‘You don’t normally find red bean inside a churro,” a friend remarked about one dessert at new Tribeca Canvas. Damn right you don’t — yet, there it was, among innumerable imponderables from globe-girdling “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto.
Among them: How crummy does a new restaurant have to be before it makes a celebrity toque a joke? The place isn’t quite as awful as Guy’s American Kitchen — but Guy Fieri had little reputation to ruin. Morimoto is taken seriously, at least by those who follow his every on-screen cooking duel with Bobby Flay.
Tribeca Canvas has been in the works forever — it was first touted in the press in the summer of 2010. Sadly true to the hype, it isn’t “creative” Japanese like Morimoto’s namesake Chelsea Market flagship, but promises “comfort food . . . marked by seamless integration of Western cooking techniques and Asian ingredients.”
Whatever that means is served in a loud, cheap-looking, high-ceilinged brick barn hung with eerie, brain-like ceiling fixtures. Said to be made from Indonesian vines, they recall plastic terrors from the ’60s sci-fi series “The Outer Limits.”
They throw mercifully scant light on canvases splashed with tree branch images said to “pay homage” to TriBeCa, a neighborhood nearly devoid of trees. The menu pays homage to Morimoto’s chutzpah in thinking he can sell anything to downtowners with grown-up dough and 16-year-olds’ tastes.
Maybe he’s right. The house was full on my visits, even Sunday night. I had one truly fine dish, luscious braised pork ribs with fried rice “risotto” that reminded us of the crusty socarrat at the bottom of a paella pan.
Most everything else was the silly, clumsily assembled party matter, served more or less communally, of a suburban roadhouse on Super Bowl night. Asian and Western flavors alike shrank from an onslaught of deep-frying, sweetening and creaming; without ranch dressing, executive chef Hisanobu Osaka’s kitchen wouldn’t know where to start.
How could Morimoto, once a top chef at Nobu, lend his name to this? He’s less a chef than a branding machine, with restaurants in the US, India and Japan, more TV, and proliferating business interests including a beer company.
Pickled daikon lent piquancy to steamed ragu buns filled with lamb rather than pork — satisfying if nothing new to anyone weary of Vietnamese simulations. Things went south from there. “Lumpy potstickers” better described pork/shrimp gyoza. A $26 entree called Duck Duck Cous, including seared breast and elusive leg confit, tasted of little except for a mystery agent permeating the couscous.
Wasn’t “sea bass,” a $28 entree, Chilean bass? “Yes, it is,” the waiter agreed. (If only the menu tasted as good as the friendly and well-versed staff make it sound.) It wasn’t a bad cut at all. It came with “creamy” farro, a grain prized for its firmness, cooked to an insipid mush like baby food.
Kurobuta corn dogs? Tough little pork numbers bland as canned Vienna sausage, skewered on ice-cream bar sticks under batter theoretically crispened with fried potatoes; only one of three shaggy dogs had the least crackle.
Morimoto’s mac ’n’ cheese “interpretation”? Limp elbows and four unidentifiable cheeses in a somnolent alloy that a bread-crumb sprinkling failed to arouse. Stir in a poached egg on top and, voilà! It’s as gooey and indistinct as before.
The town’s awash in great meat pies, so many that New York magazine featured eight of them this week. Here, peel back the flimsy, soggy “crust,” witness an impressive emission of steam, and play “find the chicken.”
It took an effort to unearth unseasoned breast and sausage fragments; the main ingredient of the “pie” was air.
Tribeca Canvas is open nightly till 4 a.m. — a compelling reason to stay off the streets, watch “Iron Chef America” and enjoy what you’re missing.