Élan
CreditKatie Orlinsky for The New York Times
If you remember David Waltuck’s cooking at Chanterelle, eating at his new restaurant, Élan, can be a little unnerving. Chanterelle, a downtown pioneer when it opened in 1979, was an institution by the time it went out of business, just a few months short of its 30th anniversary.
Like all institutions, it had become padded by ritual, tradition and reputation. You went there to eat, of course, but you also went because it was supposed to be one of the city’s greatest restaurants, holding four stars from The New York Times at various points. You went to find out whether the artist who had drawn the cover of the handwritten menu would be at the next table. You went because Karen Waltuck, the chef’s wife and partner, and her ballet corps of elegant, mildly bohemian servers knew how to make you comfortable even if grand restaurants like Chanterelle weren’t usually your thing.
At Élan, which Mr. Waltuck opened with George Stinson north of Union Square this summer, the institutional padding is gone. Restaurants like Chanterelle have a wine directory the size and mass of the Oxford English Dictionary, but Élan’s fits on four very tempting pages of reds and whites up to $105, with a short appendix of more-expensive bottles under the heading “treat yourself.” The one reminder of Mr. Waltuck’s downtown-bohemian past is the quintuple self-portrait by Chuck Close that hangs opposite the wide concrete bar, a black curtain from which disembodied Close heads stare grimly out of the darkness, like a trick in a haunted house.
The monochromatic dining room is attractive enough, but a little too bright by night when the pinpoint lights beam straight down. Look along the banquette, and you see a row of shiny, illuminated noses. A heavy framed mirror seems to be suspended by a thick white rope, which somehow makes it look less secure. It’s a reasonably quiet room, friendly to conversation, but not one whose innate beauty will draw you back. There is, in other words, little in the environment for the food to hide behind. Standing out in the open, Mr. Waltuck’s cooking is revealed to be as variable, as prone to peaks and valleys, as anyone else’s.
This may rattle the Chanterelle sentimentalists, but it seems to have liberated Mr. Waltuck. A chef with stars to defend and a reputation to maintain does what politicians do in close elections: sticks to the script, tries to stay predictable. At Élan, Mr. Waltuck gets to play. He doesn’t have to ask himself whether a pair of pot stickers filled with mashed potatoes can be a four-star dish. That’s a boring question. The point is that finding potatoes inside crimped pan-fried dumplings surrounded by a haze of shaved summer truffles is a funny, delicious surprise. He must be playing, too, when he stirs sea urchin into a deep bowl of guacamole. Avocado doesn’t need extra creaminess, but it takes extremely well to briny seafood, as you find out when you spread some on a grease-free taro chip.
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Occasionally, what seems like a fun idea will land like a bag of wet laundry. Foie gras lollipops sound decadent, but the cold wad of dull liver rolled in uncrunchy pistachios is a grim treat. General Tso’s sweetbreads are another game gone wrong. If the sweetbreads were ever crisp, they aren’t by the time they’ve been stir-fried with bok choy and sloshed around in an orange-chile sauce that seemed to need more spice and citrus tang. (This dish may fall into one of my blind spots, because the Chinese takeout classic doesn’t ring my doorbell, either.)
Servers at Élan will announce conspiratorially that there is an “off the menu special,” a burger of duck and foie gras, even though it’s always available. The whispered hard sell is a tired ploy to begin with, and this slightly mushy pile of meat sweetened with onion chutney and figs isn’t spectacular enough to make the gimmick pay off. At times, Élan seems a little unfocused, as if Mr. Waltuck is hedging his bets by combining a grown-up bistro with a gastro pub in the crazed-carnivore style of the past decade. One of Élan’s least pleasant dishes is scallop fettuccine dressed with a sauce that seems to be pure duck fat. After one forkful, I wanted a salad.
Fashions have changed since Chanterelle closed, of course, but Élan is at its best when it is not trying to keep up with the youngsters. The mere sight of tea-smoked salmon on the menu may cause Asian fusion flashbacks. (Enormous Buddhas! Chopsticks as hairpins! Raw tuna served over bowls of live Siamese fighting fish!) But Mr. Waltuck’s salmon is no throwback. It is silky and elegant, given a sweet-sour depth by a lightly curried tamarind sauce.
The dish that made Mr. Waltuck’s name, the seafood sausage in which sweet bits of scallops and shrimp are bound together by a subtle fish mousse, is back, looking hopelessly behind the times in its sauerkraut beurre blanc. Do not be fooled: It is also one of the most delicious things at Élan. I enjoyed Mr. Waltuck’s steamed zucchini blossoms at Chanterelle and enjoyed them again at Élan, where they were stuffed with zucchini and Parmesan and served with slow-cooked tomatoes and very fresh, clean-tasting lemon crème fraîche. With dishes that call for lightness and delicacy, Élan comes into its own.
The menu changes all the time, and at every meal, one or two recipes seemed to need more time in the test kitchen. A red-wine butter sauce with striped bass was very vague, as if it needed to be reduced longer. But a special I had the same night, fluffy fish quenelles bobbing in an aromatic Thai soup, skillfully combined Mr. Waltuck’s longstanding love for Asian traditions with his habit of jumping outside tradition when the mood strikes.
Diana Valenzuela, the pastry chef, seems to work the same way. She will be zigging in one direction, then she’ll zag left on you. Panna cotta with Concord grape jam and fragile sheets of pine-nut brittle starts like dessert but ends like a cheese course; Ms. Valenzuela makes the panna cotta from Gorgonzola. A pastis-soaked chocolate cake might have been more interesting if it hadn’t been topped with an oddly waxy chocolate mousse. But a swatch of basil pastry cream is an unexpected and excellent addition to blueberries in a thin, crisp corn-flour tart shell. Ms. Valenzuela’s desserts are just right for a restaurant that takes the predictability out of tradition.