One of the highlights of Vitae’s seasonal, modern-American menu is its ridiculously excellent grouper with persillade. (Zandy Mangold )
Vitae is a nice new modern-American place near Grand Central Terminal. It’s not original in the least, nor special in the way that turns critics to jelly and makes blogs go bananas. You could almost call its menu ordinary, although ordinary of a very high order.
Except for this: There are near-zero modern-American restaurants worth going to anywhere nearby. Steakhouses aside, the East 40s off Fifth Avenue are barren of places you’d take a date, much less a third date, for Manhattan’s most familiar, inexhaustibly compelling cuisine.
Two-month-old Vitae is eye-popping in a way not every eye will love. The main floor’s wrapped in a spidery cage of shimmering nickel that’s echoed in the carpet pattern. A cozier mezzanine with beveled mirrors affords an expansive view of the whole fussy space.
Like the front bar framed in blond wood and a ceiling recessed with amoeba-like cutouts, the design by Niels Guldager of Studio CMP yearns to shout, “Midcentury.” Not that you’ll find the alpha-lunchers of midcentury masterpiece the Four Seasons.
This is a place where midlevel Midtown execs trade more mundane shop talk. “I told her to get off her groove thing and get a grip on her department,” laughed one lovely lady to another. The buzz is muted at night, when mellow lighting makes the rooms more romantic.
Owner/chef Edwin Bellanco’s been around a bunch of blocks — he’s been at Gramercy Tavern, Danube, Bouley, Cru and the French Laundry in Napa — but Vitae is the first place that’s his own.
His premiere starring stint reveals a sure hand with the seasonal, Mod-Am vernacular. He’s not interested in being “creative,” but colorful presentation helps make up for it. So, oddly, does the locale. Uptown or downtown, duck breast and brussels sprouts might put you out like a light. But around the corner from Build-a-Bear, they’re Twitter-worthy, site-crashing news.
Rock shrimp risotto had proper granular-creamy tension. Endearingly bite-size pulled-pork tacos filled with polenta tuille and tomato marmalade laughed at the bar-snack version. Bigeye tuna tartare pampered our tongues with its sensuous, warm consistency.
There are satisfying poached egg salad and sunchoke salad suffused with smoky bacon; smartly scored and caramelized diver scallops that would be better without lime foam; and a ridiculously excellent grouper filet for just $28, supported with persillade and German-style potato salad.
You’ve had lamb loin before? Veal cheek agnolotti? Well, have them again when they’re so ably turned out — and when entrees (except for $55 rib-eye) run $24 to $29, rare for anything worth eating in this neighborhood.
Vitae is more than a bargain (at least for now). It typifies a little-noticed comeback of the adult restaurant, 100 percent DJ-free, with comfortable seating, tolerable noise and intelligent service — a stealth phenomenon reflected at places as different as NoMad, Alison Eighteen and Brasserie Pushkin.
Sometimes the old ways really are best, especially when they’ve become so rare as to seem new.