Upstairs At Bouley Bakery & Market

[Sneakeater]

I guess I should state for the record, now that Atelier Robuchon NYC has opened, that my comparisons of Atelier with Bouley Upstairs were way off base.

[Nathan]

well..there is that $190 tasting menu...

[Sneakeater]

Even the $160 tasting menu . . . .

[Nathan]

they upped it.

[Sneakeater]

You have made me painfully aware of that.

I just meant that, even as originally configured, Atelier Robuchon NYC clearly wasn't comparable to Upstairs.

[Dave the Cook]

Comparisons with Craftbar, Hearth and Cafe Gray are mostly beside the point to me -- I'm not a New Yorker -- and I don't know how you can locate Bouley Upstairs and Alinea on the same culinary/price-point/dining-experience map without a slide rule and a tesseract. Bouley Upstairs is successful, in a way, because it doesn't give a damn about any of those places, or about any trend. In the lingo of my generation (decidedly boomer), it's hip because it doesn't care about what's hip. I disagree with Steven that it's in touch with any particular demographic; it's simply in touch with what it wants to be. Deal with it on its terms, rather than the preconceptions that we carry around like a sack of overripe fruit, and it can be a singular experience. I don't really care about the Gen X-ers at the next table, or why they're there, though there are less expensive, more ostensibly comfortable choices for dinner -- so why choose this place?

It's for the food. Over the course of a five-day stay in Manhattan, I ate at the Bar at the Modern, the Bread Bar at Tabla, Country, New Green Bo and Eleven Madison Park. While I remember all of them for various reasons (most notably, a meal-long service fiasco at the Modern), the only one I remember simply because of the food is Bouley Upstairs.

It's for the atmosphere. The cooks are in your space, and so is the preparation of your meal. When squid or cod hits the plancha, the room fills with fish funk, then it dissipates; the same goes for the burgers and the occasional steak. It's not unpleasant at all; it's like sitting across the kitchen island while your best friend (if your best friend keeps two dozen half-liter saucepans on the flattop and whisks like a dervish without apparent provocation) composes your meal.

It's for the energy. If you're a Gen X-er, being in a noisy room of peers is comforting (I say that as someone who was obviously the oldest person in the room). If you're interested in food, the continuous culinary exhibition (including even the mostly idle sushi chefs) and dynamic service ballet are fascinating and astounding.

But really, it should be for the food. To add some specific notes: the sauces with the oysters were tomato-horseradish, yuzu vinaigrette and a mixed (heavy on the pink, as I recall) pepper mignonette. The yuzu was particularly good at enhancing rather than masking the oysters. The sauce with the shrimp was a tomato-water broth, heavy on the pepper (Chef Pechous is neither shy nor unskilled with black pepper, something that's apparent in several dishes.) The cod that Steven described is easily the best dish I've had this year, if not in the last twelve months; research suggests that it was Seranno ham rather than prosciutto in the accompanient, but what matters is that it was thinly sliced cured pork, crisped to perfection, and that the presentation didn't sacrifice the texture. The lamb was easily comparable in success to lamb that I had last year at ADNY. I don't think the sauce was a straight reduction; I think it was a more or less classic demiglace supplemented with a reduction. Let's call it lamb syrup (Steven's description). The fruit soup was predominantly blood orange. Of the four desserts, only the brulee was on the menu.

We can cavil over the bread or wine programs (they're both deficient, but that's mostly -- especially with the bread -- a comparative evaluation), and we can say that the service is idiosyncratic. Sure, I'd like a better list and a better selection from what's downstairs in the bakery (which tantalizes you while you wait), but what comes to the table is more than adequate, as is the waitstaff. It might not be what you have come to believe is appropriate at this -- or any -- price point, and you can say that what goes on at Bouley Upstairs isn't normal, but it works, undeniably, even if it's not what you expect. (Okay, the coffee really is at best okay; no excuses there.)

[Fat Guy]

Bouley Upstairs seems to me to be a sort of "happy accident"...not a deliberate concept.

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Maybe, maybe not. If so, I'm happy for that seeming accident, and I think it contributes to the good vibe at Upstairs. Whether it really is an accident, or just seems that way, doesn't make it any less or more brilliant.

It has been for awhile now that many new homes have been built with the kitchen as the spiritual center of the living space. Every restaurant I've seen with an "open" kitchen has failed to capture this centrality, except Upstairs. At Upstairs, the rangetop is facing the dining room. The cooking occurs right on the pass, not on an island suite separated from the dining room by a pass and a chasm. The chef is totally in the room, the diners are in the action not just watching it -- the human molecules are spaced closely enough that everything happening in the kitchen conducts itself all the way to the far corner of the room.

That the space is used for cooking classes is surely one reason they built the kitchen to be this aggressively visible, but the restaurant doesn't feel at all like eating in a cooking school -- I imagine the cooking classes don't feel like cooking classes either. It's all much more like an informal restaurant in a chef's home.

All these strands of influence are both decidedly modern and essentially timeless. That there's a sushi bar -- the Asian equivalent of the open kitchen -- as part of the Upstairs composition is no coincidence.

[oakapple]

Bouley Upstairs seems to me to be a sort of "happy accident"...not a deliberate concept.

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I think it's fairly well known that this idea was bouncing around in David Bouley's head for quite a while before he finally implemented it. Given all of his experience in the restaurant business, I would be very surprised if he just landed on the idea by dumb luck.

Momofuku Ssam Bar...now there's a happy accident.

[Fat Guy]

There are elements of most every restaurant above the level of a McDonald's that are reactive, improvisational, accidental. You look at the history of a place like Eleven Madison Park, where everything from the room to the chef (they lost their first chef before they even opened!) to the cuisine has influenced the restaurant in unpredictable ways to create something totally different from what anybody planned, and you can see that reality. The question is can the restaurant run with it and become something great, or does it collapse when the need to change arises.

David Bouley is long on record as wanting to create a multifaceted culinary complex in TriBeCa. Different versions of the plan were reported on extensively in the late 1990s. One example, from the New York Times:

Mr. Bouley, the restaurateur, first saw Duane Park in 1985 and, he said, ''it reminded me of a Paris quarter.'' He established his restaurant, Bouley, in the Schepp Building in 1986 but did not renew his lease when it ended. ''I wanted to own the real estate,'' he said, and he purchased a building at the northeast corner of Duane and Hudson Streets for a 50-seat wine cellar, an Asian restaurant, a banquet hall, cooking schools and his own apartment.

Mr. Bouley said he has taken space in the 1912 loft building diagonally across the intersection for a retail store and a restaurant above the store, which is to serve the same food that will be for sale below. At the southeast corner of the same intersection he is working on Danube, an Austrian restaurant, which he said would be the first to open, in early 1999. (He also opened his Bouley Bakery restaurant, at West Broadway and Duane Street, last year.)

Needless to say, though the outline of the original plan can be recognized in what David Bouley finally ended up building, his plan has been altered many times. Ambitions had to be scaled back, accommodations had to be made for space, finances have perhaps been tight. Perhaps the happy accident is that the cooking demonstration area, to be profitable, had to do double duty as a restaurant, so it was built a certain way. Or maybe David Bouley wanted it this way all along. I really don't know, and am only mildly curious -- either way it wouldn't affect my opinion of the place at all.

[Nathan]

Bouley Upstairs is expanding into the downstairs space below it this year.

[Fat Guy]

Into the space on the basement level, or the street level?

[Nathan]

the street level I believe

I imagine that you can find out more details better than I could.

Edited February 22, 2007 by Nathan (log)

[Fat Guy]

The New York Times reported today in "Off the Menu" that the Bouley fine-dining restaurant will be moving to 161 Duane Street, and that:

The current Bouley restaurant space, at 120 West Broadway at Duane Street, is to become Bouley Bakery, selling baked goods and other foods produced in his kitchens. His cafe, Upstairs at Bouley, at 130 West Broadway, will expand into the ground floor bakery area and serve breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It will be interesting to see how this affects Upstairs (will the new room be "Upstairs, Downstairs"?).

[Nathan]

Eater now has it as "Breaking News"...or they could have just read it on egullet a week ago

[Fat Guy]

I chatted with several servers and the chef tonight, and ascertained that the slow nights at Upstairs are usually Tuesday and Wednesday. Especially before 8pm, you can usually just walk in on those nights. Monday, unlike a lot of restaurants, is a usually busy night because Upstairs attracts a lot of industry people, many of whom have Mondays off (tonight was slow because of some event related to the restaurant show that has been going on for the past three days).

Also tried some sushi. I'll join the consensus: it's quite good, but no better than what you can get at a similar or lower price point at several other places.

[Nathan]

desserts generally don't interest me but while dining here last night after a Hill Country debacle, I ended up ordering one (as did Sneakeater). they are seriously ambitious. like three-star ambitious. were they always this way? (and at $9...for people that are into dessert...this should be an option when in the area)

[AvsKick21]

Over the summer they were. They bring them over from the pastry kitchen across the street.

[vivin]

Agreed.

Bouley has become my primary provider of sugar.