restaurateur Phil (Docks) Scotti among
them—won’t mind a bit if their painstaking
yearlong construction job goes unnoticed. In fact,
they’d prefer it. That’s why, even though
they gutted the ghost-ridden saloon and modernized the
infrastructure, they kept careful track of where every
last relic went, including the jukebox, the chalkboard
menus, and the ashes of an especially loyal former
customer. Change is most apparent upstairs at the
Sidecar, a posh, artfully aged addition with a
separate entrance, a 280-bottle wine list, and its own
kitchen, whence will come Key West stone crabs,
char-grilled lobster, and various other upscale
alternatives to P.J.’s signature bacon
cheeseburger and home fries.
P.J. Clarke's
915 Third Avenue, at 55th Street
212-317-1616
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Parish & Co.
At Orsons, the restaurant Shaun Rosenberg opened in
the East Village a decade ago, the menu melded French,
Italian, and Asian accents in the then-burgeoning New
American style. Apparently, Rosenberg hasn’t
lost his appetite for it: Last week, he and his
brother Jeremy opened Parish & Co., where chef
Frank Castronovo (an alumnus of Bouley and Jean
Claude) goes global, with dishes as diverse as
sesame-sprinkled cold buckwheat noodles and
pappardelle with braised-pork ragù. The
restaurant caters to another culinary trend, the
two-tiered portion—small for tasting, large for
sharing—which makes it easy to graze through a
selection of crostini, seasonal vegetables, eclectic
pastas, even rack of lamb with caponata.
202 Ninth Avenue, near 22nd St.
212-414-4988
· Cuisine: Eclectic
36-92
Little Korea isn’t lacking for barbecue joints
where diners can grill their own bits of marinated
meat over portable charcoal pots. But 36-92,
with its quasi-industrial décor, Starck chairs,
and friendly service, is still a welcome addition to
the kimchi district. The menu, while not as voluminous
as some of the neighbors’, covers all the
basics, from pajun and bibimbap to casseroles and
stews. The main attraction, though, is the black-Angus
beef—the sirloin, the skirt, and especially the
short ribs—that you grill, then wrap with rice
in lettuce leaves slathered with sweet pepper paste.
5 West 36th Street
212-563-3737
· Cuisine: Korean
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 Let's Roll
One more reason why, even if Dr. Atkins is right,
we’re willing to die young and pudgy: Italian
rice balls, a.k.a. arancine. Once a humble
street snack associated with Brooklyn pizzerias or
found under the odd Mulberry Street heat lamp, the
softball-size Sicilian orbs stuffed with a little
ragù, cheese, and peas, then bread-crumbed and
deep-fried, have cleaned up their act, slimmed down
(just a little), and are running with a much tonier
crowd.
Otto Enoteca Pizzeria
1 Fifth Avenue
212-995-9559
Never one to waste a crumb, Mario Batali coats his
arancine—stuffed with chicken-liver ragù,
mirepoix, and buffalo mozzarella—with
whatever’s left in the bottom of the bags of his
daily Sullivan Street Bakery order. As the seasons
change, so do the fillings (and the leftovers), so
look for inspirations like caponatina, yellow squash,
and garlic chives, or sweet-and-sour pumpkin with
caciocavallo come October. Wednesdays only.
Compass
208 West 70th Street
212-875-8600
Chef Neil Annis calls them saffron risotto fritters on
his menu and serves them atop a squiggle of red-pepper
coulis, but he can’t fool us. Any Sicilian
grandmother would recognize them for what they are at
twenty paces.
Crispo
240 West 14th Street
212-229-1818
Frank Crispo must have read The Sopranos Family
Cookbook, wherein the fictional muse, Artie Bucco,
reveals his modern-Italian-cooking
philosophy—“innovate or die.” That
would explain Crispo’s fever-pitched rotating
roster of rice balls, from one filled with scampi,
chervil, and lemon on a blanket of eggplant-and-tomato
confit to another stuffed with wild mushrooms and
Parmesan and served with pristine greens.
Bondi
7 West 20th Street
212-691-8136
Arancine means “little oranges” in
Italian, a reference to the rice ball’s
appearance. Bondi’s version, six to an order,
are more like clementines. They’re stuffed with
a tasty ragù or mozzarella and peas, which
(it’s said) represent the seeds of the orange.
Don’t squeeze ’em for your morning juice,
though.
Craftbar
47 East 19th Street
212-780-0880
A fontina-and-Pecorino filling instead of the more
common mozzarella, a pool of piquant tomato sauce, and
elegant presentation elevate these otherwise
traditionalist rice balls out of the ordinary and into
our greedy little mouths.
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 Going With the Grain
Two new quirky imports from Kiuchi—the
180-year-old Japanese sake producer that crossed over
into the beer business a few years ago—continue
to wean us off Sapporo. If you’re an indecisive
sake and beer drinker, try the Hitachino Nest Red
Rice Ale. Beautifully colored, with a pungently
sweet-and-bitter, berrylike finish, it’s made
from both sake and ale yeasts. "It’s the most
sakelike beer in the world,” says Richard Scholz
of Brooklyn’s gourmet beer emporium, Bierkraft.
If you’re lactose-intolerant, do not try
Hitachino’s Sweet Lacto Stout, made from
10 percent milk sugar—a rare interpretation of
an old British style, sweet and not bitter at all, the
opposite of drier, more astringent Irish stouts.
According to Scholz, it’s the type of
old-fashioned sweet stout once recommended to pregnant
women and small children.
Bierkraft
177 South 4th Street, Williamsburg
718-302-2663 |
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Ask
Gael
 I’m tired of trendy—let it be
tried-and-true.
You won’t find licorice sticks in your lamb
chops at Ouest. When it’s new on the
menu, it’s simply yet another lip-smacking toss
of some familiar food, most likely scented with garlic
or punctuated with bits of pork. Like the new quick
olive-oil sauté of calamari with a “ton of
garlic,” chef Tom Valenti notes, swimming in a
puddle of lightly stewed tomato with, oh yes, chopped
soppressata. Or like pappardelle with braised lamb,
with garlic, of course. Tonight I’m rhapsodizing
over the new sturgeon steak, meaty and slightly rare,
with black-trumpet mushrooms and sweet peas on
carnaroli rice steeped in mushroom broth with truffle
purée, and garlic purée too. Riding the fish
is a little salad, dressed simply in lemon and olive
oil, sprinkled on top with—toasted garlic chips.
It’s always a challenge for chefs to rotate old
favorites off the menu, says Valenti: “Customers
made us bring back the duck ragù with
gnocchi.” So be it.
Ouest
2315 Broadway, near 84th
Street
212-580-8700
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In the Archives
Restaurant Openings
Restaurant Buzz
Photos: Tina Rupp (1& 5), Patrik Rytikangas, Ellie Miller, Kenneth Chen (4 & 6).
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