Koloman, The Ace Hotel, 16 West 29th Street, New York (+1 212 790 8970). Starters $15-$26, mains $28-$65, desserts $16, wines from $45
Bear with me. I need to spark up my iPhone torch to read the menu. That’s better. And perhaps I should lean in closer to catch your witty gossip over the management’s booming playlist. Yes, I may be in New York, but there’s an awful lot here that is achingly familiar. On my first night in town, for example, I am dispatched by a knowledgable friend to Cervo’s, a Portuguese-inflected place on the Lower East Side. Despite an eight-hour flight, I could be in Dalston. The narrow, wood-panelled room, with its open kitchen and bandana’d chefs, would fit in very comfortably there.
They’d be lucky to have it. I snack on crispy, deep-fried prawn heads honking richly of the sea, and suck sweet clams off the shell, then mop up their herb-flecked garlicky broth with crusty sourdough. There are expertly grilled two finger-thick shrimps, creating their own spiced liquor and, alongside them, an ingenious take on a Caesar salad in which the Romaine lettuce has been replaced by the bitter hit of radicchio. I swoon over superb piri piri chicken, boned out and cooked flat-iron style, served with a rustling heap of golden fries.
Other things are so very much more New York, however much London would like to pretend it has equally good versions. The deep, crumbly chopped liver at Russ & Daughters, with its buttered, salted and baked matzoh, tastes like the city’s Ashkenazi Jewish history made edible. And while the locals may roll their eyes at the very notion of queueing at Katz’s deli on East Houston Street, and will tell you that really you should have gone to Liebman’s in the Bronx, or Eisenberg’s on 5th, the ludicrously stacked pastrami sandwich, the thickness of a large-print edition of Bonfire of the Vanities, is still a beauty, tourist attraction or not.
Revel in the rituals of the queue, the performative rudeness of the cutters, and the way they throw a few slices of the smoked, spiced beef on to a plate on the counter for you to eat with your fingers while you wait. Be prepared to wince at the prices. This is not simply the exchange rate being against us. Courtesy of our failed grifter government, an eating trip around the city left me fearing we are now simply a poorer country than the US. You feel it when paying $125 a head and up as standard for dinner in an unfancy restaurant. Or $26.95 for a Reuben. Plus ubiquitous 20% tips.
Sometimes, however, the food is so damn good it hurts a little less. On our last night we bag a table at the Austrian-influenced Koloman, which is so high up everybody’s “hot right now” list, I have to don an oxygen mask, access my acute lack of shame, and use my contacts to bag a table. Sometimes being shameless is its own reward; Koloman really does deserve its place on those admiring lists. The restaurant is named after the Austrian artist Koloman Moser, part of the Viennese Secession movement, founded in the late 19th century. It believed art should expand out of the frame to include furniture, textiles and the like. The space inside the Ace Hotel hasn’t changed much structurally from when it was April Bloomfield’s dark, clubbable Breslin, but now it is dressed in soothing shades of creamware. The wallpaper boasts sharp vintage graphic motifs as do the engraved glass panels atop the banquettes. Every detail, from fork to bar stool to crockery, has been considered.
So has the food. Austrian-born chef Markus Glocker learned his trade cooking high-end French with Gordon Ramsay in London and modernist wonders with Charlie Trotter in Chicago. Here, he brings deep wells of French technique to a thick vein of Austrian nostalgia. He pushes aside the intricate in favour of the simple things. His duck liver parfait, as smooth as Mulberry silk and as stupidly rich as Bezos, is topped with a sweet jelly of Kracher, an Austrian answer to a Sauterne. There’s a short-rib terrine in which the beef is sliced paper-thin and interleaved with a light aspic, the whole bound in mandolined carrot to form a frame. It is served at room temperature allowing the jelly to hold just so, with both a dribble of Styrian pumpkin oil and a tarragon and egg cream. Glocker has said it draws on memories of the cold jellied beef his father would cut for him at weekends.
A salmon en croute main is breathtakingly pretty. The fish is sliced into thick rectangles and lightly cured. There’s a layer of a smooth scallop and parsley mousse on each side and then a white bread casing which has been fried in butter to golden. It’s a hilariously grownup reply to the sando cult. It comes with both a lingonberry and a sea buckthorn sauce. It is precise and detailed and utterly delicious. The essentials of a breaded veal schnitzel are not mucked with. But it is so perfectly done, from the crisp, brown bubbled crumb overcoat that makes it look like a puppy in need of stroking, through the dill-heavy cucumber salad to the vinaigrette-dressed potato salad, that you can’t help but sigh.
With all this comes baked goods courtesy of pastry chef Emiko Chisholm. Start with championship quality Alpine cheese gougères, their burnished crusts giving way to a soft, unctuous crumb puffing gusts of dairy wonder at you. Tear at the warm poppy seed rolls with the salty cultured butter. For God’s sake, order the soufflé for two, a big ridged affair baked in an oven dish. It looks like a white country loaf, but cut through the surface to find a centre as soft and thick as sweet whipped cream, sent on its way by the layer of lingonberry jam beneath.
In London, I fear food of this quality would come with a side order of unnecessary grandstanding; perhaps not full cloches-at-dawn, but certainly with enough reverence to suck the joy out of the room. Here, the service is loose-limbed and jolly, as if determined you’re about to have a great time. And you do. There’s no doubt Covid has left a more visible mark on New York’s hospitality sector than on London’s. Sidestreets are still littered with outside dining sheds. Many more waiters wear masks. But beneath those scars, that trauma, it remains one of the great restaurant cities. From the humble chopped liver at Russ & Daughters to that soufflé at Koloman, I ate very well indeed.
News bites
Meanwhile back in London, some cheery news as it’s announced that the former site of the Rainforest Café at the southern end of Shaftesbury Avenue is to become the London outpost of Manchester’s Alberts Schloss. The original beer hall, with its Alpine-inflected menu of pork knuckle and spätzle with a stonking side order of live music, drag queens and table dancers, has already branched out into Liverpool and Birmingham. The London Schloss will open in the next few months (albertsschloss.co.uk).
The Table Talk Foundation, a Sussex-based charity which supports food education in the county’s schools and helps tackle mental and physical health issues in the local hospitality industry, is staging a series of fundraising dinners. Each one features a local chef cooking alongside a significant name from elsewhere. For example, on 9 March Nick Beardshaw of Kerridge’s Bar & Grill will cook a seven-course menu (served with matching wines) at Etch in Hove, working with Steven Edwards, the restaurant’s chef proprietor. For more information and to book, visit tabletalk-foundation.com.
The team behind Ancoats wine bar Flawd has found a permanent site for their restaurant Higher Ground, first trialled as a pop-up in Manchester in 2020. The bistro opens on New York Street on 18 February, and will serve a menu of small and large plates featuring ingredients sourced from suppliers across the north-west. A sample menu lists pea fritters with English pecorino, a pig head terrine with pickled garlic capers and a rye and sea buckthorn meringue tart (highergroundmcr.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
