The bar at Lafayette.

For restaurants in New York, there are spaces blessed and spaces cursed. The accursed kind is inevitably occupied by a telltale loser parade of strangely named tenants, like FR.OG, and ill-begotten concepts, like a “barstro.”

During their short lives, these places are as barren as Sarah, as lonely as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and as shifty as a carnival barker. Nevertheless, observers can’t help but be touched and a little awed at the enduring capacity of man to think he can succeed where surely he can’t. Sound the sad trombone.

Those spaces in the tabernacle of the anointed don’t see as much turnover, but they have similar tells. They bustle at night and hum during the day. In springtime, their patios are full of people. Black town cars idle in bike lanes before their doors, presenting a threat to the atmosphere—and to bicyclists—but that matters little to those within. At these tables, beyond these gates, it’s already paradise. Lafayette, Chef Andrew Carmellini’s long awaited grand cafe, which opened in March, is located in such a blessed space.

Twelve years ago, when I first moved to New York, the space was Time Cafe, a mediocre restaurant with a mural of the Mojave, a burger under $10 and an absolutely terrific downstairs club called Fez Under Time Cafe, which gave underage kids the chance to drink, unknown acts the chance to sing, and headliners like Johnny Cash and Jeff Buckley the chance to slum it. It closed in 2005 after a long and happy life and was replaced by Chinatown Brasserie, which didn’t dry up for six years and was most notable for a real tough bartender named Rainlove Lampariello (who told me his “parents were hippies”). After that rainbow dissipated, Lafayette appeared.

On a recent Tuesday evening, the sprawling restaurant felt like the set of one of those Garry Marshall ensemble romantic comedies. It’s the place where Ashton and Julia would eat on their magical first date. Like The Dutch, one of Mr. Carmellini’s other restaurants, Lafayette was designed by Roman & Williams, the husband-and-wife firm behind the Ace Hotel as well as the sets of movies like Zoolander and Addicted to Love. They are masters of golden-glow maximalism.

Even in real life, the crowd—and there is always a crowd—was from central casting. Windswept women with perky breasts, perfect highlights and ballerina flats sat with men whose stubble was so well groomed it looked more formal than the depilated cheek.

As I was led to my table by one of three siren hostesses in black dresses and white pearl necklaces who had greeted me with a beauty so strong it felt like a wall, not a welcome, the seated women followed me with their Westchester blue eyes, flicking their tongues over the teaspoons of crème fraîche that accompany any good tarte, as if to say, “The man I am with is wealthier, more handsome and more successful than you. Nevertheless, I’d be down for a quickie, if you want to meet me in the restroom.” I too was in paradise.

Much as I imagine heaven to be, Lafayette is more theme park food court than restaurant. There’s a patisserie, kitted out with perfectly formed baguettes and pain de campagne in a spread straight out of Amélie. There’s a zinc bar, lit softly by a large glowing custom clock designed by Roman & Williams. There’s a rotisserie station, where skewered Amish chickens, never Jewish or Cathlolic ones, rotate on a spit. But most of the space is meant for sitting.

Downstairs, in what used to be Fez Under Time Cafe, there’s a vaulted private dining room. Upstairs, there are 12 tables abutting plush leather booths along Great Jones Street, where the tables are large and the ballers are seated; a purgatorial space where Jeffrey Chodorow was eating on the night I visited; and a tucked-away alcove where those beautiful hostesses seat the ugly and people with babies. But as I said, the ugly are few.

For all of Lafayette’s pageantry, the menu is remarkably sober and, if anything, a bit cautious. Mr. Carmellini, assisted by Damon Wise, the longtime chef of Craft and short-lived chef of The Monkey Bar, sticks to the classics. He has drawn from nearly every region of France. The Mediterranean is amply represented by a salade Niçoise at lunch and a spaghetti Niçoise at dinner, and by the general preponderance of capers. But there’s also tripe Bourguignonne, Lyonnaise charcuterie and something called oysters “Sargent,” inspired by John Singer Sargent’s Oyster Gatherers of Cancale. Since Sargent was a man admired for his technical facility, if not his originality, one can see why Mr. Carmellini likes him.  

For the sheer scale and ambition of the project, one would be hard-pressed to find fault with anything on the menu. Mr. Carmellini’s years running Boulud Sud (1998-2005), his long successful run at The Dutch and Locanda Verde, and his general Midwestern openness have equipped him with unimpeachable technique, just as Mr. Wise’s years under Tom Colicchio have.

The appetizers, under the heading French Market, include dishes of great subtlety—like thinly sliced raw Maine scallops served lightly dressed with a sauce aigrelette, so sublime as to be a saltwater sacrament—and dishes of simple pleasures. Les olive vertes, picholine and nocerella, were warm. More restaurants should warm olives, because they are awesome.

Those oysters “Sargent,” actually Blue Points, are jazzy riffs on a classic, fantastic and thalassic. Softened by seaweed butter, topped with toasted nori and wakame, which is like the kudzu of the ocean, and baked, their brininess has been softened in the process, but their marine minerality astutely sharpened.

Astute is exactly how I would describe most of the food. Inspired? Not really. But smart and perceptive, certainly. Raclette, a cheese too often confined to blanketing potatoes, ennobles a very good brisket burger at lunch. Muscat grapes, like capers, are used to great effect, as in a perfectly prepared dorade, where they cameo in an update of sauce veronique, or at lunch, where they top little grilled shrimpies and are studded with capers. (Capers and grapes are the biggest culinary coups here.)

And Mr. Carmellini does land as well as he does sea. The steak frites, which came tremendously undercooked and almost raw, was salvaged by the fries, pick-up sticks of crispy cholesterol. And the excellent foie gras terrine, accompanied minimally with rhubarb and brioche, is beyond reproach.

In the final analysis, the food isn’t anything to write home about, for the same reason letters from the front can’t capture the horrors of war. They just can’t be quarantined from their context. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t—for better or for worse—transcendent. At Lafayette, it’s for the better. Lafayette is the three-legged stool of food, space and time. Knock out one leg and, like Shoeless Joe in Field of Dreams, the place becomes insubstantial when ex situ. But it’s that shimmering elusiveness that assures immortality.

As in many sanctified spaces, the ghosts of Time past still rumble around Lafayette. Years ago, at Fez, I remember seeing the Mingus Big Band. Sue Mingus, Charlie’s snow-haired, severe-looking widow, would call changes from the banquette.

Those guys knew something about space, and they knew about keeping time. Baritone sax player John Stubblefield used to weave his way between tables with his big horn around his neck, blowing the booming first notes of the classic Mingus tune “Moanin’”. The line starts on an A that falls precipitously to a low and almost silly-sounding B-flat.

Stubblefield died in 2005, shortly after Fez closed. But, as I sat among the blessed of the world in their fairytale France of Lafayette, I remembered that at that time, in that space, all his notes sounded true, even the flat ones.

The bar and dining room at Alder.

The chef Wylie Dufresne looks a bit like a character out of The Far Side. He is still boyish at 42, with indoor-only onionskin, anachronistic muttonchops, bookish glasses and long, side-parted hair. If you wanted to compare them side by side, however, which would be useful, that might be difficult.

In 1998, when the Internet was just a baby, Gary Larson, the creator of The Far Side, wrote a heartfelt letter to all those Far Side fans—and they are legion, because The Far Side is pure brilliance that no panel can contain, as Mr. Larson captured both a compelling misanthropic weltanschauung and tremendous tenderness—in which he asked that no Far Side comics be posted online. “These cartoons are my ‘children,’ of sorts,” he wrote, “and like a parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me.” Those who wish to join his world of perspicacious cows, disgruntled cowboys and wry aliens must buy the lavish coffee table book, The Complete Far Side, which retails for more than $100.

The work of Mr. Dufresne has proven similarly scarce and pricey. A decade ago, he opened wd~50, the brilliant beacon of modernist cuisine on the Lower East Side. Since then, he has refrained from opening what were, surely, countless other restaurants. He’s on television only rarely. He has no product line, offshoot or brand extension. For a decade, those who wished to experience Mr. Dufresne’s perspicacious, wry and heartfelt cuisine would have to travel to his 67-seat restaurant, pay $155, sit for three or four hours and, perhaps, glimpse the man, usually peering at a plate seriously or doing something with a tweezers in the kitchen.

But in March 2013, a decade after he began, Mr. Dufresne opened a new restaurant. It’s called Alder, and it was worth the wait.

Alder occupies a small space on a block of Second Avenue between East Ninth and 10th Streets long given up for dead. (After the 2nd Avenue Deli decamped to 33rd Street in 2006, the funeral home was the only building left with a soul—and that became luxury condos.) On a recent Sunday night, however, there were signs of life at Alder.

For a newly opened, long-awaited restaurant from one of New York City’s best chefs, it wasn’t nearly the rowdydow one might expect. This has something to do with the unique space Mr. Dufresne holds in the city’s culinary firmament (and something to do with it having been a Sunday). Mr. Dufresne is a chef’s chef’s chef in the same way Elizabeth Bishop was, according to John Ashbery, a writer’s writer’s writer or Les Blank was a director’s director’s director. But unlike Bishop, or Blank, who passed away last month, Mr. Dufresne isn’t deceased. He’s very much alive.

On my visit to the restaurant, he was busy in the kitchen, along with executive chef Jon Bignelli and sous-chef Ryan Henderson. The room felt breezily rustic but not slavishly so, like a farmhouse owned by Manhattanites that you’d see in Architectural Digest. Over speakers, hidden by slats of reclaimed wood on the ceiling of the dark room, Pavement played. Stephen Malkmus sang, “Ex-magician / That still knows the tricks / Tricks are everything to me.”

Tricks are also a lot to Mr. Dufresne. There is more than one thing on the pared-down 17-item menu in quotation marks. It makes one wonder how, for instance, “potato chips” differ from potato chips, “oyster crackers” from oyster crackers or “pigs in a blanket” from, you know, pigs in a blanket?

Written quotation marks should be used solely for attribution and not in the “air quotes” sense. But I’ll make an exception for Mr. Dufresne, because at Alder, without fail, the answer is that they are more delicious, more inventive, more mind-blowing than their original, impoverished, traditional selves.

On Monday, Wylie Dufresne won the James Beard Foundation's award for Best Chef: NYC.

The “pigs in a blanket” ($11) seem, on first inspection, to be standard bar mitzvah fare. Sections of dough-wrapped wieners are served on a slate dotted with artistic squirts of mustard and what looks like duck sauce. (Weirdly, neither the slate nor the artistic dots seem cliché, but maybe that’s because Mr. Dufresne was their progenitor.) But inspect closer and taste: erstwhile kosher beef is Chinese sausage; puff pastry is Pepperidge Farm hot dog bun run through a pasta machine, turned into a sort of bready fruit-leather. That mustard, laced with wasabi, is less Citi Field and more Ajinomoto Stadium. And that duck sauce is a sweet chili sauce.

Anyone who has partaken of Chinese sausage does not need an explanation. For those who have yet to do so: eating these pigs was like seeing an old friend from high school who had lost a lot of weight and now dresses well. You can still recognize them; they are just better now. It’s a sweet and piquant moment.

The menu is full of makeovers like that. The Caesar salad, the golden retriever of restaurants (friendly, good with kids, dumb), is smartly redone as Caesar nigiri ($15). Romaine, spine intact, is the canoe, laden with parmesan and egg yolk as neta. It renders faithfully unto Caesar but does so imaginatively. A plain old New England clam chowder—Mr. Dufresne was born in Rhode Island—isn’t meddled with much, save a squirt of parsley oil, a nod to Mr. Dufresne’s days at Jean-Georges. But the creamy clammy potato soup would make even the saltiest dog proud, and the “oyster crackers” that accompany it: oh my. They are actually dehydrated oysters, pureed, turned into a dough and fried. At Alder, the oyster crackers aren’t crackers that look like oysters. They are the oyster.

Mr. Dufresne’s approach isn’t based on mere wordplay, though (as so much of mine, sadly, is). It’s just really smart and really fun food. Everything I ate and everything I drank had either a turn or an expert touch or a surprise—often all three. A discus of foie gras terrine ($18) looked like a technicolor Egg McMuffin. The foie gras was tucked inside a poached apple, sat atop chartreuse yogurt and an English muffin, and tasted of fall orchards and breakfast. A slab of caramelized cauliflower, the Bob Hoskins of vegetables, was paired with a Mangalitsa lardo—made specially for Alder—and cacao nibs. It was a nutty, salty, bittersweet Blooming Onion for foodies.

Mr. Dufresne is also a neighborhood boy. He grew up in the East Village and went to Friends Seminary in Gramercy. The rye pasta ($18), served over a slice of pastrami, is a holla back to the neighborhood delicatessens of his youth (even though Mr. Dufresne said he is a Katz’s man himself). It tastes like a sandwich, looks like a pasta and embodies the best of what Alder does. It makes you smile.

The grease traps of New York kitchens are, of course, cluttered with chefs with great senses of humor, boundless ambition and unique points of view. Alas, many lack the technique to execute. And though Tragedy + Time = Comedy, Comedy - Technique = Tragedy.

Alder benefits from Mr. Dufresne’s longtime commitment to experimentation and innovation at wd~50, which has turned out to be an incubator for many of the techniques on display at his new restaurant. Over the past decade, Mr. Dufresne and his team perfected crackerizing things, yogurting things and pastasizing things. He has, he mentioned to me in passing, “a spaetzle playbook.”

It could be a line from The Far Side, but in Mr. Dufresne’s expert hands—as in Gary Larson’s—it’s a great joke in good taste.

Montmartre.

In 1973, what would become known as the Paris Peace Accords was signed after months of deliberation by Henry Kissinger, the shifty dark lord of U.S. foreign policy, and Lê Đuc Tho, who had spent years in a French colonial prison and represented the North Vietnamese government. The agreement ended American involvement in the war but effectively sold out the South Vietnamese to the ravenous North.

That same year, Tien Ho was born in Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City). He remembers it as a city “full of half-destroyed buildings, a country in complete chaos.” When he was 6, Mr. Ho’s father, who had been rescued by a U.S. naval ship during the war and had become an American citizen, moved the family to Sugar Land, Texas, an endlessly repeating subdivision outside Houston full of ticky-tacky houses.

Forty years, almost to the day, after Saigon fell, Mr. Ho, along with Gabriel Stulman, the shifty dark lord of New York restaurants, opened Montmartre, a Chelsea restaurant that assumes the form of a French bistro—but only for the purpose of gutting it, inside out, Frantz Fanon-style.

At its root, Montmartre is a post-colonial French bistro. Mr. Stulman, its owner, is a loud, swarthy Moroccan Jew from Virginia via Wisconsin. (His restaurant group is called Little Wisco.) Mr. Ho, its chef, is introverted and bespectacled. They’re like Lenin and Marx, respectively, or Laurel and Hardy, less respectfully. They’re an odd pair with little in common aside from the fact that both of their ancestral peoples were once terrorized by the French.

And as an homage to that nation’s cuisine, Montmartre is exactly as flawed and uneasy, as rich and vibrant, as complicated and perplexing as a love letter to a colonizing power could be.

Appropriately, Montmartre occupies the space that was formerly Gascogne, a desultory purveyor of French classics for the uninspired. It has since been Stulmanized. Gone are the wicker chairs, the chubby tourists, the Provençal color palate and the silly D’Artagnan mascot.

The walls are now white and heavy with hip contemporary art. Mos Def, for instance, contemplates diners from a large-format black-and-white portrait. The Wu-Tang Clan booms on the stereo. The waitress, businesslike, bare-shouldered and milkily erotic, might have been from Wisconsin. The waiter, tall, black and Francophone, was almost certainly not.

His accent was, however, the most overtly Gallic thing going. Little in Montmartre screams Vive la France! And in this age of restaurant-as-set—which commenced at the bazaar of Balthazar and is felt in the bones of Carbone—I count that as a good thing.

The menu is another matter. Mr. Ho began his career in the kitchen of The Belgian Restaurant, a well regarded, now-closed French joint in Austin, Texas. His life on the line—from Café Gray to Café Boulud to Momofuku Ssäm and finally Má Pêche—has been steeped in French technique. Verily has he mastered the language of the master. That fluency is amply demonstrated in the menu.

In some of Montmartre’s best dishes, you feel Tien Ho presiding over his food like a model-train enthusiast, at eye-level, but still looming over his landscape. Mr. Ho sets his flavors forth like villagers in a tiny village green with an obsessive’s painstaking care. The poached halibut ($32)—one of seven main courses—is poached in chamomile tea, an old Japanese technique perfectly executed. The halibut’s celestial seasoning is offset with a simple fennel puree and a not-so-simple artichoke barigoule, also flecked with chamomile. The flavors aren’t forced on each other or against each other. It’s the Shining Time Station of halibut, with Tien Ho as Mr. Conductor.

When Montmartre succeeds, it is with the argument that the minority voice—Mr. Ho’s voice—makes French cuisine infinitely more rich. No one else would have put scallions and sesame seeds on chicken liver ($9), seared and chopped up with shallots and miso, and yet everyone should. Mr. Ho offloads the garlickiness of escargots sauvage ($16) to a slab of sausage beneath them, and though the entire thing looks a little like Gericault’s Raft of Medusa awash in a sea of parsley, it tastes great. It succeeds because Mr. Ho, even in a city rife with cafes colonial, is the only man with the command, ambition and experience to coat a rabbit torchon in masago, a type of Japanese rice pearls, fry it and serve it with violet mustard—a shocking, rarely seen condiment of subtle and infinite delight—miner’s lettuce and tender carrots. It’s both a culinary joke (rabbit, carrots and lettuce, get it?) and a triumph.

But these triumphs are isolated and hampered by a muddled strategy. The restaurant has difficulties; even writing about the restaurant presents difficulties. And I can’t help but think the latter is a purposeful maneuver, designed to provide cover for the former.

Firstly, the menu is constantly shifting terrain. It’s always bobbin’ and weavin’, ducking for cover. When it first opened, Montmartre’s menu was meant to be bifurcated between French classics, intended to establish Tien Ho’s bona fides, and the chef’s own inventions, intended, I think, to showcase his talent. The results were not awesome.

About a month into the show, an appetizer of a salt cod brandade with chili jam was a crock of beige goop. It was cod-ish, true, but whatever hints of chili jam there were had been subsumed by a dissolute yet oppressive fishiness. The chicken à la reine was meant to contain foie gras, and I’m sure somewhere it did, but under a thick orange sauce, the chicken tenders or any tender flavor at all was lost in the fog of forgetting. Also, chicken tenders?

A few weeks after my first visit, I returned to Montmartre and the menu had largely turned over. There were still a few classics—the steak tartare (which was once an appetizer, then a special, and was now an entrée) and the hanger steak (topped with marrow, of course) are both tremendous—but much more territory fell under the command and control of Mr. Ho’s creativity. It was in this phase that the quail tunisienne first appeared, along with the crispy rabbit torchon and a fluke “mouclade,” a shellfish stew, which are the restaurant’s bright spots. The cod goop had made its way onto toast, with more chili paste.

Such churn, said Mr. Stulman, is to be expected. During one visit, he argued, quite forcefully, that restaurants reserve the right to five weeks of experimentation. He was furious that Jay Cheshes, who had panned Montmartre before riding into the bloated sunset with a valentine for Carbone, came a week after Montmartre opened and again after three. But business is business, and if one is charging customers, one must be held accountable for what one serves.

And I couldn’t help but feel that, at Montmartre, Mr. Stulman’s talk of evolution was actually evasion. Even as I appreciated the food, Mr. Stulman spoke excitedly of the changes yet to come. So though I write this now, by the time it goes to print, who knows what the menu will be? Will all criticism be irrelevant, salvos launched at an abandoned position?

A certain restless movement can be expected from Mr. Stulman. In the last two years alone, he’s opened five restaurants. Shifting terrain, striking and fading into the crowd, aggressive mobility—these are the hallmarks of a successful guerilla tactician. But in a restaurant, I’m not sure they’ll win the war, or even, for that matter, bring peace with honor.

Neal Conan (YouTube: Screencap)

NPR recently announced they would cease broadcasting Talk of the Nation in June, thus pulling off one of the most bald-faced betrayals since Judas in the Upper Room or Dylan in Royal Albert Hall. The betrayal cut along many lines and was felt, by this reporter, acutely.

The reason given for the cancellation was the clamor of member stations for “a magazine-style news show at the middle of the day, something along the lines of Morning Edition and All Things Considered.” But it seems to me Talk of the Nation was meant to give voice not to the Torey Malatias of the world but to the grain farmers of Nebraska, the taxi drivers of Detroit, the P.E. teachers in Denver. It was, that is, Radio for the National Public. No matter what reason given, that NPR is cancelling one of the only shows that did this directly cannot be seen as anything but treachery.

So NPR threw the National Public under the bus. They also threw Neal Conan, the host of Talk of the Nation under the bus. This would not be quite as tragic if Mr. Conan wasn’t so talented. After all, between 1999 and 2008, there were 186 motorcoach fatalities, so lots of people are thrown under the bus. But Mr. Conan is unparalleled in the gentleness with which he queried guests, listened to callers and drew them out. There was never a hint of condescension or agenda. This, I think, is primarily what made the program such a joy to listen to: it envisioned, and enabled, a world in which diametrically opposed demographics—along nearly every metric—could speak. (Contrast with the times when Celeste Headlee has played host and she, infuriatingly, pretends to listen to a caller, then hangs up, thinking if she repeats the caller’s name and location, she is somehow engendering dialogue, which she isn’t.)

Mr. Conan also meant the world to me personally, and I’m not alone in this. Here’s one of the most touching exchanges on NPR I’ve ever heard. It comes from the program “Closing The Circle: Revisiting Stories from 2012.” This is from a farmer named Richard Vernon, in South Union, Kentucky. The exchange happened after Mr. Vernon called in to check up on the man. Their conversation was substantively over but Mr. Vernon didn’t want to get off the phone. You can read below but better to listen:

God bless you, Neal. If you only knew what your program, especially your voice, means to me every day. It reaches out to my heart and my mind and my soul and every one of the people who work for the radio. If it had not been for y'all the last several years, through this recession, there were times in my tractor when my cattle were bawling, hungry for something to eat, and the wind is blowing sideways, 35 mile an hour, snowing, and I don't have enough feed to give them. And I want to get out of the tractor and give up and walk away and just be lost. But instead I stayed in the tractor and listened to you guys that I can get through this day. So thank you guys for being what you are to all of us, people like us that are just barely hanging on by a thread.

I listen to podcasts of Talk of the Nation as I bike to work, as rosy fingered dawn touches the Hudson, and when I bike home from work, the sun setting over the same. Actually, I alternate between podcasts of the Interdependence Project and Talk of the Nation but, aside from the particulars, they are, to me, one and the same: an hour or two of respect, openness, thoughtfulness, consciousness.

Now NPR is silencing TOTN and we are left only with the sycophantism of Terry Gross, the smugness of Ira Glass and, infuriatingly, the adenoidal whine of Ira Flatow. We are left bereft not only of Neal Conan’s charm and grace but, more importantly, of the chorus of voices to which Talk of the Nation gave space and volume. I’ll keep listening to NPR not because I want to, but because it’s what Neal would have wanted. But I’ll never, I fear, hear again from the Rich Vernons of the world, in the sideways blowing wind, cattle bawling, hanging on by a thread.

So there’s some amount of willful deafness that’s necessary to cutting it in the city. The longer you stay, the deafer you get. This is why kids who grow up in the city are intractable and sad, hipsters flee to Hastings-on-Hudson (supposedly) and new arrivals are so welcome and vital. One such recent immigrant is Dani Garcia, the well-regarded Spanish chef who opened Manzanilla earlier this year.

Mr. Garcia, 37, is highly regarded in his native Andalucía, where he runs a chain of high-end tapas bars called Lamoraga and a two-star Michelin restaurant called Calima that specializes in technique-driven modernist cuisine. His entry into the Big Apple is a cavernous, high-stakes “Spanish brasserie” in the Flatiron District called, perhaps with a wink, Manzanilla, which is Spanish for “little apple.”

Apparently Mr. Garcia has balls the size of his excellent squid-ink-and-cuttlefish croquettes with coriander and citrus aioli ($12) because, for an opening gambit, this one is a banger. It may be a small apple in the big scheme of things, but for a first-timer, this restaurant is huge. There are 150 seats spread out over two floors and 6,600 square feet. It should also be noted that Mr. Garcia has a sure hand in his partner, Yann de Rochefort of Boqueria and Suba.

Was it callowness or hubris, ignorance of precedent or arrogance of precedence that convinced Messrs. de Rochefort and Garcia that New York City would welcome an ambitious, high-end Spanish restaurant? If you’re attuned to echoes, Manzanilla brings back unwelcome ones. The names of short-lived top-tier Spanish places bear heavy on the mind, like lines from the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Graffit: אבר המש שדקתיו לדגתי

Romera: התוערכ ארב יד אמלעב

Ureña: התוכלמ ךילמיו

The reign of Spain falls mainly on the plain. If it can’t be speared by a toothpick and isn’t served in a cast-iron skillet, the prognosis is grim. So fancy Spanish food is a cuisine in need of a hero in a city hungry for saviors. As Cervantes wrote, “Hunger is the best sauce in the world,” so maybe Mr. Garcia’s quest isn’t so quixotic after all. Some windmills actually are giants.

On a recent Friday night, many of Manzanilla’s many seats were occupied by svelte sylphs, mignon MILFs, and men with hoary hair and hairy wrists. The space is divided in two. There’s a bar in the front, which, in the best way possible, reminds me of the Gramercy Tavern. It’s a classy place to belly up to and rarely reaches a fever pitch. Behind that, there’s a rather sprawling and somewhat troublingly club-like dining room with communal tables, booths and, you know, other normal tables.

The bar, when I first visited, was full of after-work folk, horny for the new meat in town. Few of them delved deeply into the impeccably curated wine list or into the numinous mysteries of life. “How stupid do you have to be not to know how to make a pivot table?” griped the beautiful woman next to me as her fleece-clad boyfriend drank a Hendrick’s martini, up and dirty.

How stupid do you have to be to order a Hendrick’s martini, I thought, when the cocktail list includes gin-based creations like The Sun Also Rises (NY Distilling Co. Dorothy Parker gin, Atsby Amberthorn vermouth, Baines Pacharan, $14) and other, better things, like a refreshing Albarino Garanbazan Verde 2011 ($14)? Additionally, the menu boasts a deep stable of pre-, intra- and postprandial sherries, a rarity in New York. (Manzanilla is a type of sherry.) Also, what the fuck is a pivot table?

Mr. Garcia’s menu seems like no great shakes. To anyone with even a passing knowledge of Spanish cuisine, the work of Simone Ortega or restaurants in general, it reads like a Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation of greatest hits. Tapas include pan con tomate—here called tomato tartare—and tortillita gaditana, which is a traditional Andalucían shrimp crisp. Octopi occupy the appetizers, obviously. For entrées, there’s suckling pig, black rice and bacalao. Cue the Gipsy Kings.

But—and I do love “Vamos a Bailar”—don’t be fooled. While the menu at Manzanilla may resemble the menu at La Nacional, that relic of Little Spain on 14th Street, Dani Garcia has two Michelin stars. That’s the same as David Chang’s Momofuku Ko and Matthew Lightner’s Atera. He ain’t serving paella!

Every cliché is a surprise, every assumption a wash. The shrimp crisp contains a kimchi kick. Those squid-ink-and-cuttlefish croquettes may look like bodega cochifritos, but when bitten into, they melt, thaw and resolve themselves into goo. Not that I knew—or that one needs to know—but they are a riff on a traditional cuttlefish stew from southern Spain. The détournement, in this case, is as follows: the cuttlefish is mixed with a Neptunian bechamel sauce, made with half milk and half mussel jus to impart a deep-sea flavor. The balls are panéed still frozen for maximal crunch and minimal grease. These croquettes shame all other extant croquettes and may be the best fried thing in the city.

Mr. Garcia has had practice with this dish at Calima, as he has had with many of Manzanilla’s standouts. Take the Pulpo à la Gallega ($13). Octopus is easy to scupper, but in Mr. Garcia’s hands, it arrives in a custom wooden cloche that, when opened, releases a puff of cherrywood smoke to reveal little piles of octopi atop blowtorched potato gnocchi made with Aji, a Peruvian pepper and lemon juice. The result is as tender and smoky as Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit.”

The bacalao ($27) is another one of his canon of great dishes. It’s an adaptation of a gazpachuelo, a traditional Andalucían fisherman’s soup made of leftover fish in a starchy broth. Mr. Garcia’s coup is in the translation. Here, the salt cod is fresh cod, salted (New Yorkers are no fans of the rubberiness of true bacalao). Instead of a stew, Mr. Garcia marinates the fish in a broth of dashi, bonito flakes, katsuobushi, peppers, yuzu and lemon juice. It’s then pan-seared and served atop a puree equal parts butter and cauliflower.

One needn’t know anything about The Old Man, the sea or his stew to appreciate the result: tranches of tender fish, the exhilarating emulsion of citrus and spice. Butter, of course, transcends time, space and culture.

Yet even as I gas on about how wonderful the food is—and I do think it is wonderful—I hear the words of critics past who lauded Ureña, Graffit and, to a lesser extent, Romera and reflect on how impotently those words stood by as those restaurants failed. I recall that Jesus Nuñez closed Graffit to open a folksy rustic Spanish place called Barraca, that Alex Ureña is cooking at a hotel in the Bahamas and that Miguel Sanchez Romera has retreated to the Terwilliker Institute, or to wherever failed neuroscientist chefs retreat.

To these echoes and ghosts, Dani Garcia is insensate. His ears are happily turned to the future, where the past isn’t prologue and where little apples do big things.

editorial@observer.com

Preparation in the kitchen at Aska.

Sweden has not staged a land invasion since the poorly understood and more-puckish-than-belligerent Åland Crisis of 1918. But a few years ago, that land of white snow, blue eyes and extraordinary health care began establishing sleeper cells in New York. Its Omaha was Williamsburg’s hipster beach.

First came the moustaches, establishing a front line on the upper lips of Gothenburg emigrés. Then came the music: Peter Bjorn and John’s whistles shrieked through the streets like Wagner’s Die Walküre. Jens Lekman lured our men to sleep while the infectious hooks of Love Is All seduced their girlfriends. Finally, the ground was made ready. In February, chef Fredrik Berselius opened Aska, a stunning Swedish restaurant on Wythe Avenue, and all the Swedes and semi-Swedes, the legions of Nordic fifth columnists and Scandinavian sympathizers, rose up and made reservations.

In Aska, which means “ashes,” one can discern both the promise and the pitfalls of the Scandinavian soul. Fun is taken very seriously here. Whimsy is something to be discovered, like the form hiding in a block of marble, by constant careful chipping. Thus, bright murals of diurnal birds hang in relative darkness. Fantastical landscapes of moss and wood are contained in terraria, discretely placed on a shelf. The hostess is beautiful and she wears a sweatshirt.

This studied humbleness is a hallmark of what many Americans call New Scandinavian or New Nordic cuisine, and what many Scandinavians call Nordisk Mad. The latter term was coined by René Redzepi, the chef of Copenhagen’s Noma, which has been ranked the best restaurant in the world for the last three years in San Pellegrino’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

When I visited Aska recently, news had not yet broken that Eamon Rockey, an original partner, had departed, but he wasn’t there. Neither was the chef, Mr. Berselius, who was off cooking in Iceland at something called the Food and Fun Fest. In his absence, a young bearded man named Gabriel Andersson—which is funny because only young bearded men seem to work there—was in charge. It’s tempting to hector Mr. Berselius for not being in the kitchen of his own restaurant, but it’s to his credit that his operation seemed as modular as Ikea’s IVAR shelving system, and much more sturdy.

Aska offers two tasting menus—a seven-course menu for $65 and a 10-course menu for $115. The Value for Money (VfM) is high. In one seven-course menu, the surprises and delights were squared. Each course, when it was trotted out by a seemingly consumptive Swede, looked simple but contained multitudes.

Unsurprisingly, many of the amuse-bouche arrived on various types of flooring material, a staple of Nordisk Mad. Two tiny prawns, culled from the waters of Maine, were served on a small plinth of black walnut, for example. Each had the flesh of his or her belly removed, sprinkled with salt and placed raw on his or her respective head, which had been fried in shrimp butter. Surprisingly, the crisp fried carapace, brain juice and lychee-like flesh created a really good tasting Venn diagram of texture and flavor.

And those wooden slats were Zelig-like. No sooner had the shrimp corpses been disposed of than the slats returned, bearing pig’s-blood crisps dotted with bright orange ploofs of sea-buckthorn berry gelée and garnished with fresh sea-buckthorn berry. The pig’s-blood crisp, which had been dehydrated, tasted like a crispy bloodstain—in a good way—and the sea-buckthorn berry brought an astringency from which any hemocentric food could benefit. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that the dish, which came early on and unlisted in the procession, was a joke.

The Swedes have such a dry sense of humor.

Of the six savory courses listed on the menu, three were harvested from the sea and three from the field. In general, the waterborne beat the landlubbing. The best part of a plate of sunchokes—served raw, cut thin and scattered so they fell over the plate like bleached autumn leaves—wasn’t the sunchokes themselves, though their nuttiness was pleasing, nor was it the pig trotter, which lurked underneath like an unguent Polonius, nor even the sweet apple purée. It was the psych-out.

If you’ve eaten for any sustained period in New York City, you’ve come to expect pig lurking in every disguise. So when the bearded man said sunchoke and pig trotter and showed me the plate, I steeled myself to eat a pile of sliced pig feet. Happy was I not to.

True to the Gaussian curve, the best bite of the meal fell in the exact center. It’s listed on the laconic menu—again, sly Swedish joke or fine dining cliché?—simply as “Scallop, dill.”* Predictably, that description undersells. The scallops are hand-harvested from Nantucket Bay and brought to the kitchen live. They’re served raw, topped with a touch of dill purée and a chip made from scallops. Also in the scallop shell is a broth made from scallop scraps and scallop roe. It’s a feedback loop of scallop. But in that shell, Aska finds its raison d’etre. Therein lurks the sweet softness of the scallop, the crunch of it dry, the salinity of the roe and the fragrance of the broth.

The sea has been undone, folded in on itself and reconstituted with greater precision, molarity and accuracy. Chef Berselius has taken something that covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and made it bite-size.

But is Aska Nordisk Mad? A new book by Alessandro Porcelli called Cook It Raw seems to suggest it isn’t. The book, which comes out next month, chronicles the annual invitation-only challenge founded by Mr. Porcelli, a Copenhagen food consultant, in 2009, in which an elite cadre of chefs each create a dish inspired by their environments using hyperlocal ingredients.

The first Cook It Raw was in Copenhagen, hosted by René Redzepi, then it moved to Collio, Italy, and Lapland, Finland. In the first iteration, chefs, including David Chang, Daniel Patterson and Albert Adrià, were asked to “explore nature through a zero energy cooking challenge.” They headed off to the grounds of Dragsholm Castle to forage sorrel, green strawberries and woodruff. That night, one chef, Inaki Aizpitarte, served lobster, pigeon liver, chicken liver and wood sorel as spare dots on a huge white plate. Massimo Bottura, chef at the fifth-best restaurant in the world, served something called “Pollution—20:30 Modena.” It was, by all accounts, delicious.

Clearly, what animates Messrs. Redzepi and Porcelli isn’t any particular technique like dehydration, or a specific ingredient like sea-buckthorn berry. It’s an approach to one’s environment, a ballsy usage of it, a keen listening to it. At Aska, all the phenotypic traits of Nordisk Mad are there—wood, beards, terra cotta, rawness—but I’m not convinced the genes are the same. The scallops arrived from Massachusetts, the shrimp from Maine, the sea-buckthorn berries either from Nova Scotia or remitted from Sweden by post. Fjord to City: Drop Dead.

One wishes Mr. Berselius grasped more at the roots of Nordisk Mad, where the philosophy intersects with the earth, and not at its pretty petals, spectacular but removed. What of the lichens of Greenpoint? What of the bark of Prospect Park? I kid, a bit, but only a bit, because though Aska looks good and tastes great, until Mr. Berselius starts to see the forest for the trees, it raises more questions than it answers.

*It comes after “Sunchoke, trotter, apple” and before “Monkfish, salsify, bay leaf.” Why have menus retreated into silence like sullen teenagers? Menus of America, let your kids go to the movies!

Le Philosophe.

It will soon be Valentine’s Day and, while I deny bitterness her dram and cynicism her laurels, I dread it. What is the holiday but a high striker in a cheap carnival of sentiment? No matter how bearded the artisanal chocolatier, what is he to Cupid or Cupid to him? Diamonds, teddy bears and roses are not tokens of affection but of carbon, polyester and cold Latinos standing in front of delis. There is, however, at least one way to celebrate Valentine’s Day of which I heartily approve. That’s eating at Le Philosophe, a new bistro on Bond Street.

There are many romantic places at which to dine on Valentine’s Day. Like bad Jews on Yom Kippur, every restaurant, from the white-tableclothed to the greasy spoon, is duty-bound to dress up once a year. The tropes of romance are dusted off and trotted out. There are enough hearts in New York this week to make Milton Glaser moan, enough candles for a mass exorcism and enough prix fixe to outrage the Sherman Act.  

Le Philosophe, which opened in November, is romantic. It’s romantic from without: its light spills onto Bond Street’s cobblestones and, seen from the frigid sidewalk, the plats du jour, written neatly in chalk on the wall—coq au vin, tete de veau, cassoulet—promise warmth and satisfaction. And it’s romantic from within: candlelight, high ceilings and the flush of a preprandial bottle of Sancerre rosé from the Cote de Reigny Sauterau ($37) renders every woman a Rosetti and every man a Romeo. As a concession to the name—the bistro is modeled after Café Les Philosophes in Paris’s Fourth Arrondissement—a grid of French philosophers stares at diners from along one wall. They gaze out in various stages of cogitation, contempt or, more likely, envy.

The plates that parade before their eyes are, nominally, the bistro cuisine with which even René Descartes would be familiar. But you won’t find anything as refined at, say, Les Deux Magots. The chef at Le Philosophe, Matthew Aita, learned his craft both in the carnivorous kitchen of Daniel Boulud’s DBGB, where it seems even the iced tea comes with charcuterie, and the more raffinée Eastern-tinged kitchen of Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Some of Mr. Aita’s craft is in selection and presentation, which is to say in restraint: plump oysters—Sandy Bay from the West; Montauk Grill from the East—come in Le Creuset gratin dishes and look at home surrounded by seaweed from Maine, accompanied with only a classic mignonette. Radishes arrive simply quartered, with a smear of mustardy butter and sea salt.

Some of Mr. Aita’s craft is in embellishment: salmon is veiled in bacon; frog legs come in a jumble of watercress purée, croutons, red cress and hen of the woods mushrooms. A daily paté ingeniously eats up scraps and usually includes pig trotters, foie gras, duck leg, bacon and (not or) chicken liver. The Tournedos Rossini, a sort of old fashioned Veblenian hamburger made of butter-soaked bread, medallions of seared tenderloin, a lobe of foie gras and a black truffle bordelaise, somehow tastes less decadent than it is. That’s a good thing.

But the lion’s share of Mr. Aita’s appeal comes from balance. The bar steak, a flat-iron, arrives cut and fanned like a winning hand of gin rummy, with both a sauce bordelaise and a sauce choron, as well as a mound of salty crisp fries. It is crosshaired between chewy and melty, crusty and soft, le cru et le cuit.

The duck a l’orange, another dish that, like an old relative, has been shunted into obscurity not through any fault of its own but simply because it is superannuated, is brought back to life with crisp flavors, laced with subtle spices like fennel, coriander, Thai chili and, of course, the orange gastrique.

So the food is good, the light is low, and that’s romantic. But that’s not exactly the type of romance that I have in mind. The best seat in the house, for my purposes, might also be the worst. It’s at the bar, tucked uncomfortably close to the expediting station, at the threshold of the open kitchen. Follow the gaze of Albert Camus, the handsome brooder sandwiched between Emmanuel Levinas and Auguste Escoffier, and you’ll see it. At this seat, you’ll be jostled and jangled and elbowed aside with barely concealed annoyance by otherwise pleasant servers.

But this perch also affords a spectacular view into the kitchen, a crucible of stainless steel, nerves and julienned carrots. Were you made of sterner stuff than I, you might be able to reach out to tap Chef Aita. Or you might attempt to engage the glowering garde manger, who between shucking oysters and filling profiteroles with caramel ice cream ($8) has only time to grunt and gnash his teeth. The rest of the brigade—the cuisinier in charge of poultry and fish, licked by the flames of the range, and the cuisinier at the hot-apps station, face toasted by the oven—is beyond reach and blurred by movement.

Four men in a small space, bent on production, in a fog of delirious effort and constant motion. Cataracts of salt poured on fries. Sudden flashes of flames jumping from the burners. The frantic extrusion of fresh pasta dough for the garganelli. Gazing at these men from the other side of the bar is like watching a train thunder by, just inches from one’s nose.

And this is just that train as it passes for an instant on a long-haul journey. Mr. Aita, who lives in Astoria with his wife and two kids, arrives at the restaurant at 10 a.m. and rarely leaves before 3 the following morning. At daybreak, he is greeted by raw material. A box of frog’s legs that look, according to him, “like the bottom half of leprechauns.” A brace of duck carcasses that need to be broken down, their bones reserved for jus. Chanterelles and hens of the woods to be cleaned. Those legs must be de-femured, the meat rolled in barley and wheat flour and fricasseed, the bones made into a fumet. Seventeen hours later, he’ll leave, and he’ll leave nothing of this behind.

Perhaps it was because Camus was burning a hole in the back of my head for the entire meal, but I felt as if Le Philosophe was filled with a hundred Sisyphuses. In the kitchen, Mr. Aita was burning through himself, ending each day just a day older. And we diners, seeking to immortalize our romance, baptize it in candlelight, bathe it in bordelaise—we too were burning through ourselves with hours even more unforgiving than the chef’s and a burden far heavier.

For on Valentine’s Day, we’re faced with what Love should be, and it is so far from our felt reality of it that we become conscious of the absurdity. Love is not lit by candles, but by computer screens. It’s not “Let me count the ways ...” but “How many times do I have to tell you ...” Being in love isn’t holding hands; it’s holding back, cleaning up and steering clear. Love, like freedom, is an endless meeting.

At Le Philosophe, where we are faced with the delta between the grind of the kitchen and the calm sanctity of the plate, and on Valentine’s Day, when we can’t help but notice the divergence between the difficulty of what relationships are and the sepia of what Romance is, we are at our apex, just as Sisyphus was, watching his boulder roll down the slope again. At that moment, Camus says, Sisyphus realized his own absurdity. And at that moment, Camus writes, “He is superior to his fate.”

Finishing off the tarte tatin ($9), its apple cider glaze swirls with buttermilk ice cream and the last crumbs quickly disappear. Draining the last sips of a Pommard 1er Cru Jean-Claude Boisset ($82), a ruby red pinot noir grown mid-slope in Bourgogne, one is both conscious of the absurd and satiated at the same time. And, as Camus wrote, one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

editorial@observer.com

Antica Pesa.

The particular stretch of Williamsburg real estate on which Antica Pesa, a tremendously impressive Roman restaurant, opened in October is no stranger to cucina rustica. Restaurants where Italian food is served in charmingly ramshackle conditions are manifold. Between Fiore, Aurora, Osteria Il Paiolo and other vowel-heavy trattorie too legion to mention, wandering around the neighborhood can feel like stumbling about Cinecitta’s Palermo back lot. But that’s not Antica Pesa.

Whereas those restaurants, whether by design or default, offer a homogenized view of humble Italy, a nation of casalinghe and clotheslines, Antica Pesa—Italian for “the old scale”—presents the Italy of Loro Piana, Fiat, Brioni, Trussardi and Ferragamo. This is the Italy of oligarchs.

On a recent Saturday night, the scales were fully loaded with richesse. Every table in the high-ceilinged room was occupied by patrons who smelled nice and looked nicer. Men wore thick gray sweaters with shawl collars. Women wore Carven frocks and Isabel Marant shoes. Scarves for all, Moscots for many, New Balances for none.

The bar was crowded, but its patrons civilly spaced. Out of a silver cup, a woman sipped a Piazza di Ricci, a cocktail made of vodka, fresh raspberries, mint, lime juice, homemade ginger syrup and ginger beer. Next to her, a man nursed a negroni and checked in on Foursquare.

Even the leather settee in front of the fireplace was occupied by a warm if silent couple. The man had made the mistake of wearing a hoodie. Man that I am, I could tell that he felt insecure in the company of so stylish a crowd. The woman, sensing trouble, drank a cocktail called Goodbye Lovers (Tequila 8, agave sec, yuzu juice, lime juice; $14) to steel her nerves.

That fire, set in a fireplace with an immense burnished-wood frontispiece, imbued the restaurant with a golden light. The fixtures at Antica Pesa are custom-made brass tubes in which bulbs are recessed. They consequently cast a soft brassy glow that seems beamed in from mid-century.

This is not the first Antica Pesa. To find its progenitor, one must travel to Via Garibaldi, 18, in Rome’s Trastevere, the neighborhood of that ancient city that lies west of the River Tiber, and climb up the family vine four generations to 1922, when the Panella family opened the restaurant in a former Vatican tollhouse.

Today, Antica Pesa is to Rome what Cipriani is to New York, a tollhouse for the cavalcade of big-name stars whose brilliance is only burnished by plates of high-priced pasta. The walls are lined with photographs of Hollywood celebrities like ScarJo, Matt Damon and Jessica Alba arm-in-arm with the owner, Francesco Panella, taken in front of a wall full of photographs of celebrities arm-in-arm with the owner, Francesco Panella. It’s a mise-en-abyme of celebrity and cuisine. And that star has not diminished. In early January, the Roman mothership hosted a premiere party for Django. Quentin Tarantino, it turns out, loves the spaghetti cacio e pepe.

The Brooklyn outpost of Antica Pesa is primarily the work of two of the four Panella brothers, Francesco and Simone. But when I arrived, both were in Rome, where they live, and I was met by Lorenzo, the only one of the brothers who lives in New York full time—who, like a Roman colonist of yore, had set off from the shores of Latium to seek his fortune in distant climes.

Suave and handsome, Mr. Panella looks like Johnny Depp impersonating Robert Downey Jr. He is given to cashmere sweaters and high-quality blazers. His goatee is unparalleled in lushness. The menu is expensive—pastas start at $16 and main courses range up to $30—and the presentation of its content is fittingly elegant, the result of its owners having run a very successful restaurant for 90 years. I don’t think it would even occur to them not to serve their fresh baked grissini, foccacia and pane casareccia in a wooden box with a brass clasp or to decant the olive oil—from the family orchard, no less—without a flourish of the hand. They don’t, for lack of a more graceful term, peasant-up their cuisine.

Starters like crudo e bufala croccante ($17), a treacherously addictive ball of imported mozzarella baked in a jacket of filo dough, or arzilla confit ($15), silky confit skate sautéed with escarole, pine nuts and spelt bread, aren’t presented on heavy, chipped porcelain with a floral border. They are, rather, accompanied on broad white plates by an entourage of fussy dots of balsamic vinegar, in one case, or draped, painstakingly, over a hillock of escarole in the other. The rack of lamb ($30) is perfectly frenched, very well cooked and served, not with mashed potatoes, but with a dainty potato gâteau.

Even the pasta, which is hard to present in a way that gives proper credit to the effort needed to produce it, comes across well. The cacio e pepe, in which pecorino and Parmesan bind themselves to thick al dente strands of homemade spaghetti, is phenomenal. Disagree as you will with Mr. Tarantino’s taste for violence, his taste in pasta is top-notch. The schiaffoni all’Amatriciana, little fat rigatoni with guanciale and pecorino, is equally addictive.

In short, the food is presented with pride. It’s a pride that, unlike in many other prideful restaurants, is presented in an entirely unforced and unself-conscious way. The Panella brothers are stars in their own world; their food is lionized in its own town, their charm is unimpeachable and it does not occur to them that it might not fare as well in a foreign land.

Their confidence, I hope, is justified. But, it must be said, confidence has an overweening side and can well swoop perilously into silliness. When I asked Lorenzo why his family opened in Williamsburg, as opposed to, say, the West Village, he told me that the neighborhood reminded him of the scruffy charms of Trastevere. “We wanted to open here,” he said, “before the neighborhood blossomed. Before,” he said, looking at me earnestly, “it was too late.”

So deep and puppylike were his brown eyes and so soothing the little massage he gave my delts that I couldn’t bring myself to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Instead, I sipped a Manhattan that a man in a turtleneck had made for me and nodded. In fact, Williamsburg might be the apotheosis of a neighborhood whose scruff had been shorn by capital and condominiums—the very condominiums, I wager, from which these patrons had issued.

And yet the more I thought about it—aided and abetted by a terrific bottle of teroldego ($35), one of the many stars on an all-Italian wine list, and by the ministrations of a waitress born in Osaka and raised in Sydney, who had moved to Greenpoint only five months earlier and who, she told us, had a passive-aggressive boyfriend—perhaps Mr. Panella was correct. It was just a matter of scale.

Ten years ago, Antica Pesa would have been the restaurant to which Williamsburgians brought their parents in order to prove they didn’t live in a dangerous hinterland. Now, those erstwhile children have grown up, grown richer and grown unashamed to eat well. They can, in fact, eat Lucullan feasts, not in faux grubby diners with egalitarian waiters who nestle next to you, but like mini-captains of industry. And now the burden of parental soothing has fallen farther out on the L, to places like Roberta’s, Northeast Kingdom and Dear Bushwick. Only a fool would call Williamsburg hinter anything.

And so, Lorenzo was right. One flower had withered, and another bud, made of richer stuff, had formed. It was this, the secondary, tertiary and probably quaternary harvest, that Antica Pesa had come to reap. Here I was, a constant gardener, mourning for a petal long since made dust. But now, thanks to Antica Pesa, the scales have finally fallen from my eyes.

The juniper brased lamb neck at The Marrow

At a certain point in a man’s life, usually in his mid- to late 30s, a time when his grandparents are dead or dying, when he may or may not have children of his own, and when his own wrinkles start to remind him of his father’s tired eyes, he begins ardently wishing to how to deal with that millstone, scaffold and lodestar we call family.

One can only cast family aside for so long until its weight accrues like unpaid interest and reaches for closure. One can only take it for granted, unexamined and floating like gossamer in the wind, so long before its tendrils clench. But at this age—which varies from man to man in accordance with the circumstances of his life—the weight of family becomes too much to deny and the import of family too much to shirk. And so, most of us enter therapy.

Some of us, however, open restaurants.

Such is the case with Harold Dieterle, whose new restaurant, The Marrow, opened just before Christmas in the West Village and draws explicitly from the cookbook of his childhood. Mr. Dieterle, 35, is Italian on his mother’s side, German on his father’s, and grew up in West Babylon, Long Island.

The menu at his intimate restaurant is, therefore, equally—and literally—divided between the Italianate cuisine of the Famiglia Chiarelli and the Germanic pantry of the Familie Dieterle. On the side of the menu that is maternal and Italian, there is hand-cut fettuccine, gnudi, cuttlefish with guanciale and riffs on classic Italian dishes. The other side, the paternal and northern European, is gamier, with a braised duck and pretzel dumpling soup, rabbit leg with schupfnudeln, a Bavarian rolled noodle and pan-fried duck schnitzel. (Mr. Dieterle is duck’s greatest interpreter in New York City. He is Gould to duck’s Bach.) On the menu, the sides are divided by a defoliated family tree that separates the two national cuisines like a culino-genealogical Switzerland.

Partition begs partisanship, and it is difficult not to pit the matrilineal against the patrimonial. But Mr. Dieterle is a peacemaker and child of divorce. He generously resists the impulse. He lightens the oft-heavy Germanic preparations, turning pickled herring, so often a salty gut bomb, into an epigram, a crisscross of tender fish accompanied by baby beets. And he ennobles his mother’s humble Palermitan roots through the shrewd addition of luxury to the erstwhile peasant cuisine. A sauce of sweet complexity made of golden raisins, pine nuts, rosemary and spicy cherry peppers, for instance, sits under three plump salt cod gnudi. (Dear Spotted Pig, relinquish your West Village gnocchi crown.) Wicked smart and savvy, Mr. Dieterle rides the brisket train, braising it, rolling it, anointing it with red sauce, enthroning it on polenta and calling it a “braciole.” His quotes, not mine.

This dish, in fact, embodies Mr. Dieterle’s peculiar genius. As a chef, he achieves perfect equipoise between active listener and self-conscious innovator. This was apparent at his first restaurant, Perilla, and to a greater degree at his second, Kin Shop. (See, the familial inclination was already beginning.) There Mr. Dieterle was respectful of traditional Thai cuisine yet assertive of his right to fux wit’ it.

At The Marrow, he increases the record of his struggle with agon to 3-0. Mr. Dieterle’s “vitello tonato,” usually a cold dish of veal with tuna sauce, which sounds gross but isn’t, is made with sautéed stone bass topped with a sweetbreads and tuna-belly sauce. Again, those are his quotes, not mine, and yet the dishes truly feel like a homage rather than a wink. It’s fancy Sunday-at-Nonna’s-house food, which uses those memories—that seemed like memories even at the time they were still unfolding—as a base for exploration, not a butt of jokes. Mr. Dieterle, following the trail blazed by Messrs. Carbone and Torrisi, has given Italian-American immigrant cuisine the American Dream.

Even at his most outré, Mr. Dieterle never falls victim to fancy; rather he contains his fancy, hammers it and works it like a blacksmith ’til it turns to something sharp and flavorful. His juniper-braised lamb neck is inventive but not foolish. And the namesake dish, The Bone Marrow, is as it sounds—a roasted length of cow femur, topped with a squiggle of Meyer lemon aioli and deep orange strips of sea urchin.

The plate belongs on the Famiglia Chiarelli side, and it is true, they do sell fresh sea urchin right past the Orto Botanico in Palermo, fresh from the Med. But I get the feeling this is all Harold himself.

When I had dinner at The Marrow, I ran into a blogroll of critics (Sietsema, Sytsma, Sutton, Sheraton and Kludt). These are all great people, a family unto themselves. But the faces that made me happiest to see, I didn’t recognize at all. Downstairs, at the entrance of the future private dining room, easily overlooked except by the gods of small things, is a fuzzy photograph taken around 1980. A young Harold Dieterle sits in front of a Long Island fireplace between his grandfathers. A row of cheap red stockings is pinned on the hearth. It’s Christmas. Harold Dieterle Sr., on his left, is a thickset bald man with bushy eyebrows, a cardigan and plaid pants. He’s grinning like crazy and looking at his grandson. On his other side is Carmelo Chiarelli, a handsome gray-haired guy with no jacket, gazing at his grandson with a quiet smile. Then there’s Harold, kneeling on bright red shag carpeting with a shit-eating grin, clearly stoked to be there.

His enthusiasm on that wayback Christmas Eve, between two dead men in a house now filled with strangers, stretches over 30 years, jumps from his genes and mutates into dinner. Mr. Dieterle has taken his family dinners and made his family dinner.

My grandfather, a gruff man who worked on the Manhattan Project, still grunts when I drive too fast and once gave me the finger for fighting with my sister. He writes poems, and stayed briefly in L.A., where he cheated on the KCRW radio trivia show. The Kokomo Kid won four times in a row. My own father I won’t speak to, and he’ll never meet my son. My mother has taken recently to long silent retreats and sitting in meditation on the opposite coast. But I love the lady, remote as she is. And I feel this all coming home to roost but can’t evade the swarm. Family is a latent disease.

I am not alone, I hope, in feeling impotent against this useless archive of feeling. But Mr. Dieterle has found an answer, and he suggests a path: he turns his love to food, and if it is less than love that he feels, he makes it sweet by stewing and softens it by braising. He bares his chest, cuts open his veins, breaks apart his bones and serves the tender marrow to all.

editorial@observer.com

Mayfield.

When an ambitious and tremendously good restaurant like Mayfield opens, as it did in November on the corner of Franklin Avenue and Prospect Place in Crown Heights, an ornate choreography is set in motion, no less intricate or predetermined than a tarantella or gavotte.

Aligned on one side, festooned in the pomp of the court, is the stout Old Guard. They begin by wiggling their codpieces and running in little circles shouting “Gentrification!” As they shuffle, they fan themselves with a sheaf of papers emblazoned with statistics on rising rents and evictions and excerpts of Frantz Fanon.

Facing them, bosom implored upward by a tight bodice, is Callow Youth. She shakes her tresses, coquettishly prances and squeals, “My lovelies! Have you ever heard of Crown Heights? I’ve found a new restaurant there and it is simply gorgeous!”

Through the night, the couples whirl more quickly and furiously as they wade deeper into the dance: tradition, wearing the scarlet cloak of Marxism, and naïveté, gauzy in a veil of imbecile white. Spittle flies and commingles with sweat, slicking the floor. Slips occur. By the time the last lutist leaves, the dancers will have collapsed into a multi-limbed pile.

Lost in the tumble, of course, is the food.

Prima facie, it is not difficult to see why Mayfield might set off such fury. Crown Heights is already a neighborhood in flux. After a sordid history of race-tinged strife seemingly overcome of late, it now has the Barclays Center breathing the heavy and hot winds of change down its streets.

Mayfield, where the average entrée costs $16, the walls are white tile, the brick exposed, the lighting soft, the typography custom, the men bespectacled and the women banged, might be a harbinger of what Crown Heights will be in five years time. And it’s a future that, like all futures, contains both net gains and net losses. (What with the current Nets season record, I’m betting on Net losses.)

Mayfield is named after Curtis Mayfield, the great soul funk singer whose hit album was about a cocaine dealer. It is jointly owned by a 37-year-old Upper West Side native named Lev Gewirtzman—previously employed at Tom Valenti’s shmancy Upper West Side restaurant Ouest and Stone Park Café, the Park Slope purveyor of expensive comfort food to NPR subscribers—and Jacques Belanger, a Torontonian who had worked with Mr. Gewirtzman in Mr. Valenti’s empire.

The audacity! Responding to sundry Old Guard comments on the blog I Love Franklin Avenue, Chef Gewirtzman, who has lived in Crown Heights for the last seven years, defended his restaurant’s name with an autobiographical disclosure. “I still remember when I bought the Superfly soundtrack on album from a guy selling used records when I was interning on 125th street for the NYS Division of Human Rights my junior year in high school. It’s been my dream to open a restaurant for many years. When I moved here I was immediately struck by the potential of Franklin Avenue and have been working ever since to make that happen.”

It’s hard to take issue with Mr. Gerwirtzman’s point without being horrible. Surely, we must aver, he is not confined in his naming choices to bands like Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, Phish or, in a more historical vein, Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt. (Though what a surprise that no one has yet named an oyster bar Pearl Jam.) Nor can we expect him to limit the scope of his ambition to a square-block radius wherein everyone looks exactly like he does, especially when he has lived in Crown Heights for seven years. Even the Old Guard, who rail against the vanilla tide of gentrification, blush at the implications of their own argument.

Nevertheless, a white guy opening a fancy restaurant on a black block named after a black soul singer rankles. Yet one of the great pleasures of Mayfield is how quietly brilliant it reveals itself to be upon closer inspection. Mayfield might not be the type of restaurant that will be unduly buzzed about among the critical establishment. It shall never enjoy the constant Instagram flash-panning of @rapo4, @kkrader and @andrewknowlton. Mr. Gewirtzman is well-respected but neither an up-and-comer nor a superstar. His restaurant is not in itself revolutionary. Nor is it timid. Flavors, though not outlandish, are clarion clear. This clarity, more than novelty, betokens the work of a very skilled chef.

Short, goateed and bespectacled, Mr. Gewirtzman is a chef more in the mold of Eisenhower than Patton. His forte isn’t in brash flavor combinations or aggressively avant-garde technique but in the brilliant management of his legions and auxiliaries. He marshals flavors in perfect order, with discipline and skill and just enough of an element of surprise to confound expectation: a touch of yogurt in a butternut squash salad; something called Dante in the roasted Brussels sprouts (it turns out to be an aged sheep’s milk cheese from Wisconsin). The ceviche is picked with something called fresnos; celeriac remoulade accompanies the house-smoked salmon. We are not in the pantry of a quisling, demagogue or tyrant.

The fragile flavor of seared Nantucket Bay scallops ($12) is protected and offset by a sweet dumpling squash, the melancholy spice of watercress and a truffle soy butter in which, a rarity, the truffle isn’t overweening. The homemade pappardelle ($16) —quelle tendresse!—is surrounded by more hearty braised veal breast than a pedophile steer and yet is never lost in the carnivorous scrum. And enough can never be said nor written of Gewirtzman’s Berkshire pork saltimbocca ($22), a holdover from his Ouest days, which doesn’t really jump in the mouth as much as perform delightful little petits jetés across one’s tongue.

Administering to the palates of Park Slope has left Mr. Gerwirtzman with a deep bench of bourgeois comfort food—like a Cuban sandwich ($14), here made with roasted pork shoulder and ennobled by house-made pickles, a burger ($15) whose generous height is matched by its flavor and a Berkshire maple bacon BLT ($13) whose renown has already begun to spread and shall only increase.

However I still quail before the buttermilk fried quail ($20) and would ask Mr. Gewirtzman and all those who chose to substitute so petite a bird for its larger cousin, whether the deeper flavor and residual social cachet of quail offsets the skimpy meat-to-bone ratio. The quail is, happily, the only misstep on the menu.

By removing the element of heat, the small raw bar section—which when I visited consisted exclusively of oysters (MP), sweet Maine shrimp crudo ($10) and local black fish ceviche ($11)—offers Mr. Gewirtzman less to play with, thereby distilling further his excellent taste. The shrimp crudo, in which silken slices of shrimp were accompanied by fennel and crisp apple sharpened by a light lemon oil, is both exactly the sum of its parts and more.

Perhaps the most commendable aspect of Mayfield is that it could be enjoyed, if one so wishes, as just a neighborhood bar. The wine list, which like the rest of the bar is the purview of Mr. Belanger, is democratic, by-the-glass and superb. It contains well balanced, fruit-forward wines like Temperamento Bobal ($9) as well as the all too rarely seen Txacolina ($11), a fresh almost effervescent Basque wine that is to oysters what Hall is to Oates. (The wine in this case is the refreshing Hall to the brinier Oates.) The beer list is even better, drawing from far afield (a Uinta Hop Notch IPA from Salt Lake City, $6) as well as from local breweries like Kelso ($6).

There, at the wood and tile bar, with Curtis Mayfield singing “I’m your pusher man,” in the background, a member of the Old Guard can saddle up, adjust his codpiece, approach a Callow Youth, sipping her planters punch ($12), and ask, “Come here often?”