Pete Wells is a great restaurant critic. First off, he has a serious depth of knowledge. He’s been a food writer for over a decade. From 2009 until January 2011, he wrote a terrific column for The New York Times Magazine called “Cooking with Dexter,” about the kitchen life of a working father, and the silly, wonderful joys of teaching a kid to love food, cook food, and eat it all up.

Prior to joining The Times, he was articles editor at Details for five years. He also wrote a column, “Always Hungry,” for Food & Wine, where he worked as an editor from 1999 until 2001. The guy has received five James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards for his writing about eating and drinking. But for me, what’s best about reading his reviews is that he not only knows food, but he can write: beautifully, engagingly, hilariously, convincingly, and with thrilling detail. I am constantly pointing my food writing students to his work, and if he says go somewhere, I’m there. Gwynett Street is on the top of my list thanks to him, along with Pok Pok Ny (though I’ll probably be waiting until sometime in 2015 to brave those crowds).

Pete is also pretty honest about his experiences. Sometimes brutally so, but that’s what you need from a critic. Someone to tell it to you straight. In his review of the restaurant La Mar Cebicheria Peruana, he described the dismal state of the dining room, with its chairs draped in winter coats, as having “the elegance of a church-basement bingo game.” He concluded: “Any restaurant can get the hiccups. This one was having a full-blown seizure.”

So when he awarded Daniel Humm and Will Guidara’s Eleven Madison Park follow up, The Nomad, three stars, I was on that reservation line like Rush Limbaugh on Sarah Fluke. I was on the attack, searching on Open Table for a reservation, my credit card primed for an $80 roast chicken with foie gras and truffles under its skin. Alas, I got the reservation: 7pm for a party of three: myself, a chef friend, and a restaurant industry veteran. The three of us were primed for wonder. Unfortunately for us, Pete's three star experience was not to be repeated on the evening of our visit.

The restaurant is located in the newish NoMad Hotel, on a strip of lower Broadway marked by old shops sheltered by tattered awnings, selling a random assortment of perfume, buttons, doilies, and plastic windmills. Like the Ace Hotel, the NoMad is made for those who tweet as they eat, and use “Brooklyn” as an adjective. It’s a hip crowd, and one that’s a mix of sexy chaos and flirty mayhem. Much of the buzz is found in the main dining room, called the Atrium. It’s a vaulted chamber capped in glass, which makes you feel as though you are eating in the greenhouse of a botanical garden. It’s light and lovely, with an urban edge. What with the tightly spaced tables, and the voices, the cell phones, and all those tweets, the sound fires around the room like a rocket. So if hearing or speaking is something you’d like to do, you might opt instead for the darker, more sedate Parlour Room, located off to the side of the Atrium. This room has a Vegas meets Burlesque vibe achieved through heavy red velvet drapery, and claw-footed Elizabethan style arm chairs (upholstered in more crushed velvet) tucked into round side tables. While the sound level is better, it feels very gothic and overdone, and all together disjointed from the sleek scene unfolding in the next room. You may feel left out, banished to a Siberia of velvet. We preferred it because it allowed us to speak, but truth be told the room feels dated and dusty. Since I am dated and dusty, this was just fine.

A third dining space is the Library off of the bar, a place where some 30 fantastic cocktails (some classic, some reimagined, some non-alcoholic), are hand-manipulated by a band of brilliant bartenders led by the inimitable Leo Robitschek. To get to this wonderland of liquor, you must push your way through the main dining room. To me, this is a massive design flaw. Why have throngs of people migrating through a crowded dining room like a heard of wild buffalo just to reach the cocktail bar? You’re jostling diners, and increasing the Olympic level of difficulty servers face every time they have to approach a table. Not the smartest place to put a watering hole, in my opinion, but hey, I’m no architect, I just eat.

Now, speaking of eating; that is the point of this review, now, isn’t it? Well, Pete was right about most of the food. It’s no Eleven Madison (a restaurant where I had one of the greatest meals of my life under Chef Humm), but it’s good fun. After we finished our cocktails and located a reasonably priced bottle of wine (the latter challenge was quite arduous), our meal began with a loaf of warm homemade zucchini and cheese flatbread. Heaven is the place where bread and cheese meet, don’t you think? ‘Tis. Don’t expect to be able to leave a crumb behind. This is bread you’ll battle blood for. Order another loaf and bring some Ziplocs. It, over everything else at your table, including friends, lovers, and children, needs to come home with you.

The radishes ($8) are just adorable. Now I know you’ve never seen the words “adorable” and “radish” in such proximity, but it’s just the truth. The peppery little knobs, colored in bubble gum pink and cherry red, are dunked in melted butter and then arranged, standing up, on a butcher block slab like strawberries dipped in white chocolate. My daughter Emily would have loved these. They looked like a small family of critters that could support a Nick Jr. series for a good long time. I can just see it now: The Radishes! Premiering this Fall! They sure are tasty, too. Since they’ve already been buttered, glossed in just the right amount of fat, simply dip them in the little hill of sea salt, and nosh away.

Lumps of sweet King Crab take on a mound of taglietelle, brightened with sunny Meyer lemon and a smack of black pepper ($19/$28). We could’ve eaten the larger size, so I suggest you go for the bigger bowl when the decision comes. Snappy snow peas ($15) are chiffonaded (pity the garde manger and his poor carpel tunnel syndrome) into skinny rafts for a salad that’s tossed up with smoky pancetta, nutty shavings of Pecorino, and a fistful of fresh mint, drizzled with the lightest hand of olive oil and salt. The salad is a beauty, a reason to believe in simplicity forever, a white dress in summertime. Humm’s smoked trout ($18) is dressed with a buttermilk-horseradish cream, and comes with some thin rye crackers. Sadly, it’s a bit of a sloppy dish, to be honest, with the sauce painting the plate in wild brushstrokes. But the trout is wonderfully smoky and rich, and what’s not to love about those flavors?

So, things were looking good at the half-time break. Sure, I didn’t love the design of the restaurant, but that’s okay. Many people don’t like the way I decorate and they still visit me. True, the service was slow, leaving wine glasses empty, taking too long to clear dirty plates. But given the quality of the first course, I could deal. But you know how this story ends, right? It’s not pretty. It ends with that $80 roast chicken for two, served raw. Oh, yes. Raw.

But what promise that plump little bird had when it was presented tableside in its cast iron pan, with bouquets of fragrant herbs poofing out of the right places, its gorgeous brown skin glistening in the candlelight. We oohed and aahed at it like it was some young southern belle at a Coming Out party. After the viewing, it was removed from the table, where our waiter promised it would be returned, once it had been carved. As pledged, it was brought back, but only two tiny breasts came back (we could have sworn the chicken was better endowed), and a tiny crock of dark meat fricasseed with butter and mushrooms.

It was plated just as our scallops ($28) with sorrel, lemon, and maitake mushrooms were served. The scallops, creamy in the middle and caramelized on the outside by the sweet heat of butter in a pan, could not have been better unless they had multiplied spontaneously on the plate. The chicken, though, was a disaster. Raw through the breast, it was the color of silly putty. We had to send it back. Meanwhile, we had already spooned the dark meat fricassee onto our plates, so when they were removed, so was the dark meat. We picked at the scallops, waiting for the chicken to come back cooked instead of raw. The timing of our dinner was ruined. The chicken came back after a while. Those same pieces were reheated and cooked through, but without the dark meat fricasee, which had disappeared somewhere in the kitchen.

Our waitress seemed dumbfounded when I asked her to get us some more of the dark meat fricasee. “You took it away with our white meat, can we have it back?” I asked. “Okay, I’ll see what I can find.” She seemed so confused. I felt like explaining the facts to her: My dear girl. You work in a restaurant. Find us another chicken. Make it work.” I was quite perturbed. (Can you tell? I can get so bitchy.) Well, to her credit, she managed to find some dark meat fricassee somewhere (perhaps the shops across the street have added it to their menu of trinkets?). And to be honest, it tasted darn good, which should not come as a surprise given the amount of foie gras and truffles and butter that’s tucked between flesh and skin. But a three star restaurant should not serve raw chicken.

Things only got worse at dessert, which were barely edible. Something called Milk and Honey was a mess of melted milky ice cream and shattered cookies that seem to have been crushed underfoot. The Strawberry Shortcake was possibly the worst one known to man: a broken flavorless biscuit topped with decimated strawberries, and cream. A salty chocolate caramel tart was a sad imitation of Claudia Fleming’s original. Things had gone from bad to worse.

The final blow came with the check, which included $80 for the roasted (read: raw) chicken. I’m sorry. If you serve me raw chicken, then re-heat it, and then forget the dark meat and cobble the entire meal back together in assorted pieces and at different times, you take the $80 hit. Not me.

Now Pete, I agree with you in many ways because The Nomad does a lot of things right. Great beverage program, and some fine food, for sure. But just as all those rooms don’t fit together, for the restaurant itself, the big picture is lost. There is something called “good will.” For me, it goes a long way. It brings guests back when experiences are not right. Because we all make mistakes. In our personal lives, professional lives, heck, I probably even make them in my sleep. Flaws are to human nature what clouds are to the sky. But every mistake is also an opportunity. An opportunity to apologize, to explain, and make amends. This raw chicken was a mistake. It happens; I suppose that a cook just rushed her bird out of the oven.  To make it right, at $80, you comp the chicken. Or you create a customer who will not return. I can find great cocktails at many other restaurants. And fun platters of radishes, and tasty snow pea salads. All these things can be found at restaurants that don’t serve raw chicken and ask you to pay for it. Pete, what do you think?

The NoMad is located at the NoMad Hotel, 1170 Broadway at 28^th Street, 347-472-5660, www.thenomadhotel.com/#dining.

Andrea Strong