After years of punching other people's time clocks, chef Steve Vranian is finally cooking in his own kitchen.
This is very good news. Vranian's so-easy-it's-hard brand of cooking comes by way of his mentor, California chef Jeremiah Tower. The rules are few: Buy great ingredients, combine them in fresh new ways and prepare them with as little folderol as possible. Here's the drill. You start with, say, a mesquite-burning grill. Take oysters plucked from Puget Sound, split them open, place them over the charcoal for a few moments, add a smoky tomatillo-jalapeño salsa and serve. What could be more delicious?
Or try this: Form grated potatoes into thin patties, fry them in duck fat until they're crisp and golden and put them on a plate with a barely embellished whitefish salad. Or sear plump shrimp on the grill, then cool them with a refreshing avocado-mango-mint garnish. Or how about braising deeply flavorful beef cheeks -- literally, the cow's jaw -- low and slow, until the meat falls apart at a fork's slightest pressure. Saw off an enormous hunk of the stuff, add a mellow parsnip purée and believe me, you'll never settle for stringy pot roast and starchy mashed potatoes, ever again.
That's Nick and Eddie. Outwardly, the restaurant is an homage to a former 1980s Manhattan hot spot, reincarnated alongside the spirits of the long-gone New French and Loring bars. But get past the revivalist trappings and this enterprise is clearly all about Vranian, a chef who obviously lives by another key word: restraint. What an admirable trait. (Here's another one: value. Entrees average $17, and most appetizers fall in the $5 to $7 range.)
Vranian puts the grill's attributes -- searingly high heat and sinuously smoky flavor -- to very good use. An exceptionally tasty chicken breast, the skin boasting a slight crackle, the meat marvelously juicy -- is a steal at $15, especially given the nicely bitter Swiss chard and super-crisp fries that share the plate. Salmon, meltingly succulent, stood up very well against caramelized Brussels sprouts. Minnesota-raised duck, so tender it barely needed a knife, gets the north-south treatment with a blended bed of wild rice and hominy.
A smoked paprika-cayenne-chile marinade definitely puts a spicy twist on a pan-sautéed steak; it's paired with collard greens and deliriously creamy mashed potatoes.
Sure, Vranian is flirting with the whole comfort food phenomenon, but he's not quite giving it a bear hug. Case in point: His gnocchi. Instead of potatoes, Vranian turns to choux pastry, piping it out into light little bite-size balls and drenching them in a simple béchamel; the overall effect is not unlike macaroni and cheese, only so much better. The kitchen uses the liquids from that braised beef as a base for its ruddy, spicy borscht. Oh, and did I mention the rich chopped chicken liver, spread thin on tidy slices of toast and sprinkled with bits of bacon? Heaven.
Anyone who fell hard for the former Bakery on Grand -- count me as a charter member of that club -- will be happy to learn that Vranian's business partner is Jessica Anderson, the Bakery's head baker. Anderson's soft, yeasty Parker House rolls and old-fashioned semolina loaf are the embodiment of simplicity and integrity. Ditto her short list of sweets. There's a lovable chocolate roulade and exceptional single-bite cookies. A slab of moist gingerbread is no wallflower in the flavor department, that gusto balanced by a bit of tangy crème fraîche. Her crowning achievement is a voluptuously caramel-ey butterscotch pudding finished with a splash of cream. With each spoonful -- an exercise in pure, unadulterated bliss -- Anderson just might be singlehandedly turning wallflower-esque pudding into the belle of the dessert ball. It's that good.
