Restaurant Week can be so confusing: Should you take advantage of bargain meals, or spend more money to try a place at its best? Fortunately, certain spots present no such vexing choices. They’re the Scenes in Search of Cuisine — eating establishments where eating at any time or price is secondary to the party vibe or to often fleeting, all-around fabulousness.
Some are club-like, with velvet ropes and/or deejays. Others are Krazy Glued to an actual club, so you can conveniently partake of solid food before or after your romantic evening of drinking, dancing and drugging.
Overcooked fish upstairs, underage boozers downstairs — vertical integration, after-hours style. Not that any of the places described in this column tolerate any illegal activity; the ones that do are too odious to mention.
We dropped in on three scene spots at times when they were less busy than usual — and there could be no excuse of an overtaxed kitchen. But how much more fun when you wait 90 minutes for a table reserved a month ago!
* LAVO, 39 E. 58th St.
I knew better than to dine again at Lavo — above the club of the same name — after a night when it was packed with Tony Soprano types vying to be heard above the din from a deejay stand. But the Italian-American food wasn’t bad at all last winter, so I risked returning for lunch.
The crowd was business-class, the music all Frank at his 1950s greatest. There was another difference: The original executive chef was gone. Enter linguini with clams and white sauce. The too-salty broth tasted fishy.
The standard Linguini Clam-Loss-Factor Formula requires that at least half the clams in shells must be chewable by a human with a full set of teeth. This rule was ignored at Lavo, which went 0 for 7. Lavo’s chicken paillard turned instantly to clay; you could get the same thing in a deli for $7 or $8, compared to $22 at Lavo.
* KENMARE, 98 Kenmare St.
The hostess would not seat my wife, who arrived ahead of me, because “it is the chef’s policy not to serve incomplete parties.” Which raised two questions: 1) How dumb or hostile must a greeter be to let a customer stand for 30 minutes in a near-empty dining room? 2) There’s a chef?
Kenmare might be the least tolerable of “scene” joints. Atop the club of the same name, it bowed with culinary aspirations, thanks to the involvement of Little Owl chef Joey Campanaro. He left in February, perhaps to save his reputation.
Owl-inspired gravy- meatball sliders devolved into spheroid matter with scant gravy or flavor. Tuna tartare proved more name than fact; it was mainly red snapper with harshly citric greens. A product called “The Chicken” was The Worst; veal cutlet “Milanese” could moonlight as a sponge. By 10:30 p.m., the house was as dead as at 9. But one table held an eightsome of guys and a lone woman. She turned out to be, Page Six reported, Tiger Woods mistress Rachel Uchitel. Free Range goes where the action is, even if it isn’t the kind we wanted.
* HOTEL GRIFFOU, 21 W. Ninth St.
At least they’re nice. And Hotel Griffou isn’t a club appendage. Sure, it acted like a club when it opened two years ago, but it now fancies itself a serious restaurant. The chef claims “seasonal” affinity.
But the weirdly accented recording when you call — “Hotel Greef-eww” — is your first cue to cringe. The fun ends with the cutely decorated underground rooms. Cavatelli came with eggplant of no identifiable season. Farro risotto had the right texture — when you found it amid onions and carrots as flavorless as those in coffee-shop chicken soup. A parched Iowa pork chop begged for jus, sauce or moisture of any kind. It came with “spring” vegetables — didn’t that season end three weeks ago?
I hadn’t sent wine back in years, but Hotel Griffou broke the streak with a glass of sour pinot noir. Molten chocolate cake was molten chocolate broth, and ice cream boasted the least vanilla taste since house-brand ice milk at the supermarket where I worked in 1968.