Blenheim
CreditMorgan Ione Yeager for The New York Times
Morten Sohlberg designed the tables for Blenheim, the West Village restaurant he and his wife opened in May. The concrete tops are polished smooth with beeswax, and the sides are edged with copper. The shapes look irregular, but the sides are slightly bowed so that a pair of two-tops can spoon against each other and become a four-top.
“That’s the idea, anyway,” our server said. “But they don’t all fit together.”
Blenheim is like that, too. A tremendous amount of thought and effort has gone into the food, drinks and design, but they don’t always connect.
This seems to have been an issue since the beginning. The first chef left about three weeks in because of what the owners called “irreconcilable differences.” In July, they hired Ryan Tate, who had been the chef at Le Restaurant in TriBeCa until it suddenly closed. I admired the $100 set menus he served there enough that I happily gave the place two stars in a review last year.
Mr. Tate has set his ambitions even higher this time. Besides a sizable à la carte menu, he offers a $115, nine-course tasting loaded with extra dishes. At times, his cooking is as thoughtful and transporting as it was at Le Restaurant, but with a higher degree of intricacy. At other times, the kitchen is obviously struggling to keep up. Meanwhile, the service runs the gamut from charming and slightly lost to nonexistent. On my first night there, the disparity between the two was the widest I had ever seen in any restaurant.
That is not the only disconnect. When tables are set up outside next to the cobblestone streets, Blenheim looks as if its only desire is to be your drop-in-and-hang-out corner tavern. The dining room, with an antique tree saw, a wooden yoke and a whole array of carpentry tools on the walls, looks like the historical society of some upstate village, where it would be the only tourist attraction. Underlining the point, servers tell you right away that this is a farm-to-table restaurant, that ingredients are trucked in from Blenheim Hill Farm in Schoharie County, southwest of Albany, owned by Mr. Sohlberg and his wife, Min Ye. You might reasonably expect pork cutlets, creamed corn, maybe pie.
Mr. Tate has other ideas. Terrific ideas, often, even if they have as much business in a rusticated farm-to-table tavern as white tie and spats.
The stream in Schoharie County where tilefish and sea urchin splash around together hasn’t been discovered yet, but at Blenheim they swim happily side by side on one plate. The tilefish falls into big, sweet white flakes that taste of shrimp. The urchin is whipped into a creamy, slightly briny sabayon that is like a richer, more luxurious taramosalata. Also on the plate are fat blueberries and carrots roasted in coffee bean oil. I can’t explain why blueberries taste so good with sea urchin sabayon, but they do.
Alaskan king crab meat had been made almost as sweet and tender as some tropical fruit, but the midnight funk of squid ink sauce brought it back to the sea. With dense roasted chanterelles and wands of naturally pickled sea bean scattered around the plate, this was an appetizer you could go quietly crazy over.
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And it would take a crazy person to complain that Alaskan crab and sea urchin are insufficiently farm-to-table when they’re cooked this skillfully. Not that Mr. Tate turns his back on the owners’ land entirely. The carrots and the chanterelles come from Blenheim Hill Farm. So does the pork loin, which is slowly roasted until it drips with juices and then sent to the table with a cast of cool Southern characters: pickled peaches, okra charred to a crisp husk, and sorghum syrup, like molasses cut with espresso.
Those are Blenheim lettuces and crunchy chips of smoked Blenheim ham in the gloriously crisp and fresh salad, and that’s creamy Blenheim pork fat spackling the side of the bowl. The lemon balm, thyme and pineapple sage in a sensational group of herb sorbets: Blenheim-grown.
The gap between the farm-to-table ethos and Mr. Tate’s style is minor compared with the gulf between the restaurant Blenheim could be and the restaurant that currently sits at 283 West 12th Street.
The same dish can be stunning one night and a contorted mess on another.
The first time I had the roasted king mushrooms with spaetzle and sauerkraut, the mushroom stems had something like the flavor and texture of weisswurst. A German-inspired vegetarian main course with mushrooms standing in for sausages is a fantastic notion, and I couldn’t wait to taste it again when I returned. But when I did, the stems were watery inside and rubbery outside, like a steamed hot dog wrapped in a balloon. An unusual dessert soup of cooked barley and Champagne grapes in a chilled barley-jasmine tea went out of whack between visits, going from fascinating to weird. And there were glitches that were surprising in such a technique-focused kitchen. The grapefruit pearls with cured Tasmanian sea trout were meant to burst with juice, but they had solidified. Eating them was like chewing on the drippings of a grapefruit-scented candle.
On Blenheim’s better nights, I might have ranked the food among the most exciting and interesting I’ve eaten in the last year. But it came to the table so very, very slowly that it was hard to stay excited or interested. It took more than three hours one night to order and eat appetizers, main courses and desserts. I wondered if the kitchen was overwhelmed. I was sure our server was.
We had to flag him down to ask for more of the soft, warm and yeasty rolls made with Cheddar and Marmite. They never came. It took two tries and about 20 minutes to get a second glass of wine. We were left alone with menus for three-quarters of an hour before we waved like drowning sailors and begged him to take our order.
“There are some additions to the menu tonight,” he began.
Additions? When the kitchen can’t send out more than one course an hour, the menu needs subtractions. And Blenheim has no business offering nine-course tastings unless it is ready to provide pajamas and sleeping bags. Maybe its pieces would fit together better if there weren’t so many of them. I hope so, because I’d like to see it transform itself from a puzzle to a restaurant.