DAMN the $49 steaks. The hell with $41 sole. Manhattan’s restaurant pricing atrocities are more easily avoided than those scare-stories in the Times would have you believe.
Take Blue Hill, a place without a distracted bicoastal chef, $2 million-a-job designer or publicist. Blue Hill is one of those restaurants that make Jell-O of star ratings. By any reasonable standard, it isn’t a three-star place.
Its menu is too limited. You don’t go there for exquisitely composed, French-style complexity. It doesn’t boast the culinary daring of Sono or Thalia, the scene or variety of Mercer Kitchen, or the romance of Tocqueville.
But those establishments all cost more. Unlike movies, restaurants don’t come with unit pricing. Blue Hill’s food is marvelous for its kind, and costs less than at some places where dishes taste microwaved.
In a cheerful townhouse off Washington Square, Blue Hill is not luxurious. But it’s a lot more comfortable than cramped Village dining rooms that leave you less wiggle room than an MRI. The wood-floored rectangular space has decently spaced tables down the center, banquettes along the sides, and strip mirrors on the walls.
Since it opened early last month, it’s been packed with laid-back West Village regulars and clued-in foodies from farther afield. The tiny bar at the front can be buzzy, but there’s no “scene.” This is a place where people come to eat – period.
Chef Alex Urena has worked at Bouley and at famed restaurants in Spain and France. His menu lists familiar warhorses of the modern American “seasonal” menu, but wow, what flavor he coaxes from them!
The entrees, priced from $18 to $23, are miracles of inventive simplicity. Everything is executed as if they had only you to cook for, even when every seat is taken.
The precision announces itself in the immaculate look of each element on the plate – like a wedge of pristine cod ($20) rising like an iceberg from a colorful sea of glazed ramps and herring roe caviar sauce.
Is there a place in town that doesn’t serve foie gras? But Blue Hill’s poached version, layered Napoleon-style with smoked eel and apples ($14), is out of the ordinary, with a sugary, crackling top that punctuates the dish’s many-splendored softness.
Poaching comes easily here: “real slow cooked salmon” ($19), the kind of moniker that usually signals a dud, is so sublimely delicate, it must be simmered forever at low temperature. A light, green pistou sauce with spring vegetables contrasts beautifully, to the eye and on the tongue.
Duck, too, comes exquisitely poached ($21) – a fan of succulent slices flanking a tiny, crunchy-skin leg, atop glazed artichokes and artichoke puree.
That dish is composed too similarly to “not another roast chicken” ($18). This little bird comes with revelatory broccoli rabe, lacking the green’s usual bitterness and so buttery we asked the waitress whether it had touched cream. She insisted it wasn’t. Cut them slack.
Foams are the rage these days, and bubble-topped parmesan cheese ripples on the surface of Urena’s fervent, creamless asparagus soup ($8). Smoked (and amazingly boneless) brook trout with avocado salad and green gazpacho, and skate with shrimp ravioli in green garlic sauce (both $11), are fine starters.
Desserts for $8, like warm vanilla bean rice pudding, are just as grand. If all this isn’t enough, they don’t rush you on a packed evening. The floor staff – run by Franco Serafin, former manager at Gramercy Tavern – stay poised under pressure.
Blue Hill gives you hope that affordable, civilized dining will outlive today’s superheated dot-com delirium.
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BLUE HILL ½
75 WASHINGTON PLACE (BETWEEN SIXTH AVENUE AND MACDOUGAL STREET) (212) 539-1776