Page 75 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

No.
O R D E R I N G
E V E RY T H I N G
AT K ĀW I
W O U L D N OT B E
W R O N G .
No.
12 American restaurant scene a hard elbow to
In the fifteen years since he gave the
the sternum with the arrival of Momofuku
Noodle Bar, David Chang had never opened
a restaurant that wholeheartedly bear-
hugged his Korean heritage—until Kāwi,
that is. By offering the Seoul-born fine-dining
veteran Eunjo Park carte blanche in the
kitchen, Chang is treating Manhattan to an
unfiltered dose of fire and funk, which is all
the more surprising when you realize that
Kāwi is serving yesterday’s stinky soybean
stew (that’s what it’s called) and bowls of raw
clams in the sterile, Stanley Kubrickian
hallways of the Hudson Yards shopping mall.
Toto, we’re not in a food court anymore:
Pay attention to the way the foie gras segues
into the rice in the kimbap; tune in to that
sustained power chord of heat hovering
behind the raw fish in the hwedupbap.
Park’s Wagyu ragù—with long semi-
scissored rice cakes flooded with a sweet,
meaty Bolognese—might be my favorite
dish of 2019.
gram star because of his jewel-like, wildly creative
sweets, but at his new full-service restaurant in the Miami area,
we also get to see how a virtuoso baker can work
miracles with a Cuban sandwich and an avocado toast.
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I’m bound to love any restaurant that has a
dessert called “we finally got a piece of the pie.”
(And if you don’t get the reference, or the extra
layer of meaning behind it, I’m not going to explain the thirty-five-
it to you here.) The entire menu at Virtue is like a
spread at a family reunion piled high with dishes year-old Gotham
that inspire such love. Moist cornbread cradling a Bar & Grill kicked
off a summer
pat of butter the size of a bar of soap. Shrimp
skirmish when
blanketed in rémoulade on a crunchy bed of fried they bid farewell to
green tomatoes. Velvety mac and cheese (below).
But chef Erick Williams reveals his virtuosity with downtown stalwart
Alfred Portale and
lighter dishes, like a plate of broccoli, garlanded
replaced him with
with pecans and chunks of cheese, that is guaran-
table where it happens to show up. hold-nothing-back
Chilean culinary
teed to become a favorite at any Thanksgiving
firebrand Victoria
Blamey, whose
approach to acid
and spice is a far
cry from the tuna
tartare of yore.
By now, she has
utterly recharged
a restaurant that
had vanished from
the conversation.
We’re rooting
for her.
No.
Once so fresh, the omakase/kaiseki
game in America can sometimes feel
14 bedeviled by performative stiffness, luna-
tic prices, and high-decibel customers
with a lot of money and no class. (See a
very special episode of Billions.) That’s
( T I E ) why it’s so refreshing to find two new
sanctuaries with plenty of local soul. At
Sushi Note, named as a nod to the Blue
Note record label, chef Kiminobu Saito
tailors each bite of his omakase offering
to the rhythms of conversation and whim,
in the spirit of the American jazz masters
he reveres. And at Odo, chef Hiroki Odo
prepares a kaiseki meal—with sushi by
Seong Cheol Byun midway through, as a
sort of symphonic movement with a
guest soloist—that delivers one seasonal
surprise after another. At both restau-
rants you’ll have fun, and I’m guessing
you weren’t expecting that.
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