How to Order at Aqua, the New 400-Seat Italian Japanese Import From London | Eater NY
"A massive new restaurant at 920 Broadway (near 20th Street in Flatiron) owned by David Yeo — a branch of a London restaurant — occupies a former furniture store shaped like a mallet, with a main room that sprawls around an oval bar surmounted by massive rope sculptures that make it look like a ship without sails, a long wing with a 70-foot sushi bar shooting off toward a separate 21st Street entrance, and a mezzanine not yet open. It mounts two separate menus, one devoted to Italian food ("Aqua Roma"), the other to Japanese ("Aqua Kyoto"); the Japanese and Italian menus are separate, and there is almost no fusion going on. Our waitress warned that diners would have "no control over when the dishes arrived — making it impossible to enjoy a sequential meal of one cuisine and then the other," so items from both kitchens can land together (for example, rock shrimp tempura and fried calamari arrived at precisely the same time, both thickly breaded and hard to tell apart). Several dishes stand out for novelty and execution: "Crystal Sushi," invented in Hong Kong at Shiro, swaddles a core of raw fish with translucent flavored jelly instead of nori — in one option the roll contains scallop wrapped with gelatin kimchi, with caviar and a swatch of gold leaf — and is "more visually striking than flavorful." The lobster bisque pizza ($35) is worth trying: a perhaps-too-puffy, yeasty crust with generous lobster tail and claw meat though the underlying sauce "didn't really qualify as a bisque," and it can feed four as an appetizer. Of the Italian pastas, the mafalde with oxtail ragu ($29) was superb: frilled noodles slippery in a thick dark sauce, but with too few noodles so you end up spooning the sauce when the pasta is gone. On the Japanese side, the maki are assembled with particular skill so the nori doesn't unravel; the futomaki ($19), wrapped in rice paper, combines tuna, salmon, yellowtail, and avocado "like a jazz trio." Vegetable-focused diners can order the spinach salad ($17), the ohitashi presented as two cylinders of compressed spinach with a lovely sesame dressing poured tableside. The chicken thigh ($19) comes as a pair of bulbous skewers painted with a dark sweet sauce and grilled for a smoky flavor. Practical advice from the review: place a small order and then another small order later if you want some control over sequencing; it's not really a pizza parlor nor a sushi bar — quality is good but selection limited — so skip those categories, consider it a good place for drinks and snacks, and note that the place is big enough that you can probably get in without a reservation most times." - Robert Sietsema
