Ny Times Review the Strip House Seafood Plateau
Restaurants
Giving Luxury the Thrill of Danger
- Kobe Club
- Satisfactory
- Airtight
IT'S a rare and less than propitious moment when dinner out begins with a server asking: "Are y'all scared?" Only that eerie query fix the stage for a recent meal at Kobe Lodge, and information technology was prompted by one of this bizarre steakhouse'southward many design oddities.
Hanging upside down from the ceiling in the nigh pitch-blackness dining room are sharp, gleaming samurai swords, about 2,000 of them. The server volunteered that number, appended with an assurance that the blades, firmly anchored, shouldn't cause any concern.
The food and the bill should. Although Kobe Gild does right past the fabled mankind for which it's named, it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that depict claret from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account.
For the most part information technology feels like a cynical stab at exploiting the current mania for steakhouses in Manhattan past contriving one with an especially costly conceit and more gimmicks than all of the others combined.
Unsurprisingly, it's the piece of work of the restaurateur and gimmick maestro Jeffrey Chodorow, who scored big in years by with Mainland china Grill and Asia de Republic of cuba but hasn't had as much local success of late.
Kobe Club occupies the Midtown infinite once inhabited past Mix in New York, Mr. Chodorow's derisive, ill-fated collaboration with the French chef Alain Ducasse.
Mix wasn't even Mr. Chodorow's flashiest recent failure. Who can forget Rocco'due south on 22nd, scene of "The Eatery," where Mama'due south meatballs were sauced with acrimony and eventual litigation? Or its curt-lived successor in that location, Brasserio Caviar & Banana?
Brasserio Caviar & Banana — the proper noun really does behave repeating — tried a grill-from-Ipanema approach and foreshadowed Mr. Chodorow'due south fascination with sharp objects. Meats came on disturbingly, dangerously long skewers.
Every bit its name suggests, Kobe Lodge pays tribute to the fatty-marbled beef of pampered wagyu cattle, beefiness correctly termed Kobe merely if it is from a particular area of Japan.
The menu at Kobe Lodge advertises genuine Kobe beef, along with Australian and American wagyu, and encourages discerning carnivores to compare and contrast these unlike sources by making small cuts available and assembling a "samurai's flight" of 4-ounce tasting portions of Australian, American and Japanese wagyu, plus six ounces of American prime beef, for $190.
For $295, there's an "emperor's flight" of four ounces each of Kobe fillet and strip loin and x ounces of Kobe rib-center. Although tempted by this imperial excursion, intended for two, I confined myself to more than restrained, strategic samplings.
They were enough to establish the kitchen's usual competence with steaks, grilled and seasoned simply with salt and pepper, the correct call. Anything more would distract from the glories of a steer well fed.
At Kobe Guild these glories were more evident in the Australian than in the American wagyu, and they were about axiomatic in the Kobe, which has the densest marbling. Kobe does for steak what o-toro does for tuna, showcasing a holy communion of flesh and fat, inseparable from each other and impossibly silky on the natural language. It's rapturous. At upwards of $v a bite, information technology had better be.
Kobe and wagyu never come cheap, then the jaw-dropping prices of many steaks at Kobe Club — $35 for simply iv ounces of American wagyu fillet, $150 for 10 ounces of Kobe rib-eye — aren't entirely unwarranted.
But even diners who steer articulate of wagyu, thereby missing the whole betoken of the restaurant, don't get off easy. A 12-ounce prime fillet is $48, an organic chicken entree $32.
What's more than, servers seem intent on plumping upwardly the tab, whether by omitting any mention of a tap when asking about water preferences or rushing to replace cocktails and glasses of wine that are suspiciously shallow on inflow. Surrendering to that hustle is all too like shooting fish in a barrel: extra alcohol helps absorb out the environment.
And blotting is essential, not but because of the swords. In ane corner in that location's a broad screen with an image of roaring flames, a seemingly inadvertent and incomparably unfortunate allusion to the telly Yule Log.
Strings of leather that wait like avoiding shoelaces dangle here, there and everywhere, creating sinister-looking canopies and screens. Black-painted bricks in some areas and chains forth one wall bring to mind a torture chamber.
If Akira Kurosawa hired the Marquis de Sade as an interior decorator, he might stop up with a gloomy rec room similar this. Volition the concluding samurai to leave please turn on the lights?
Volition someone else prune the tables of their crazy-making clutter? Oversize ornamental plates leave too little room for anything else, and although salt, pepper and steak sauce are already present, a gratuitous chemical science-set tableau of greyness, pinkish and black specialty salts arrives with the steaks. The steaks themselves sprout toothpick flags identifying the land of the beef's origin.
The carte du jour is as tricked-out every bit the presentations, detailing thirteen available steak toppings (classic béarnaise, lobster béarnaise, wasabi-and-shiso béarnaise, advertising infinitum) and four kinds of mashed potatoes. The potatoes announced amongst a anticipated profusion of sides, many given a vacuously luxurious sprinkling of truffles or truffle oil, just to tip the restaurant's slavishness to trendiness off the charts.
The appetizers, entrees and desserts alternate steakhouse stalwarts similar Caesar salad, Dover sole and cheesecake with less predictable fare, some of which, similar a starter of salmon cured in sake, reflects the eatery's quasi-Asian bearings.
And in that location are winners, to be sure: y'all can't throw this many swords without occasionally hitting the wagyu balderdash'due south-middle.
The wagyu and Kobe beef tartare, prepared tableside, had a lusciousness in sync with its $32 toll. Fried Malpeque oysters benefited richly from a smothering of creamed spinach and lobster béarnaise.
Merely more of the nutrient was disappointing, sometimes fifty-fifty infuriating, exist information technology a rubbery roasted pork chop, mayhap left too long in its brine; limp iceberg lettuce, propped upwardly insufficiently past bluish cheese; those mashed potatoes, gluey; or a crème brûlée in dire need of a crunchier hood.
And some of the nutrient was alarming. A clam in an underwhelming common cold seafood platter had a metallic tang, while an American strip loin had a sourness that didn't sense of taste like aging or, for that matter, similar anything anyone intended.
On the night when the server bodacious me of my condom, every bit I put my coat back on and headed toward the door, I of a sudden constitute that I couldn't leave. Something was pulling me back, only what?
A delayed appreciation for the restaurant's triple-decker crab cake? A yearning to retrieve a toothpick flag? A need to make peace with the check, which had come pinned to a wooden board by a dagger?
No, it was i of those leather strings, which had wrapped like a tentacle around me. Scary indeed.
Kobe Club
Satisfactory (no stars)
68 West 58th Street; (212) 644-5623.
ATMOSPHERE A dimly lighted theater of about 100 seats that's part samurai fantasia, function torture chamber and packed with mesomorphic guys on expense accounts.
Audio LEVEL Very loud, thanks in role to a blaring multigenerational soundtrack with Don Henley, Steely Dan, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Garbage.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Beef tartare; fried oysters; applewood-smoked bacon; crab block; wagyu and Kobe beef steaks; broiled Alaska.
WINE List International, relatively expensive and rightly focused on reds. Supplemented by extensive lists of other spirits and special cocktails past David Wondrich.
PRICE RANGE Appetizers, $9 to $32. Entrees, $25 to $150. Desserts, $9 to $12.
HOURS v:xxx to 11:30 p.m. Mon through Saturday; limited late-night menu until 2 a.thousand. Th through Saturday. Lunch hours to be added later this month.
RESERVATIONS For prime dinner times, call at least two weeks ahead.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Archway, most of restaurant and accessible restroom on street level.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reverberate the reviewer'south reaction to nutrient, ambient and service, with price taken into consideration. Bill of fare listings and prices are subject to modify.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN:
(None) Poor to satisfactory
* Good
** Very good
*** Excellent
**** Extraordinary
Ratings reflect the reviewer's reaction to nutrient, ambience and service, with toll taken into consideration.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/dining/reviews/07rest.html
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