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“Dovetail”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	New American	Upper West Side	Break the Bank	Great

s so you don’t have the luxury of a real bar experience. I would not advise meeting at Dovetail for a drink with this set up.

Another problem about the space is the location of the restrooms. Those having dinner upstairs, like I was, have to walk back to the front of the restaurant, through the crowds of guests coming in and leaving, to wind around to the staircase to the lower level restrooms. On the night I was having dinner, there was a terrible rainstorm accompanied by wild blustery winds. This meant that every time I went to the ladies room, I was blown by wind and rain from guests opening the door to enter or leave the restaurant. (Note to management about the ladies’ room: the unmarked but downward-sloped slate floor is a serious accident waiting to happen. Both Diana and I almost fell chin-first tripping on that slanted floor.) Think before you design.

In addition to exposure to the elements, I had to battle through a veritable scrum of people waiting for coats and lined up to be checked in for dinner at the hostess station. It was a mess up there. By the time I returned to my table by the brick wall, I was exhausted, rained on, and annoyed—not exactly ideal. And this is a shame because the food at Dovetail does not deserve to be met with exhaustion and annoyance.

In a time when menus are prone to ubiquity and repetition, here’s a kitchen that seems to approach every dish as a chance for reinvention with a distinct point of view. That point of view is America, as seen through the eyes of a chef, John Fraser, who’s cooked everywhere from Taillevent in Paris to Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in California.

His passion for the cuisine of our country comes across first with bread service. You won’t find focaccia or brioche or any sort of olive-rosemary twist (though those would be nice). What you will find are little individual loaves of cornbread so warm and fluffy you’ll almost want to curl up on one and take a nap. What followed our cornbread the night Diana and I had dinner at Dovetail was a first course called fried lambs tongue “Muffalatta” ($13)—a riff on the New Orleans classic overloaded deli-meat sandwich layered up with olive salad. This dish is brilliant—the tongue is cloaked in a crunchy batter and paired with a bracing olive salad and a caper remoulade with enough pickle punch to balance the richness of the fried la ... [more, click below]

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Posted: March 27, 2008

Other restaurants in Upper West Side :
+ 'Cesca   + Asiate   + Blue Hill Stone Barns   + Per Se   + The Neptune Room   + Spigolo   + Telepan   + Aix Brasserie   + 'Cesca   + Bar Boulud   + Dovetail   + BarBao   + Dinosaur Bar-be-Que   + Kefi   + Bar Luna   + Ed's Chowder House   + Red Rooster, by Rachel Barbarotta   + Loi by Dara Pollak   

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