Allen & Delancey,
115 Allen Street,
New York, USA (001 212 253 5400)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £125
Neil Ferguson is a brave man. I know this because he once allowed me to butcher a whole box of his partridge. Ferguson was head chef at Angela Hartnett's Connaught restaurant at the time, and I was working in the kitchen there as research for a novel set amid the world of stove and blade. He didn't flinch once, not even when what I did to those birds amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Instead, he chose to show me how to do it in such a way that there might actually be something left to eat. I was not at all surprised when Gordon Ramsay later chose Ferguson, who had worked with him at Aubergine, to open his New York venture. I could think of no better man for the job.
But the restaurant business can be brutal. After some unflattering reviews, Ramsay decided that rather than change the message - his increasingly outmoded brand of safe neo-classicism, which was always going to be a tough sell in New York - he would sack the chef he had employed to deliver it. Even accepting my own admiration for the man, it always seemed unlikely to me that Ferguson was the problem, and so it has proved. Rather than return to London, he decided to stay in New York and, as all the best people do, disprove F Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American life.
Ferguson's second act is Allen & Delancey, a neighbourhood restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It is everything that Ramsay's is not - relaxed, satisfying and popular. So popular, in fact, that in the interests of full disclosure I should tell you I couldn't get a table without pulling every string at my disposal, so I pulled and pulled.
I'm glad I did. Allen & Delancey is a very different beast from his last gig. Gordon Ramsay New York is shiny and puckered in a way that can only raise expectations about the food. Allen & Delancey is casual in a way that can only lower them. The walls are bare brick. There are mismatched wooden tables and chairs tightly packed together and dark velvet drapes, and almost all the lighting is by guttering candle. He has gone from the aesthetic of the Midtown salon to something closer to the boudoir. Indeed, it is so down-lit that there's very little point in talking about the presentation of the food. I'm sure it's great, but you really can't see it.
What matters here are the big, bold flavours which, given Neil's Englishness, pull convincingly on the local palate. So, playing to the American sweet tooth, scallops come with a bacon onion compote and a maple dressing, and there is walnut praline with the foie gras. One starter stands out: a cylinder of slippery bone marrow, caramelised and then served with a little salty caviar (a dish first created by Ferran Adria of El Bulli). Not everybody will adore its defiant luxury, I'm sure, but people who know how to eat will. Those with a more fragile appetite can go for the bright tastes of thinly sliced hamachi (yellowtail) with beads of pink grapefruit and pickled fennel bulb.
Ferguson likes his fennel. It turned up again with confit lemon and an oyster veloute tasting boldly of the sea to accompany a perfectly cooked tranche of cod. What that dish proved is that hiding away here is a classical kitchen which is cutting through the waffle that comes with too much high-end cooking. They get to the essentials. So a dish simply called 'cabbage, beef and onion' brings a leaf of the former enclosing a luxurious, meaty stuffing, a long-braised onion, a perfectly cooked fillet of local beef, the whole bound by an impeccable jus.
At the end Ferguson assumes the American accent most convincingly, with a selection of fine sorbets, including one flavoured with apple and cinnamon, and a tart of dark chocolate and peanut butter accompanied by a whisky vanilla shake. You can put those last words in any order you like. They will always read just as they taste: great. Service was good (read American) and the buzz, from the standing-room-only bar to the elbow-to-elbow dining room, irresistible. Neil Ferguson is too polite to ever mention it so I'll say it instead: the day Gordon sacked him he did him a massive favour.
· This article was amended on Wednesday March 5 2008. Allen & Delancey is located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, not the Lower West Side as we originally had it. This has been corrected.
