when you want, where you want.
When Good Chefs Hide in Bad Rooms
Photo: Hugo Yu
The otter burrows into habitats called holts, tunneling imperceptibly into the landscape to make its home. So, it seems, does the Otter, which opened this past September in the Manner hotel. It is as holtish a restaurant as you’re likely to find. Tucked off the lobby, this Otter is all but invisible from the outside and protected from things like sunlight. Nevertheless, danger lurks: Obscurity is the natural predator of the restaurant, which survives by dispersing its charms to lure in curious passersby.
The Otter, like the otter, prefers fish. Though no hotel restaurant can go without a steak and a burger, this one opened at the end of a long year of ascendant seafood and designer raw bars. Whether the pescatarian brief came from hotel management or Alex Stupak of the Empellón restaurants, the latest in a line of established, well-regarded chefs offering their services as hired guns, I couldn’t say. Either way, a combination of Stupak’s usual cooking interests (Mexican, with nods to the also-trendy Basque) and New England chowderism works a treat.
Photo: Hugo Yu
The restrictions of hotel cooking — its need for both variety and accessibility — can cramp a chef’s style. Stupak finds ways to tweak the expected. Parker House rolls come with three different butters, including one that tastes like bouillabaisse. Scallop crudos are served in two brash chile sauces, grassy, vegetal serrano and a sweeter red Fresno — Christmas style, as they’d say in New Mexico. A basketful of fish and chips is as crunchy and burnished brown as you could wish, Spanish mackerel hidden inside the batter. Mackerel is an often-unbeloved fish — strong, oily, the dreaded “fishy” — but its assertiveness is tamed by the salty fry (and McDonald’s-thin fries). Chomping away, I wondered why I’d never noticed how insipid the usual clouds of cod or hake in the classic fish and chips could be. And I’d never given much thought at all to Boston cream pie until I tried Stupak’s, which takes a homestyle cake and elevates it, in beauty and delicacy, to the level of the pâtisserie, worthy of front-window display. And there’s the rub. The holt hides its treasures.
That’s a shame, because the Otter is a good restaurant, with plenty to offer symbiotic species like strolling Sohoites. Yet on a few visits over the past several months, it seemed clear that it isn’t reaching them. The dining room, which tries to make up for its deficiencies of exposure with candlelight, wood paneling, and Art Deco–ish murals in the Diego Rivera style, was often underfilled. The Otter has the benefit of the built-in audience of guests of the hotel. Rooms start at around $800 per night, which lends its own cast to the color of the place. “This feels a little like The White Lotus,” one of my guests whispered as we spotted a woman in a dramatically backless going-out top lingering over cocktails. The bar did seem a little livelier than the tables, though even this is nibbled away at by the presence of a second, separate lounge, called Sloane’s, upstairs. There, too, you can get a couple of seafood-leaning small bites — shrimp cocktail, crab cakes, cottage fries with caviar — and the now-requisite array of martinis, though only at the Otter do they come with a single-oyster sidecar.
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Farther uptown, Brass is another well-insulated restaurant in another hotel from another moonlighting chef. In this case, two. Nestled deep in the Evelyn Hotel — behind reception, then behind the Tusk Bar, a sister cocktail lounge — Brass is, like the Otter, enclosed, though it at least has a skylight. And like the Otter, it does what it can to dress up this disadvantage. There’s a heavy-lidded sexiness sought here, befitting the locale — hotels are for assignations, after all. So what if it’s a little mishmashed, with velvet banquettes sitting under frilled Art Nouveau chandeliers and mirrors hung with faux Corbusier nudes? A baby-grand piano stands in the center of the dining room, played, one night I went, by a gentleman in Harry Caray glasses. “You guys love the Doobie Brothers, huh?” he cracked after one lengthy run. (To defend their honor, I feel compelled to report that the diners had actually requested Debussy.)
Brass, which also opened in the fall, is short for brasserie, and its menu picks up the other big trend of last year: French. As at the Otter, you can start with fruits de mer or fromage or charcuterie or a few hors d’oeuvre. Brass’s chef-partners are Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske, the duo behind the Contra-Wildair universe who have made a specialty of aggressively creative small plates and natural wine delivered with rockish posturing. All this has been imported to Brass — “One is Leonard Cohen; one is Iggy Pop,” a sommelier advised me as I debated between two New World Pinot Noirs — sometimes more creatively than is necessary. Brass’s moules-frites are marinated mussels served atop small batons of chickpea-flour panisse, slightly stodgy. A crown of gougères, smaller and denser than the name would suggest, is dusted with caraway and poppy, giving a hint of everything bagel. Potatoes have found their way into the green salad.
You get the feeling that the twists interest the kitchen more than the classics. A tarte flambée with its canonical fixings had the soggy chew of airline pizza. Still, give these cooks a project and watch them go. The pièce de résistance is a $135 roulade of chicken, deboned, buffed, and delivered in a copper gratin dish atop a purée of potato and celery root.
The mixed blessing of the hotel upstairs both keeps Brass in business and keeps it quiet. Back in the fall, it had a busy energy; on my more recent visit, the crowds were sparse. By 10 p.m., we were the last table seated. Harry Caray, having played through his Brubeck repertoire, turned to tuning his instrument as we moved on to dessert: a yuzu-meringue tart for the twisters, a blackberry-studded vanilla-custard slice (a Napoleon, but shorter) for the classicists. “After-dinner drinks?” our attentive server asked hopefully. The mood might’ve struck if we’d been paying guests in the rooms above. But for these locals at the hotel, it was time to check out.
Photo: Hugo Yu
This posted has been updated. Stone and von Hauske are chef-partners, not chef-consultants, at Brass.
More Restaurant Reviews