Restaurant Review: A Chef Draws a Map of the World, With Africa at the Center

Earlier this year Henry, a new restaurant in the lobby of the Life Hotel on West 31st Street, quietly died. You wouldn’t know it to look around the place on any recent night at 8, when a seamless playlist of hip-hop and R&B unspools as servers carry stacked beef ribs to what seems like every third table.

What changed? In August, the chef Joseph Johnson, better known as JJ, was made a partner and assumed control of the kitchen. What he has done is less a makeover than a takeover; his imprint radiates out from his Afrocentric menu to animate the whole enterprise. The playlist, which can run from noon until 8 the next morning without repeating a track, is his. Mr. Johnson’s initials now hang in the front window, flooding the nearby tables with pink neon. The initials have migrated to the restaurant’s website as well, where its name is now given as Henry at Life Hotel by JJ. These are not subtle gestures, but subtlety has rarely saved a restaurant on the brink of failure.

Mr. Johnson has been busy hiring new employees for the front and back of the house, and the racial mix he has already achieved is as impressive as it is rare. Diversifying a restaurant’s service staff is one of the surest ways to diversify the audience, and on many nights brown faces and white faces, topknots and braids, headscarves and headbands, sit side by side, giving Henry more the appearance of a restaurant in Harlem than of one just off Herald Square.

It was in Harlem, as chef de cuisine at a slinky neighborhood hangout called the Cecil and the history-drenched jazz supper club Minton’s, that Mr. Johnson made his name. Fleshing out a notion suggested by Alexander Smalls, the consulting chef in both places, Mr. Johnson explored the African diaspora, the imprint that Africans have put on cooking around the world. He does something similar at Henry, although his view has grown to embrace flavors from, say, India and Southeast Asia that turn up in Africa and in diasporic countries like Jamaica and Barbados. He calls the menu at Henry “Pan-African.”

This is a big story — too big to be told in full by one restaurant, or two for that matter. But it’s an important story, and it certainly beats Henry’s original idea of tying the restaurant to the history of Life magazine, which was once published in the same building, and to Henry Luce, who bought it in 1936, then radically remade it and moved it to other quarters. This concept was so wispy that Henry’s first chef, Michael Vignola, resorted to an all-things-to-all-people menu of foie gras sliders and meatball pizza.

Just how vast Mr. Johnson’s scope has become will be clear by the end of the appetizer course. (Here I am assuming that you have chosen a traditional two- or three-course meal rather than eating all 15 items on the menu, in full and in order; this route costs $390 and is called “It Was All a Dream,” after a Notorious B.I.G. lyric.)

There are littleneck clams, battered with rice flour and crunchy with shaved fennel and Asian pear. All of this is dotted with a tangerine-colored fluff of piri-piri sauce that is less ferociously spicy than the scalding piri-piris of Angola, Mozambique or South Africa. You are welcome to get a half-dozen, but at my table a full dozen went quickly.

Benne seeds, the heirloom variety of sesame brought to North America on slave ships, add a flavor that is something like toasted almonds mixed with coffee beans to tuna tartare. The tuna is topped with a chip of curried peanut brittle and spooned over shiso leaves; you pinch the leaf and pop it in your mouth, where good things start to happen.

And as you’re adjusting to this cross-pollination of Africa and Japan, Indo-Caribbean cuisine appears on the horizon: a plate of folded roti with dips. The spinach chutney is a little joyless, but the inky purée of eggplant sweetened with dates is a terrific idea.

Why Mr. Johnson puts a fried egg on the roti is unclear. When your meal at Henry is over, you may wish you had been sent home with a world map showing the history of forced African migration and spice-trade routes. While it’s going on, though, you generally flow with the inner logic the way you can get into a hip-hop track without being able to name every last sample.

Generally, but not always. I believe I understood some of the reasoning behind chopped collard greens and cashews tossed with a coconut dressing, but I still find raw collards somewhat rough going after the first few mouthfuls.

Is the seared salmon with rice noodles, edamame and bok choy a reference to the Vietnamese community in Senegal? To me it tasted, not unpleasantly, like something one of the better Asian fusion restaurants in Manhattan would have served 20 years ago.

Henry’s shrimp and pork dumplings, on the other hand, are nondescript little blobs; they sit in an aromatic “Harlem curry,” informed by Bengali cooking, that deserves a better dance partner. You could say the same about the intensely herb-scented seafood broth in a seafood boil that Mr. Johnson calls the Afropot; the clams and king crab legs were very good, but the prawns were unappealingly soft and the mussels not quite fleshy enough.

The cooking, though, has been getting tighter over the past month, picking up from a first and somewhat droopy meal on a night when Mr. Johnson was not in the kitchen. Tamarind jerk chicken had no spice to speak of. A parcel of rice supposedly inspired by Dominican concón had as much crunch as if it had been left out on the counter overnight, and the eggplant curry ladled over it tasted more like a halfheartedly seasoned tomato sauce. The second time I tried it, the rice had a golden crackle and the curry was worth paying attention to.

Apart from the seared scallops in a remarkably good hominy broth with cilantro pistou, those bone-in ribs are the most rewarding main course. The rewards are not so much the short ribs themselves, though they are flavorful and tender; the thrill of the dish is in the battery of little sides like stir-fried millet, spiced black beans and a hoisin sauce I wanted to take home to keep on hand for Chinese-food emergencies.

I also thought about pocketing a Foie Crispy Treat, and I would have gotten away with it because everybody else at the table thought they were too weird. Weird they are, but interesting, too. Maybe you’d be happier with the sweet potato pie in a crisp butter crust, very old school apart from the purple yam in the filling.

True, at some point in your meal a hotel guest may decide to march through the dining room with a full set of luggage. But under Mr. Johnson, Henry is under no risk of being capsized by that kind of distraction. He has pulled the restaurant back from the edge of failure, and that’s a rare trick.

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