X marks the spot where David Chang fell to earth. Ma Peche (“mother peach”) is a soft landing for him — far from a fiasco — but a definite comedown for the city’s most insufferably hyped, over-awarded, self-dramatizing young chef. You’ve been waiting for that, right?
The X is Ma Peche’s giant, cruciform communal table, the centerpiece of its dining room. For the past two months, it’s hosted some marvelous meals courtesy of executive chef Tien Ho — but they might not be enough for some of Chang’s fanatical true-believers.
Ma Peche isn’t as daring or original as Chang’s downtown Momofuku “empire,” a trio of tiny eateries with fewer seats combined than Ma Peche has. But it serves a broader audience than East Villagers with time on their hands to wait 45 minutes for tables.
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You want to enjoy the place for what it is: a more than welcome, accessibly exotic addition to the Midtown eating scene, with quirks that make it lovable and dislikable by turns. But that’s difficult, thanks to the overhanging Chang mystique.
Like Chang’s Noodle Bar and Ssam Bar, Ma Peche doesn’t take reservations (except for its Beef 7 Ways, which requires on advance online reservation). It’s besieged at lunch and dinner, but much easier to penetrate if you go even slightly earlier or later.
Although the place has settled down since its early days, some howlers are hard to get out of our system. A waiter claimed that unopened mussels were fine to eat — maybe, but we took no chances with seven of 30-odd specimens locked up tight. The original, weird wine list failed to differentiate between white and red. The “sommelier” recommended a bottle, then admitted she hadn’t tasted it.
The place runs better now, but oy! — lunacies remain. There are no desserts. Slippery paper napkins, like dental bibs, fall from your lap to the floor: “I pick them up with my toes,” a friend laughed.
The challenge of living up to Chang’s aura is unfair to Ho, a fine chef who previously ran the kitchen at Ssam Bar. Nor does it help that his boss unveiled Ma Peche in teasing glimpses, like a pole stripper — first, “preview” dishes on the hotel mezzanine; then lunch in the dining room; then dinner in the bar; and dining-room dinner a month ago.
Ma Peche is pricier than Momofuku Noodle Bar and Ssam Bar. Its nominal inspiration is not Korean but Vietnamese; its favored creature not the pig but the cow, sourced from various ranches (“All our beef is from different animals,” we were proudly told).
Even a few dishes that read as if they could appear on a Momofuku menu miss the boat. A pool of captivating fish sauce, lemongrass and garlic lurked at the bottom of rice noodles with spicy pork, but to extract it required navigating a mess of scorched noodles.
But, what a thrill to taste the magic Ho makes of rice in a different form: as part of what’s now the city’s best steak frites. Rice fries, stacked like toy logs, deliver salt crackle and a mysterious popcorn-y flavor. The 12-ounce shoulder cut was crisp-seared after a turn in sous-vide, pink inside, and imbued with a primordial ambrosia of grass, grain, garlic and thyme.
Although Ho’s menu includes no Thai dishes, it reflects the sweet-and-sour, salty-spicy dialogues for which Vietnam’s neighboring cuisine is famed. Textural contrasts delight as well: Puffed rice lent a playful crackle to silken raw fluke with pickled pineapple and herbs.
Grilled trout was moist, crisp-skinned and tinted with almond-coconut sauce. “It will be pink, but cooked through,” the waitress promised of roasted chicken, a trio of skin-on, white and dark cylindrical rounds. Their buttery texture was complemented by a ranch dressing-like blend of buttermilk, pickled ramp leaves and mild chilies.
Burgundy snails paired with a fat little pork sausage, tough in the early days, were more recently tender enough for a baby’s teeth. They come in a pan brimming with chicken stock aromatic with garlic, shallots, thyme and bay leaf — we ran our baguettes through until not a drop remained.
But then comes the bitter end: no dessert except for cheeses. You can buy blueberry cream cookies at the Milk Bar in the lobby and take them home — or order them at tables on the hotel mezzanine two long flights up.
That’s the same mezzanine Chang admitted to us last winter was “not conducive to eating.” If he wants to be regarded as a grown-up chef — not merely a wunderkind by those who fear to tread north of 14th Street — he needs to treat his customers like grown-ups, too.
scuozzo@nypost.com