If David Burke’s eponymous new downtown restaurant, David Burke Kitchen, suggests anything in the simplicity of its title, perhaps it’s that its menu will deliver the hallmarks of Burke’s style.
Burke has made a career of concocting eclectic, even whimsical fusions of flavor, transforming familiar dishes and sophisticating comfort foods into the exotic and gourmet. David Burke Kitchen, with its desire to fuse country chow and fine dining, should have given Burke the perfect forum in which to test the bounds of his creativity and complexify the straightforward.
The restaurant, in the basement of the newly built boutique hotel The James New York in Soho, suggests its mission in the aesthetics of the space alone. Reclaimed barn wood planks angled like a gently sloping inverted boat’s hull form the ceiling of the dining room and large canvas photographs along the perimeter of the space display what servers will tell you is the restaurant’s principal distribution chain: a flanneled farmer, rubber-overalled fisherman clutching lobsters, and a white smocked baker standing in front of his ovens, among others.
Burke uses locally sourced foods whenever possible and maintains a connection with the people and facilities that produce them in a way that is supposed to promote both sustainability and a supply line that one would assume is most conducive to freshness and quality. David Burke Kitchen also features rustic ingredients that ooze its countryside motif, items like various pickled stuffs and root vegetables and, at least in the cases of small dishes and snacks, cute little glass serving containers on gingham check napkins that look straight out of a rural pantry.
This being Burke however, an appetizer of beef tartare is done with bison instead and blended with egg salad, smoked tomato and fingerling crisps. The restaurant’s visually striking crab cake, also on the starter menu, stows rich crab meat inside a rectangular log cabin of pretzel sticks. Salmon pastrami, which is part of a short list of snacks, fits in with other tongue in cheek, gourmet odes to comfort food, a tasty morsel of pleasantly oily salmon jerky rolled in spices and wrapped around a pretzel stick. Herbed mack and cheese employs duck ham. All accomplish the somewhat amusing trick of approximating their inspiration using a palate of higher order flavors.
Still some of the dishes fell short, which seemed especially disappointing given the potent promise of Burke’s unusual pairings. Idaho trout with leeks, grapefruit and sour carrot sauce for instance got its main kick from a sparse sprinkle of fried olive crisps flanking the fillet and a thin slick of citrus flavored sauce wiped on the plate.
So it was with the crab cake, which also had a dribbling of zesty syrup at the corners. In that dish, the pretzel sticks, which had worked well with the pastrami salmon, felt underpowered as a core component of something that should have been more substantial. Why did Burke in this instance shy away from the rustic heartiness that this eatery would seem to want to embrace and use a more flavorful pretzel such as a sour dough instead of sticks that reminded me of the boxed variety I used to receive as part of my school lunch in elementary school? Probably because it would have subtracted from the dish’s dramatic presentation, which suggests an unfortunate preference for style over substance. Ground up pretzels would have also amalgamated better with the crab meat creating the bready richness that one expects from the dish. Another appetizer of baby octopus also seem disjointed, the bland tasting crustacean plopped on top of a mix of garbanzo and black beans doused in a yogurt sauce, a bed that was tasty and yet had the feel of being irrelevant to the centerpiece of the dish.
In short, Burke’s flavors reside too much along periphery, elusive concentrations of the sweet and savory that should be featured in more abundance and that, in many cases, should better compliment the headline items on the plate. A dinner special of lobster risotto for instance (lobster is featured as a special every Thursday) included an abundance of meat but left it naked on top of the garlicky risotto. Credit should be given to Burke for not over-salting his food or obliterating its nuances with overpowering sauces and spices, but that is no excuse either for blandness.
Burke’s deserts are a whole other story. Ever conscious of the element of presentation, our excellent waitress urged us to order monkey bread, a cake made of balls of dough that are sandwiched together and topped with pecans and slices of banana underneath a candy sugar glaze. It is served with an impressive compliment of fresh whip cream from a metal urn, caramel sauce, and vanilla ice cream. Here, finally was a dish whose constituent flavors and textures, when blended together, achieved devastating heights, triggering an almost insuppressable urge to gorge. The cake itself reminded me strongly of french toast my grandmother used to make from thick slices of Challah bread, a pleasing contrast between a crispy exterior and soggy gushiness inside. It was a good thing that Burke’s entrees tend to be modestly portioned. The monkey bread comes in a large tin and though the menu says it’s enough for two, it probably could serve double that, which, if you are just a couple, leaves enough for seconds and yes, even thirds.
Burke has made a career of concocting eclectic, even whimsical fusions of flavor, transforming familiar dishes and sophisticating comfort foods into the exotic and gourmet. David Burke Kitchen, with its desire to fuse country chow and fine dining, should have given Burke the perfect forum in which to test the bounds of his creativity and complexify the straightforward.
The restaurant, in the basement of the newly built boutique hotel The James New York in Soho, suggests its mission in the aesthetics of the space alone. Reclaimed barn wood planks angled like a gently sloping inverted boat’s hull form the ceiling of the dining room and large canvas photographs along the perimeter of the space display what servers will tell you is the restaurant’s principal distribution chain: a flanneled farmer, rubber-overalled fisherman clutching lobsters, and a white smocked baker standing in front of his ovens, among others.
Burke uses locally sourced foods whenever possible and maintains a connection with the people and facilities that produce them in a way that is supposed to promote both sustainability and a supply line that one would assume is most conducive to freshness and quality. David Burke Kitchen also features rustic ingredients that ooze its countryside motif, items like various pickled stuffs and root vegetables and, at least in the cases of small dishes and snacks, cute little glass serving containers on gingham check napkins that look straight out of a rural pantry.
This being Burke however, an appetizer of beef tartare is done with bison instead and blended with egg salad, smoked tomato and fingerling crisps. The restaurant’s visually striking crab cake, also on the starter menu, stows rich crab meat inside a rectangular log cabin of pretzel sticks. Salmon pastrami, which is part of a short list of snacks, fits in with other tongue in cheek, gourmet odes to comfort food, a tasty morsel of pleasantly oily salmon jerky rolled in spices and wrapped around a pretzel stick. Herbed mack and cheese employs duck ham. All accomplish the somewhat amusing trick of approximating their inspiration using a palate of higher order flavors.
Still some of the dishes fell short, which seemed especially disappointing given the potent promise of Burke’s unusual pairings. Idaho trout with leeks, grapefruit and sour carrot sauce for instance got its main kick from a sparse sprinkle of fried olive crisps flanking the fillet and a thin slick of citrus flavored sauce wiped on the plate.
So it was with the crab cake, which also had a dribbling of zesty syrup at the corners. In that dish, the pretzel sticks, which had worked well with the pastrami salmon, felt underpowered as a core component of something that should have been more substantial. Why did Burke in this instance shy away from the rustic heartiness that this eatery would seem to want to embrace and use a more flavorful pretzel such as a sour dough instead of sticks that reminded me of the boxed variety I used to receive as part of my school lunch in elementary school? Probably because it would have subtracted from the dish’s dramatic presentation, which suggests an unfortunate preference for style over substance. Ground up pretzels would have also amalgamated better with the crab meat creating the bready richness that one expects from the dish. Another appetizer of baby octopus also seem disjointed, the bland tasting crustacean plopped on top of a mix of garbanzo and black beans doused in a yogurt sauce, a bed that was tasty and yet had the feel of being irrelevant to the centerpiece of the dish.
In short, Burke’s flavors reside too much along periphery, elusive concentrations of the sweet and savory that should be featured in more abundance and that, in many cases, should better compliment the headline items on the plate. A dinner special of lobster risotto for instance (lobster is featured as a special every Thursday) included an abundance of meat but left it naked on top of the garlicky risotto. Credit should be given to Burke for not over-salting his food or obliterating its nuances with overpowering sauces and spices, but that is no excuse either for blandness.
Burke’s deserts are a whole other story. Ever conscious of the element of presentation, our excellent waitress urged us to order monkey bread, a cake made of balls of dough that are sandwiched together and topped with pecans and slices of banana underneath a candy sugar glaze. It is served with an impressive compliment of fresh whip cream from a metal urn, caramel sauce, and vanilla ice cream. Here, finally was a dish whose constituent flavors and textures, when blended together, achieved devastating heights, triggering an almost insuppressable urge to gorge. The cake itself reminded me strongly of french toast my grandmother used to make from thick slices of Challah bread, a pleasing contrast between a crispy exterior and soggy gushiness inside. It was a good thing that Burke’s entrees tend to be modestly portioned. The monkey bread comes in a large tin and though the menu says it’s enough for two, it probably could serve double that, which, if you are just a couple, leaves enough for seconds and yes, even thirds.
