But generous applications of produce don’t always save the food from seeming a bit safe, conservative and slightly dated. Mr. Pfeifer, who spent eight years in the kitchen at Maialino, Mr. Meyer’s Roman-inspired restaurant, is now cooking French food in the post-nouvelle mode that Daniel Boulud has been artfully fomenting for years. Mr. Boulud has earned the right to keep working in that groove as long as he likes, but it’s strange to find a young chef at a new, high-profile destination doing it when others around the city are pushing ahead with contemporary interpretations of French cuisine.
And when Manhatta turns to the classics, its use of French idioms seems skin-deep compared with Laetitia Rouabah’s light touch and sophisticated technique at Benoit, or Marie-Aude Rose’s painstaking elevations of cafe cooking at La Mercerie, or Daniel Rose’s intelligent, neoclassical excavations of silver-cloche cuisine at Le Coucou.
Where Le Coucou brought back quenelles as helium-light pike dumplings in dizzyingly rich lobster-brandy sauce, Manhatta turns them into quivering balls of pudding distantly scented with seafood. Of all the ways a modern chef might grapple with cassoulet, the sublimely burly Languedocian assault on the digestive system, upending it over a crisp and golden chicken paillard has to be one of the strangest. Manhatta isn’t the first restaurant to update veal blanquette with meat that’s roasted rather than stewed, but the sauce is so blandly milky that it’s hardly there. And while modern desserts can stray into savory territory more than they did in Escoffier’s day, a vanilla soufflé with butterscotch sauce probably shouldn’t taste salty.
Some of this was dispiriting, but I never got up from the table in a bad mood. There are grace notes throughout the restaurant, like the dark, shiny little canelés that show up with dessert. This being a Union Square Hospitality production, the servers seem to be trained mind readers. A pair of the mismatched binoculars scattered around the restaurant materialized just when I was trying to locate the clock tower in the Consolidated Edison Building; before I’d had a chance to point out a fruit fly in my wine (did it ride up with me in the elevator?) a sommelier spirited the glass away and brought a fresh one.
Mr. Meyer was probably right to take a dialed-down approach to the top-floor restaurant genre. It dates from a more innocent age, when people could look at the financial district’s unblinking grids of lighted windows as the bland face of high-stakes cheating that we’ve come to recognize from “Margin Call” and “Billions.” At the time of the financial crisis, Manhatta’s building was the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase — a relatively minor player in the three-card-monte game of mortgage-backed securities, but a player nonetheless. Ten years have gone by, but it’s still too soon for revolving dance floors.
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