Food & Drink

All brine and no Pearl

An unhappy ice cream treat tastes like bitter medicine.

An unhappy ice cream treat tastes like bitter medicine. (
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Diners have to dive much too far to find the gems at the too loud, uncomfortable and gimmicky Pearl & Ash on the Bowery. (Gabi Porter (2))

Let’s get the good news about Pearl & Ash out of the way:

Open six weeks, it serves some captivating “modern and globally inspired small plates” out of an open kitchen nearly as tiny as the dishes. Chef Richard Kuo has a fine hand with spices, herbs and oils and a flair for small-scale, intricate composition.

Some choices — like a thrilling, harmonious arrangement of raw, thinsliced diver scallops blow-torchdusted with berbere spice and presented with silken strands of fennel — seem impossibly fully realized (and filling) for $6.

The staff’s as sweet and poised as can be. But like lesser restaurants where customers don’t care what they eat as long as it’s AMAZING, as they say on Yelp, Pearl & Ash is up to its eyeballs in attention begging shticks and nuisances.

Now, every small new downtown restaurant acts like it’s inBrooklyn. A chef from Williamsburg’s “New Nordic” popup Frej! A 400 bottle wine list on a Bowery block where oldschool winos still guzzle swill on the sidewalk!

And, OMG, ice cream made from Earth’s most viletasting spirit! (That would be Fernet Branca. We’ll get to it.)

Naturally, all the weirdness recently landed Pearl & Ash, the No. 1 spot on Eater.com’s “Manhattan Heatmap,” and earned it oodles of groveling inches in print.

Pearl & Ash takes only a “limited number” of reservations for its 60 seats.

Guys, this isn’t Bushwick.

The black-and-blond room is striking, with a tall, backlit bar, diamond-pattern steel floor and lattice-like-wall installations set with flickering candles. Poplar tables and bar stools are said to “channel the lush farmlands that once filled the nowpaved downtown streets.”

But a few hours on a backless low seatmade me feel paved over. The tooloud soundtrack—overworked rock, Motown and doo-wop — belongs in a dive bar, not a placewith wine priced up to $995.

The vast list overwhelms the brief menu — and patience. It’s smartly compiled by talkative sommelier Patrick Cappiello, a veteran of deepcellared Gilt and Veritas. He knows it insideout, like the “pinnacle”2010 Ar-not-Roberts he recommended— aCalifornia North Coast Syrah that blossomed in the glassevenas seared octopus, tender at first, tightened up on my plate.

I saw few bottles on tables even though they don’t yet have a full liquor license. Most customers seemed to order low alcohol cocktails which the bar turns out with great skill.

Even with Cappiello’s caring help, who wants to peruse hundreds of international choices — eight vintages alone of Olga Raffault Chinon “Les Picasses” from the LoireValley? — to go with eensy servings of pork meatballs? There are many good bottles under $200 and some less than $100, but still.

Kuo’s creations are inventive but usually not fussy. (Raw and small items, $6 to $10; fish and meat, $21 to $27 for a full portion, $11 to $15 for a half, which in most cases suffice.) Accents may be Mediterranean, Asian or just “marketdriven.”

The menu on its own is two star worthy, not the most cutting edge but compelling if you skip those dull meatballs. Crunchy seaweed suavely complements salmon delicately tea smoked. No beef I’ve had this year was better than Kuo’s skirt steak, the grassfed cut lent a rustic tavern twist by “prohibition ale sauce” (a veal and beer reduction).

Black olive-canola oil and well modulated puree of white beans, anchovies and goat cheese made Chatham cod faintly Spanish — and new.

But it all comes crashing down with dessert. There are only two. Coffee semifreddo is fine, but you’ll likely risk the Fernet Branca ice cream sandwich out of morbid curiosity.

It comes wrapped in paper adorned with a smiley face. “It will taste like Vicks VapoRub,” my wife predicted. It lived down to the bitter Italian liqueur’s medicine and mud reputation.

Putting it on the menu is either a screech for attention — or an act of hostility. I miss the days when dining out was more about what we ate than what we put up with for the sake of it.

scuozzo@nypost.com