Andrew Carmellini’s latest Tribeca restaurant has a conundrum that could be filed under Good Problem to Have. The vegetable-focussed food is so good, so gorgeous and seasonal, that the setting, a curtained annex to the Smyth Hotel that has changed hands twice in the past two years, feels incongruously dispassionate. The blond-wood tables with straw-colored banquettes are nice enough, and the room is hushed and tasteful, but how lovely it would be to eat this exuberant food, like the luscious pea soup, in a garden! (A New Yorker can dream.) The soup is made from the freshest peas, puréed into a cool, thick Kelly-green cream, topped with a crunchy little salad of minted sugar-snap peas and a scoop of horseradish ice cream—this is the exquisite taste of summer.
How is it that the tomatillos, tossed with white cabbage and cilantro, sitting quietly at the side of a house-made-duck-sausage banh mi, taste like such sweet, healthy candy? At lunch recently, this was preceded by more tomatoes, multi-hued heirlooms, prettily mixed with green Castelvetrano olives and piled on top of a spelt crisp spread with garlicky white-bean purée. The tomatoes’ strong competition for best appetizer was the utterly unsuspecting beetroot tartare. A disk of shredded cooked beets sounds the opposite of exciting, but there it was, with horseradish cream and a buttered rye crumble and topped with smoked trout roe, like some kind of perverse, delicious beet Brown Betty. Last place went to the obligatory burrata, which was sadly dry, and given little help from macerated strawberries, even though they were the tiny, ostentatiously natural variety.
Summer has been good to Little Park, but Carmellini doesn’t just do vegetables. Grilled sardines are tangy with vinegar; tuna crudo is extravagantly garnished with microgreens, beech mushrooms, and Fresno pepper; dreary farro tagliatelle is made fun with crab, asparagus, peas, and a lemon kick. A hefty aged lamb porterhouse is served on the bone with fermented hot sauce; strip steak is charred to medium rare. It’s not until the meat comes out that you realize there’s not a starch in sight. Fries with that steak wouldn’t kill anyone, although the tangle of dazzlingly bright greens is quite distracting.
The room may be subdued, but that afternoon it was livened up by a waitress with the guileless charisma of Sandra Bullock in her rom-com heyday. When asked what to do about dessert, she explained her predilection for the malted-milk panna cotta: “I’m a Whopper person.” Sounds like fun. Even better was a moist blueberry cake with corn ice cream. It will be interesting to see what Carmellini can do with the grim array of local root vegetables of a New York winter. But first, September should be glorious. ♦
Open daily for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Entrées $15-$34.
