One of the fallacies of restaurant criticism is that the whole menu matters. Normal people who find a great dish at a restaurant come back and order it over and over, barely noticing that the rest of the menu exists. A restaurant critic who finds a great dish will come back and order all the other stuff. Most of the time this means eating some things that are average or slightly better, and a few that don’t click, and then writing a review on the theme of inconsistency.
If I were a normal person, I’d go back to a two-month-old West Village restaurant called Anton’s every few weeks and get the spaghetti anchoiade each time. I’d twirl the noodles around my fork, noticing how plain and mild they looked. Then I’d start to eat. As I chewed and chewed — here’s a kitchen that knows what al dente means — I’d start to taste anchovies, as if one small piece had been pounded into invisibility and stirred with the garlic and oil. The anchovy flavor would build. It would magnify. So would my appreciation of the spaghetti.
But I am not normal, and I am obliged to report that after digging around at Anton’s I found some, you know, inconsistency. The restaurant, the first that the chef Nick Anderer has opened since he left the velvet clutches of the Union Square Hospitality Group, is a low-key homage to old-guard New York specialties and traditions. His menu has no truck with avocado toasts, rainbow bagels and other early-21st-century ephemera. Chicken broth comes in a two-handled bouillon cup that, like many of the floral-patterned plates and bowls at Anton’s, looks as if it came from Grandma’s china hutch. (The broth is darker than the yellow broths of Grandma’s time, though, with a roasted flavor that can handle the shot of amontillado that is tipped into it at the table.)
Anton’s occupies a squat Federal-era building on the corner of Hudson and West 11th Streets with mullioned windows and five-pointed metal stars that hold its brick facade in place. From just about anywhere in the low-ceilinged, plank-floored dining room you can look across Hudson Street and see the White Horse Tavern. It is the kind of West Village view that makes you hope for snow.
Around the interior are framed oil paintings of bottles, cups, fruit and other still-life chestnuts. Some were commissioned from a contemporary artist from Tblisi, Georgia, named Vitali Dvali. Others were picked up secondhand by Mr. Anderer and Natalie Johnson, the general manager and his partner in operating the restaurant; these look as if they have been quietly decorating the back room of some neighborhood restaurant for decades.
Nostalgia is a fraught exercise in the Trump era. Reviving historic dishes is one thing, but when an entire restaurant seems to be based on a gauzy dream of a rose-colored past, you hope for some sign that the creators understand that the past wasn’t equally dreamy for everybody. To some extent, Anton’s menu does this by portraying a history of New York in which appetites have been shaped by immigrants.
With an eye on Jewish appetizing stores, he serves a whitefish salad that I might almost call luxurious if we weren’t talking about whitefish salad. The chopped liver may have the same inspiration, although it’s been made significantly meatier by the addition of chopped chicken hearts and significantly fruitier by a glug of Marsala. The liver is served with white toast and curly parsley, which has waited long enough for its comeback, thank you very much.
Mr. Anderer brings together slices of dry-cured country ham from Tennessee with a sweeter and less salty “city ham” brined and smoked by the East Village Meat Market on Second Avenue, still owned by the Baczynsky family and one of the last standing relics of Little Ukraine. Since the demise of the great Kurowycky butcher shop, the Baczynskys have been the undisputed ham champions of the East Village. They also make a fine bacon, which Anton’s incorporates into the spicy and smoky bucatini Baczynski, essentially a pasta all’amatriciana by way of Kyiv.
It is very good, as you would predict if you are familiar with the amatriciana that Mr. Anderer kept on Maialino’s menu for his 10 years as chef there. So are the spinach ravioli, along with most of the four or five other pastas, whose ethnic heritage needs no footnote.
The angel hair francese could use a brief introduction, though. Gene’s Restaurant is known to passers-by on West 11th Street for its Garden State Brickface-style molded stone facade and its faded red awning stretching from the front door to the taxicab; regulars know it for what it calls “continental cuisine.” Mr. Anderer is given to ordering chicken francese with a side of angel-hair pasta, a pairing that by the end of the meal results in a nest of noodles coated with garlic, lemon and chicken juices.
This is what Mr. Anderer serves as angel-hair francese, approximately, although at Anton’s the angel hair is freshly made and is blitzed with fried bread crumbs so it won’t be mistaken for noodle soup. It is another Anton’s dish that I would make an appointment to eat every few weeks if I were a normal person.
As a critic, though, I pressed my luck. I ordered the thin, weak ragù with overcooked lasagna noodles. I went for the roasted cauliflower, too, and wondered why the random scattering of chopped apricots, almonds and olives sounded so much more interesting on the menu, where it is called a relish. The onions under hanger steak Lorenz, supposedly “melted,” were still quite solid, and kind of strange. The roast chicken and some other main courses were flat-out dull, and the schmaltz potatoes didn’t taste like much of anything, not even schmaltz.
The service was hard to get a fix on, too. Maybe you will get the jovial, welcoming treatment I got one night when no wish went unfulfilled, no matter how minor. Maybe, as happened to me on a different night, your requests for another appetizer or a side dish will be met with vague nods which could mean “later,” or “much later,” or “never.”
This worried me more than the schmaltz potatoes. You can simply stop eating a dud dish, but when some food doesn’t show up at all, that’s the kind of inconsistency that can keep even normal people away.
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