the secret to this
creative freedom lets be
plain, more capital
This is the second haiku from the same review … but it’s been a bad week for inspiration.
The first line of this restaurant review from the New Yorker reminds me of an exchange in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Read Window.
A neighbor on the courtyard of James Stewart is a song writer and Grace Kelly can hear him trying out a melody.
“There’s that song again. Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?” askes Ms Kelly. ?
“Well, he gets it from the landlady once a month.” Replies Mr. Stewart.
New York is a phenomenal restaurant city, but rarely is it a thrillingly innovative one. As usual, we can blame capital: the cost of operating a food business in this viciously expensive town makes risktaking far too risky. So it’s exhilarating to have a meal that’s genuinely interesting. At Foxface Natural, a chic little restaurant in the East Village, the owners, Sivan Lahat and Ori Kushnir, are doing something almost rebellious in their apparent lack of regard for trends, or social media, or financial success.
The secret to this creative freedom is, let’s be plain, more capital. Lahat and Kushnir are devoted gastronomes; they’re also former techies who earned enough money to quit their day jobs and opened an idiosyncratic sandwich shop called Foxface—because they wanted to, and because they could—which became famous partly on the strength of a camel-meat pita. The sandwich shop is now closed, but the duo remains committed to menu as menagerie: at Foxface Natural, which opened this spring, you may encounter purple clams (with cucumber five ways), Boer goat (smoked, with a tomato-saffron sauce), pig’s blood (a sausage filling), or gooseneck barnacles that resemble dragon claws. “Where do you source your kangaroo?” I asked recently, staring down a marsupial tartare. The ruby meat was lean and subtle, tossed with punchy slivers of pickled rhubarb, spiced intoxicatingly with coriander, fenugreek, and turmeric. (The answer, of course, is Australia.)
There are recognizable flavors at Foxface and recognizable shapes but—in the talented hands of the chef David Santos—rarely both at once. The closest the kitchen comes to convention is a hulking cross-section of striped bass that’s roasted on the bone in a wood-burning oven and served over an explosively flavorful sauce inspired by chraime, a Sephardic tomato stew. That frizzy schnitzel adorning so many tables is a fried disk of sweetbreads, marshmallow light, adorned with chanterelles and corn—a study in yellows and golds. The pasta is a girella: a single, lengthy, snakelike pocket, presented in a spiral, like a jagged flower. Its fillings change; I tried it stuffed with golden tile-fish, buttery and sweet, set atop a sunset-orange sweep of sauce Nantua, bathed in a tarragon broth drizzled tableside.
Foxface engages its small space with satisfying efficiency: order the sourdough, lusciously soft, presented with a plate of cultured butter and a tiny tableau of pickles, and you might see a server pull down a loaf from a ledge on the wall, where a half-dozen boules are set on their sides, like books. Other shelves display bottles from Foxface’s pointedly unconventional wine list. Sitting at the dining bar one evening, I swirled a Vermentino-Moscato blend that looked like apple juice and tasted wild and metallic, like beautiful gasoline. It was strange, assured, unbothered, exquisite. (Dishes $11-$69.)
From a review of Foxface Natural in TABLES FOR TWO in the New Yorker, Sep 25, 2023, Issue 30 Volume 99.
No Haiku For You 