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“The Tasting Room”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	New American	Soho	Moderate	Good

nook. And there is something lost in that transition. Sure, Renee is still on the floor, and her genuine enthusiasm and energy is still the same. She is a natural hostess and when she walks into the room, chatting with regulars, welcoming guests and making this space her own, there is a change in the atmosphere. There’s that same warmth and love. But, I still find it hard not to yearn for the old space. It’s just not the same.

While the space has changed, the menu and the vision of bringing the Greenmarket to the table, has not wavered. The couple has not changed their original mission: to offer an intimate, personal dining experience with a menu that is a daily meditation on the Greenmarket. The menu is such an ode to the farmer’s market that you half expect the farmers themselves to come out of the kitchen and bring you your food.

The first time I had dinner at the Tasting Room, with Julie and Kiri, the menu had been modified to conform to standard appetizers and entrees from the signature Share/Taste format. We were disappointed by that change, but on my last visit, the original format had been restored.

On our first visit we started with a watermelon salad ($11)—chunks of juicy sugar sweet melon tossed with red-ribbed dandelion greens and creamy hunks of goat’s milk feta spiced up with a dressing made with black chiles. The effect was amazing—as your mouth heats up from the chiles, it gets cooled down from the sweet cool balm of the melon. Another first course salad was composed of heirloom longbeans beans sautéed with crunchy fried pork skins, which were nice, though I would have preferred a few hunks of pork belly in their too. But the salad was nicely seasoned and showered with hazelnuts in a clever dressing made with miso ($12). We also got into a wonderful plate of wild chanterelles were roasted and plated with Swiss chard, and fingerling potatoes, topped with a perfectly poached egg with a yolk the color of a hot orange summer sun on its way down the horizon ($34).

Our last appetizer was a braised and stuffed chicken leg ($12), which Colin cooks sous vide, a preparation that is used liberally all over the menu. The technique, in which the food in question is essentially cooked in a vacuum-sealed plastic pouch in a thermal circulator (water is kept at a constant temp that way) that acts to impressively soften and tenderize the contents of that bag. While it&r ... [more, click below]

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Posted: October 1, 2006

Other restaurants in Soho :
+ Balthazar   + Savoy   + Blue Ribbon   + Lupa   + Public   + Kittichai   + Lure Fishbar   + Barmarche   + Porcupine-- CLOSED   + Ama   + La Esquina   + Jerry's- Closed Now   + The Tasting Room   + Papatzul   + Shorty's.32   + The Monday Room   + Ed's Lobster Bar   + Aurora   + Provence   + Tailor   + Hundred Acres   + Delicatessen, By Guest Reviewer Julie Besonen   + The Mott   + The Dutch   + Cherrywood, by Guest Reviewer Dara Pollak   

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