Justine's on Hudson

"Think of Justine’s on Hudson as the kind of West Village bistro where Emily (of Paris) and Carrie (of the post-pandemic City) might meet for a bottle of Sauternes on a Saturday evening. Outside are white-tablecloth four-tops convenient for surveying the expensively heeled clacking down the leafy street. Inside are gray leather banquettes, glistening brass, and a brilliant chandelier of upside-down tulip petals which would not look out of place on Carrie or Emily, as a bag—or a hat. In a way, Justine’s—named for its proprietor, the daughter of the famous Upper East Side wine importer Neal Rosenthal—harks to a different era, when the economy was a little more flush and overt extravagance a touch less gauche. But, then again, in 2023 even an upscale bistro where bottles average around a hundred and fifty dollars feels, well, very 2023. On a recent evening, a genial if slightly harried-looking waiter apologized that there’s no longer a sommelier on staff and that the cheapest wine by the glass (a fifteen-dollar rosé) had just run out. Items on the Filipino-French menu rotate seasonally. Of the seven appetizers the other night, the least glamorous turned out to be the most winning. A cucumber carpaccio, mixed with caramelized pumpkin seeds and basil, was the perfectly calibrated, autumnally inflected farewell to summer my palate didn’t know it needed. Ubiquitous heirloom tomatoes were given new, luminous life with herb-salted slices of plum and tossed with ginseng vinegar. “When I was little, my mother was obsessed with everything ginseng in the Chinese grocery stores in New Jersey,” Jeanne Jordan, the restaurant’s thirty-four-year-old Filipino American chef, told me with a grin. “So I guess the ginseng vinegar drizzled down to me.” Occasionally, the commendable jeu d’esprit gets away from Jordan. The shrimp toast, delightful on the first bite, became edgeless too fast with its opulent bath of butter, Gruyère, and bacon. Similarly, the flavorful pork chop—probably the most traditionally Filipino item on the menu—slathered in a creamy Billi Bi sauce, liberally spangled with mussels, and showered in trout roe, could have removed at least one piece of jewelry before departing the kitchen. Jordan’s finest creation is the spicy crab spaghetti, inspired by the crab fried rice she ate growing up. “It’s the one item we don’t take off the menu,” she said with pride. The light, bouncy noodles, coupled with silky crab meat, are almost slurpable, and the sauce, an elusive mélange of red-pepper pistou, garlic purée, aged Parmesan, and crushed pepper flakes, brings a seductive, flickering heat. “If you like this, you should have tried it when we used crab roe. It was very, very good,” Jordan remarked. “But it was also very, very expensive.” ( Dishes $23-$46. )" - Jiayang Fan