Anyone who eats out often in New York will have a lot of questions. Like, why do taco-joint waiters talk like “Downton Abbey” butlers?
But the young woman in the busy communal sink area at cyclopean new Manon in the Meatpacking District the other night mustn’t get out of the house much.
“Can I use the mirror in private?” she asked the attendant, who shook his head with a bemused “WTF?” expression.
WTF? occurs to you early and often at Manon, the three-level, 20,000-square-footer (407 W. 14th St.; 212-596-7255) from Moscow-based, Russian-French owner Andrei Dellos. How could even a gazillionaire open a place so gargantuan ($1 million annual rent, as I reported last year) on the heels of his colossal instant-flop, czarist-fantasy Brasserie Pushkin uptown?
Dellos recently reinvented Pushkin as a modern-American place called Betony (41 W. 57th St.; 212-465-2400). But it’s a molecule compared to Manon, which boasts two floors of crystal-chandeliered lounges with a blue-glowing bar and a third-floor dining room framed in interminable brick under a spidery, wire-mesh ceiling.
As the only critic who had anything nice to say about Pushkin, permit me to raise some WTFs.
Who are the giraffe-heeled babes and swarthy, slobby guys jamming Manon on Saturday night when the elite classes have fled town en masse? (Unlike at Pushkin, I heard not a word of Russian but more than a little “Jersey Shore.”)
Which Einstein mixologist wrote a cocktail list that doesn’t say what’s in the drinks, but “describes their flavors like wine,” as the waitress bravely put it?
“Marshmallow Cloud” involves three kinds of rum and the house “considers it a well-balanced strawberry daiquiri,” she tells us. Yet a request for a classic daiquiri, a strawberry-free drink, brings the apology, “We can’t make that, we don’t have strawberries.” WTF?
With the staff sorting out confusion at every table, it took 40 minutes from the time we sat to taste a sip of booze. The drinks, when they finally reached us, were killer. The not-bad American food fell shy of intoxicating.
Boldly for the nabe, the menu lists “first courses” and “main courses” rather than share plates; examining it by the light of slick table lamps with four brightness settings, baffled party animals looked as if they’d come upon a rotary phone. Andrei, conventional menus are supposed to be for uptown.
Meanwhile, poor Betony — named for an obscure medicinal herb — has been stripped of the “Versailles-inspired” murals and tchotchkes that made Brasserie Pushkin a hoot; it has its predecessor’s bones without the borscht. The cuisine’s now “refined modern American fare that is both familiar and engaging,” courtesy of a chef who once worked at Eleven Madison Park.
The menu’s organized in stark columns meant to suggest the one at EMP. A few dishes tasted wonderful, but others outsmarted themselves with cutesy presentations that raised the WTF, “Where do I start?”
Shellfish ragout (tough specimens in mysterious green broth) came with a web-like wafer on top resembling a Cantonese bird’s nest. “Just crack it like creme brulee,” the waiter advised. WTF?
“Is your black bass equally tasty?” In fact, it was excellent once I found the teensy cut under a cloud of flavorless foam. The wine by the glass pour was stingier still. But, hey, they’ve got a lot of rubles to pay back.