47 East Houston Street, New York (001 212 219 7693). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £130
A good life is all about the small victories. After dinner at Estela in New York, for example, I can celebrate the fact that I achieved something that eluded the most powerful man in the western world. I was able to pay for my meal with my own credit card – Barack Obama’s was rejected. “I guess I don’t use it enough,” he said shortly after eating there in September, “so [the bank] thought there was fraud going on.” Thank God Michelle was packing plastic.
As a mark of all-round hotness, a visit from arguably the foodiest president of all time isn’t bad, though barricades at each end of the street and snipers on the rooftops opposite might be regarded by some as an appetite suppressant. That said, I suspect the presence of secret service agents outside, holsters bulging with snub-nosed intent as they checked the reservations lists, would have struck most New Yorkers as business as usual.
The meeters and greeters at the city’s oversubscribed restaurants are notoriously Arctic in their warmth. You should consider yourself lucky for having bagged a table. Don’t go expecting anything approximating a pleasant welcome. The beautiful people who guard these doors are there to be looked at and obeyed, not engaged with. If anything, the secret service agents would probably have made a pleasant change.
So it is with Estela, which does a fine job of representing where a certain part of the Manhattan scene is right now. It presents a humble face to the world, the doorway all but unmarked, as if it were simply the entrance to another grim apartment block on the Houston corridor that cuts just below the island’s numbered grid. The website explains that they “welcome walk-ins”, though as we know they make no effort to welcome people who have actually booked a month in advance, so the poor saps who are trying their luck shouldn’t go looking for love. It is crowded and noisy, just like a real neighbourhood dive. Small and big plates, priced between the low teens and high 20s, are for sharing and sent out in the order that suits the kitchen. So far so very Polpo.
But dig deeper. There is ambition here. The co-owners have form. Thomas Carter was the drinks man at Blue Hill at Stone Barns – chef Dan Barber’s self-consciously field-to-fork sustainable restaurant an hour or so’s drive north of the city, which charges $198 a head (before service and tax) to wealthy New Yorkers who generally get there in unsustainable town cars. Accordingly, Carter’s list bulges with hip biodynamics.
The chef, Uruguay-born Ignacio Mattos, has a stint at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in California on his CV, which in America is akin to a Catholic priest having spent time at the Vatican. They are serious players, and while I can point and laugh at the way their establishment represents New York restaurant clichés – to be fair, they aren’t especially worse than any of those in London – there is no arguing with the food. It is good, and in places very good indeed.
There is one hilarious visual tick: many things we ordered arrived hidden under leaves, so that a 23-buck plate of scallops actually looks like a big heap of shiny greens. At Estela it seems you must first excavate to find out why they are charging you so much for a plate of foliage. Generally it is worth the effort, for there are big, clean flavours here. Fossick about beneath the dog-paw-sized leaves of flat parsley and you find plump vinagered mussels escabeche perching on pieces of lightly burnt sourdough toast smeared with the slap of garlic. Another plate looks like nothing more than endive leaves piled high – just so many bleached shells on the seashore. But get the cutlery in there and those leaves reveal a glorious mess of walnut and salted anchovy.
Flakes of cod with the brassic purr of caramelised brussels sprouts are tucked up for the night beneath the above-ground greenery of sweet potatoes. And so it goes on: those chunks of pert scallop, seared on either side, their sweet virtue violated by cubes of hot, melting lardo – oh, but the pig provides in so many ways – are indeed buried beneath that canopy of shiny greens, but peas add the necessary pop of texture. It is such a repeated theme that it’s impossible to see it as an accident.
This type of knowingly down-at-heel classy restaurant must set its face against the garish baubles of design and display prominent in places up town where they smear teardrops of sauce across the plate with the back of a spoon. This whole leaf thing feels like anti-presentation. It’s the equivalent of wearing your couture jacket with the sleeves rolled up.
The non-foliaged dishes have the virtues of good tapas – of classic ingredients displayed to their best advantage without adornment. There are greaseless salt-cod croquettes, untroubled by anything as tawdry as potato, with a snog-me-later aioli. There are thick lamb ribs, crisped and dark and sticky with honey, tasting deeply of lanolin from the running fat for those who seriously like their roasted sheep. A dish of rice and squid cooked down and down in the latter’s ink is as black as the Dark Knight and roaring with umami. We scrap over the last beads.
Most impressive and most divisive is a plump folded omelette hiding the unashamedly creamed oyster tang of sea urchins. It’s an outrageous idea. It makes every other act of food pimping look like a feeble, half-hearted effort. It’s a glorious dish and worth the fight for a table alone. Could someone in Britain please half-inch it?
Desserts are, by comparison, a mere sideshow, with one of them striking me as bad manners. As my companion said, if you like parsnips and panna cotta you’ll like this, the latter being flavoured with the former. It’s a Venn diagram that need not detain us. A lightly cooked chocolate cake under a nimbus of frothy aerated cream is a lot of old-fashioned sweet virtues. A strawberry sorbet, tasting the way you always hope a punnet will and rarely does, comes with fractured green-tea meringue which makes you sit up straight.
We drink crémant at something stupid by the glass, and a bottle of something low down the list which still makes us wince. As we leave, the jumpsuited hostess appears to crack a smile. But of course. In our leaving we have gifted her the one thing she really needs: another free table.
Jay’s news bites
■ Of all the other meals enjoyed in New York, it was the cooking of British gal April Bloomfield at the Breslin, a (sort of) gastropub located inside the Ace Hotel, which sticks out. She may have been in the United States for more than a decade, but her boisterous Scotch egg wipes the floor with all comers. Don’t miss the braised and breaded strips of lamb belly, the big-fisted beef and stilton pie, and the roast chicken. She even elevates the Caesar salad without losing its essence (thebreslin.com).
■ Good news for tenanted pub landlords. A House of Commons vote has finally scrapped the “beer tie”, which forced landlords to buy beer from their pub company, often at an unsustainable price. The Campaign for Real Ale, which has argued for the change for a decade, said it will “secure the future of the Great British pub”.
■ Street Food US BBQ outfit Miss P’s, which serves killer smoked brisket, has a bricks-and-mortar home in the run-up to Christmas. It’ll be at the King & Co pub in Clapham, south London, until 23 December (thekingandco.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
