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“BarBao”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	Asian	Upper West Side	Moderate	Good

Though I’d love to go, I’ve never been to Vietnam. Friends who have been come home raving about the countryside, the architecture and the food (both street and restaurant food, too.) When I do make it over there, I know this much. I plan on eating my way through the country. While I know I’ll find a lot of food that I’ve never seen or heard of before (and possibly some foods that I will be too freaked out to eat), I do feel like I’ve gotten a good culinary primer on the country’s indigenous eats from one of our city’s best known Vietnamese chefs, Michael “Bao” Huynh.

Huynh first hit my radar when he opened Bao 111, a sweet little Vietnamese outpost in the East Village. I remember making many trips to Avenue C to satisfy cravings for melting hunks of braised short ribs skewered on lemongrass. Later on at Bao Noodles, which he opened in Gramercy in 2002, I would practically sleepwalk over to his restaurant for crispy whole snapper and bowls of vermicelli noodles decorated with fresh fistfuls of cilantro, braised pork belly and fat juicy just charred shrimp. Oddly, he sold off his interest in his Bao restaurants, but his name started hitting the food press pages again when he teamed up with Drew Nieporent to open Mai House, a more upscale Vietnamese restaurant located in the former Tribakery space. I had some good meals at Mai House—I remember being very committed to finishing every last bit of chicken in a clay pot—but the partnership went south. Despite Huynh’s fall, like a spry cat, Huynh landed feet first in a sweet new deal with Main Street Restaurant Group (Calle Ocho, BLT Prime) to reconceptualize and revitalize their long time Upper West Side restaurant, Rain.

Clearing out Rain’s Pan-Asian fare, Huynh has put his Vietnamese stamp on the menu, peppering it with his signatures: short ribs on lemongrass skewers, baby lamb lollipops, clay pot chicken, crispy whole snapper, and bowls of vermicelli. It’s a menu that will appeal to couples looking for a bite at the long lazy serpentine bar where cocktails are mixed from sake, vodka, gin and rum, paired up with fresh juices like lemongrass, lychee, and passion fruit, or groups of friends more interested in a big family-style dinner in the stunning dining room. Yes indeed, the menu is not the only thing that’s been made over. The restaurant is virtually unrecognizable from its prior self.

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Posted: November 9, 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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