Alex Raij and Eder Montero met while working in the kitchen of a sprawling, impersonal, gloomy modern-Spanish restaurant that lasted about two years. They went on to get married and, as joint chefs and owners, opened a string of compact, intimate, slinky modern-Spanish restaurants that are still in business.
Their one misfire was a small, intimate non-Spanish coffee shop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. After dusting themselves off, they replaced the cafe tables with taller and longer ones, traded the pastry cases for a bar, installed a stripe of backlighted glass blocks that cast a subaqueous glow on the room, and in September reopened as Saint Julivert Fisherie.
And what is a fisherie, you ask, having quickly consulted your French, Spanish and English dictionaries and found no such word? Saint Julivert is my first, but if it is anything to go by, then a fisherie is a seafood establishment that aspires to be more than a raw bar but does not want to be mistaken for a full-bore restaurant. Wines come mostly from coastal regions (and are organized by the nearest body of salt water). Small plates abound. And if you guessed that they are something like the tapas that Ms. Raij and Mr. Montero explore at El Quinto Pino, Txikito and La Vara, but without the running Spanish theme, you are not far off.
Not that the menu is entirely un-Spanish. The octopus carpaccio from Txikito makes a special guest appearance at Saint Julivert Fisherie, the way the Fresh Prince once turned up on an episode of “Blossom.” Under marjoram leaves and pinprick grains of Espelette pepper, the carpaccio is as good as you remember; the warm plate halfway melts the fattier bits of octopus into delicious goo.
The restaurant’s exemplary seafood includes gooseneck barnacles.CreditDaniel Krieger for The New York Times
There is another cameo: El Quinto Pino’s very fine combination of pink-fleshed anchovies with cold vanilla butter. The butter soothes the anchovies the way the vermouth in a martini helps the gin settle down. (On a related topic, the short cocktail list includes a deceptively soft-spoken number called the Kanpai Martini. It’s a variation on the Vesper, which itself is the amended martini that Ian Fleming had James Bond order in “Casino Royale.”)
At times Saint Julivert reminds me of Cal Pep, in Barcelona, Spain, whose plain, cramped counter looks like the last place in the world where you are going to have an epiphany of the taste buds, right up until the moment the txipirones and thumbtack-size clams knock you off your barstool. Like Cal Pep, and unlike nearly every other New York restaurant, Saint Julivert serves gooseneck barnacles when they’re available, boiling them with bay leaves and salt and mounding them on a cloth napkin before they cool so that when you twist the wrinkled sheath of skin away from the sweet, edible meat inside there is a good chance somebody in the vicinity will get hit with a squirt of hot barnacle juice.
Mostly, though, any Spanish-ness in Saint Julivert has more to do with its spirit than its recipes, which come from all over: the deep-fried Puerto Rican cylinders of cornmeal known as sorrullitos; a kanpachi collar whose juicy meat is shockingly white under a black rub of jerk spices; tender slices of warm beef tenderloin on a fist-size roll, known in Portugal as a prego sandwich.
There is also the crispy tuna bake, a peculiarly satisfying hybrid that crosses a tuna noodle casserole by way of India with fideuà, the Spanish dish that treats pasta like the rice in paella. The noodles, short ridged tubes, are toasted and cooked with oil-cured tuna in a tomato sauce that is seasoned with turmeric and curry leaves. It is one of the most fearless, not to mention filling, dishes on a menu that could use a little more of both qualities.
Although Saint Julivert works with exceptional seafood, and treats it with the care that fans of Ms. Raij and Mr. Montero have come to expect, the menu plays it safe more often than it should. Like all of the couple’s restaurants, Saint Julivert toggles between innovation and tradition. But the other places explore Spanish cuisine, so when they toss off a straight-ahead classic like patatas bravas, there’s a reason. When Saint Julivert serves fluke ceviche or a crab and avocado salad dressed with yuzu juice and trout roe, it can seem to be grasping at ideas that other restaurants are already doing — even when Saint Julivert does them better.
The sautéed skate splashed with Manzanilla could not be fresher or more skillfully browned, but do the garlic chips and sliced dried chiles on top make this version of a well-known standard one I’ll remember a month from now? Maybe not, although at the time I was very happy to have it, not least because it was one of the few things on the menu the size of a standard main course.
Even if you’re an old hand at navigating the shallow waters of small plates, it can be unnervingly easy to spend more than $100 on food and drinks at Saint Julivert and still wonder whether you’ve actually had dinner. Seafood this good is expensive, but the menu doesn’t stray very far above $20; the result is that portions can seem somewhat airy.
When there’s an inexpensive opportunity to pad out a dish, Saint Julivert doesn’t always take it. I understand why I can’t have more than three excellent wild shrimp in a $21 bowl of red pozole, but couldn’t there be more than a spoonful of hominy kernels? Saltines fried in canola oil are served with the ceviche and with a cold and highly appealing bowl of pickled shrimp under pink pickled onions; grilled bread slices accompany the mackerel whipped into a hummus-like orange spread with piri-piri oil. Still, each time I went, somebody at my table asked for more bread.
None of Saint Julivert’s issues are insoluble. The lighting could be warmed up so the room looks less like an aquarium. A few more dishes you won’t see anywhere else, like the tuna bake, would make it harder to resist. Another two or three large plates would make it a place you think of when you’re hungry.
The excellent $19 prego sandwich is more snack than dinner, until you pay another $7 to have fried oysters tucked into the roll beside the beef, making it into a kind of crunchy carpetbagger. On the other hand, that’s worth doing even if you’re not hungry.
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