[Pigging by Wilfrid: October 15, 2007]
Yes! so Gray-Z right now/Most edibly/It's your chef G/It's your small plates/Restaurant in the making...
Okay, I admit it, the restaurant is called "Grayz" as in graze, as in a buzzing elision of the Gray-Kunz brand. I don't like the name, and I insist we all call it Gray-Z instead. But who could not like the food?
I should be cautious, though. Once bitten, twice shy. I dined at Café Gray the moment it opened, just walked in off the street. Charlie Trotter had been seated. Nobu Matsuhisa was sitting next to me at the bar waiting for his table. The dinner was sensational: it brought back memories of the precision with which Kunz had balanced sweet and sour flavors, classical French and Asian notes, at Lespinasse, his great restaurant in the St Regis Hotel.
But Café Gray is a large operation, and as it quickly filled up and tables started spinning, there were reports of flawed dishes, inconsistency, cloying sweetness or drastic saltiness. I eventually had to admit that someone else's soignée must have rubbed off on me.
In any case, two visits to Grayz now under my belt, and I can only report on what I ate, not what others might eat in the future if this operation grows to fill the space it occupies. (As I understand it the big former Aquavit dining room/atrium is currently private dining only. Peeking through a window, I think there's a chef's table in the kitchen too.)
In any case, the hub of the current operation is the bar room, a few steps below the street, in the landmark 1896 townhouse at 13 West 54th formerly owned by Nelson A. Rockefeller. Rockefeller might have felt at home with the bar crowd: much-travelled broad-shouldered business dudes (and occasional dudette), flicking their French cuffs back and slipping fancy-colored credit cards out of crocodile-skin cases. The tables you see as you enter look uncomfortable. Beyond the bar-seating, some couches for lounging in the rear (in front of a flickering fireplace), then what I'd call proper tables at the back of the room.
Have a drink. A list of seasonal (and doubtless artisanal) house cocktails is paired with a list of classics with a twist. I tried the Toranja, a light and fizzy concoction based on cachaça, the spirit which anchors a traditional Caiprinha,and accented with orange bitters, grapefruit syrup and lemon juice. Since cachaça itself is quite light, this was too much of a citrusy soda for my taste.
I was happier with the Rockefeller Manhattan, and very taken with this Margarita which substituted pomegranate for lime juice.
I have been replicating it quite closely at home ever since.
It may be early days to talk in terms of a Grayz (as opposed to Gray Kunz) signature dish, but it will be hard to eat there without ordering the prawns, grilled and served on a white-hot stone. These excellent creatures are each dripped with kaffir lime rémoulade, a supplementary dish of which is served on the side.
The prawns themselves are good enough. The rémoulade kicks the dish square into Gray Kunz territory - deeply flavored, rich, slightly spicy, shifting your palate suddenly from the Eastern seaboard to Indonesia. Four hefty prawns (and don't burn your mouth on the part in contact with the stone), means this dish can be shared, although it's no burden to eat it alone either. This is worth mentioning, because "finger food and small plates" covers a multitude of portion sizes here.
Witness the weisswurst.
That's a small plate, but it's made for two. There's even a second soft, warm, salty pretzel under the napkin (and to be fair, servers were quite explicit about the different sized dishes). Now, I've visited Germany a number of times, and sucked up the best of the wurst (sorry), but I cannot remember ever eating weisswurst this good. How can I convey the exceptional delicacy of the texture - veal, I'm sure, with chicken? Pork? Lighter than you would ever imagine from the picture. How about if I reminded you of the first time you ever ate David Waltuck's seafood sausage? Think: a meat version of that.
The pretzels were a characteristically classy touch, and the mustard is super-sweet Handlmaier's, a traditional German accompaniment to the white banger.
Conversely, no reasonable person is going to want to share the diminutive and delicious truffled foie gras millefeuille, even if it's not a millefeuille at all.
First time around, I did ask about the millefeuille concept, but hearing it pronounced mill- (as in hill) fooey depressed me. I can only think the crisp shards of parsnip substitute for the thousand leaves. Second time around, I relaxed and enjoyed it. The degree of truffling has been inconsistent, from assertively pungent down to just discernible. The foie and the chanterelles and the port reduction are all terrific. It's sticky in a good way.
There are usually some small plate specials, and if you're not told - ask; but so far I've seen only three entrées: pasta, meat and fish (red snapper).
The cavatelli was a wilfully autumnal pasta dish, with sweet and sharp accents, and it worked very well. Playing off the texture and appearance of the cavatelli shells, we have meaty little chestnuts. A trio plays the acidic theme: pomegranates (everywhere this fall), Asian pears and pickled ramps. Looks like a little something grated on the top there, but hey, they can bottle this and sell it to me.
Fanfare please. Here come the ribs.
These have been a Gray Kunz crowd-pleaser since Lespinasse, and were still on the menu at Café Gray last time I looked. A heap of meltingly soft and sweet cowmeat, sitting in a tarragon-horseradish emulsion like Aphrodite at the water-hole. Too cloying for some palates, I know, but an all-star dish to many. News: the lunch-time menu will be serving this meat in a sandwich. A couple of weisswurst and a short-rib sub - that will fill your boots on a cold winter day.
The citrus panaché with grapefruit granité would make a good pre-dessert. As it is, served generously in a big soup-bowl, it's too much chilly tartness for me, even though the granité is cleverly infused with fizzy wine bubbles.
The misprinted menus have been confusing everyone by appearing to offer a plate of pickled vegetables as a dessert option. In fact, they partner a ripely odorous Swiss cheese, Étivaz. It's the only cheese offered, and again served so generously that it would suit two (or four) people para picar.
A visual treat, the chocolate ice cream bon bons, seething with dry ice as they're brought to the table, were just a bit too cold for me to taste. I think I picked up the rum-raisin flavor.
The food here is expensive, if you submit to regarding it as bar snacks. The variously sized "small" plates are in the teens, except for the pricier oysters and foie gras dishes. The short ribs are fully priced at $39. Cocktails are up there too, typically $14, and I was struck by the high price of wine by the glass - and people grazing, as the restaurant suggests, are likely to order by the glass too.
Conversely, the bottle list has many reasonable options (by smart restaurant standards) from $50 to $60, and I was happy to pay $100 for a premier cru Vosne Romanée. A light meal of two small plates and a couple of glasses of wine at the bar, if you choose nice wine, can easily push you toward three figures. That seems unconscionable. But for a full dinner, sharing cocktails and a good bottle, $150 seems fair. Note that, thus far, chef Gray himself has been cooking most nights. That may change.
So which way-zee is Gray-zee headed? Will the public restaurant expand into "private" space downstairs? Will the menu grow into the full carte which the elegant spaces surely demand? Do we in fact have here a millionaire's version of David Chang's Ssam Bar strategy: restaurant-by-stealth. Chef David, of course, opened Ssam Bar as a wrap and soup joint, and craftily (he'll claim haphazardly) built one of the more adventurous and interesting dinner menus in town, working kind of backwards from an after-hours supper menu.
I have a dollar says Chef Gray and his backers will grow a high-end upscale restaurant out of this "tapas" concept. Heaven knows we need one, and we need Gray Kunz cooking at full-stretch again. At the same time, there's a mint to be made milking Black Amex players over high-concept cocktails and $26 oyster plates. We'll see.
Grayz has the bare bones of a web-site here. This article can be discussed at MouthfulsFood.
And I was pretty much putting the finishing touches to this, when out comes Steve Cuozzo of the Post with a litany of service complaints: "One hour and 45 minutes into the feast, most of what we'd ordered had yet to show up" (and on, and on). Now the estimable Cuozzo is one of the city's more plausible restaurant writers, so if he says it happened it happened. I can only report smooth and graceful service, dining like him at a table on a Saturday evening (judging by gender, my server was different). The meal ran like clockwork.
However, dining at the bar midweek, a series of curious miscommunications prompted the house to comp me a consolatory drink and dessert; no, they didn't know I was writing a review). Some attention does seem to be needed, and the muscle on the door, complete with earpiece, affable though he is, is out of place.
