Incrível restaurante em NYC – Mehtaphor do chef Jehangir Mehta

Em minha última viagem a New York fui jantar no restaurante Mehtaphor, do chef Jehangir Mehta.

Está fora da rota dos famosos pelos turistas, num ambiente pequeno e acolhedor. A comida é fantástica e vale cada cents gasto.

Fica minha dica para quem quiser conhecer.

Matéria – New York Times:

130 Duane Street (Church Street), Duane Street Hotel; (212) 542-9440, mehtaphornyc.com.

Jehangir Mehta made his name as a brilliant and contrarian pastry chef, more inclined to shock the palate than to tickle it.

Then he decided to take charge of the whole meal. In 2007, he opened Graffiti, a closet-size spot where he cooks in a 40-square-foot kitchen with two induction burners and a microwave.

Now, after a second-place finish on “The Next Iron Chef” in 2009, he has a new restaurant, the namesake Mehtaphor, but only slightly more breathing room.

The very narrow restaurant is tucked inside the very narrow lobby of the Duane Street Hotel, whose Ikea aesthetic Mr. Mehta has done his best to exorcise, with gauzy cloths, miniature chandeliers and crimson pillows.

Still, the space (which is aggressively underlighted) lacks the exuberance of Graffiti. The attempts at quirkiness — faux burn marks on the menus, for example — don’t square with the lounge vibe.

Neither does the over-attentive service. Cheerful waitresses in mustard-colored blouses and black jeans earnestly extol the virtues of each dish they deliver. You get the sense that they don’t come from New York.

The food seems constrained, too, although for the most part, it is delicious: beef tartare mined with chilies, the heat allayed by guacamole sorbet ($12); an unlikely but happy marriage of crab and truffle goat cheese on a puff-pastry pizza ($12); shaved foie gras with raspberry compote on toast, a grown-up P. B. & J. ($12).

Whose heart does not leap at the sight of perfectly cooked eggs? Here, they come shirred, the yolks shimmying atop tomatoes wanton with cinnamon ($17), smelling like Christmas. One favor, Mr. Mehta: please add bread, for sopping up.

But such straightforward pleasures are not what you expect from a culinary provocateur. The single outré gesture — oysters sprinkled with Pop Rocks — is a dud: when I tried them, the rocks failed to pop. All I got was a synthetic tang.

In Mr. Mehta’s world, cocktails ($7 each) count as dessert. Prosecco is mixed with litchi granita, tequila with lime sherbet — sophisticated slushies.

Among the desserts proper ($7 each), none is as kooky, or as fiendish, as the infamous licorice panna cotta that Mr. Mehta once served at Aix, which some diners likened to eating tobacco. Instead, he offers an orthodox sundae, with three scoops of ice cream (on a recent visit, rum raisin, chocolate chicory and Kahlua) and a scattering of tiny dark malt balls for crunch. If this is an apologia, I’m not complaining.

Has Mr. Mehta mellowed? The best dishes here are the kinds of things you crave at midnight, when you have collapsed in your hotel room after a day lost in the twilight of flying coach and a hair-raising cab ride from J.F.K. They do not demand thought. They just please.

Perhaps, after years of wooing our minds, Mr. Mehta is settling for our hearts.