Restaurant Review: Café Carmellini Is Fine Dining That Knows a Good Time | The New Yorker
"At the Fifth Avenue Hotel's swanky dining room I was charmed by the irresistible, pencil-thin, two-foot grissini—breadsticks presented in a vase and replenished so deftly we nearly cheered—which set the tone for a meal that is simultaneously serious and mischievous. The exquisitely appointed room (blue and gold, rich woods, soaring ceilings, faux trees, balcony box seating) and bow-tied service are matched by an elegant, precise menu; Andrew Carmellini, a former Boulud protege who runs Locanda Verde, Lafayette and the Dutch among others, is personally in the kitchen much of the time, and the place feels like a stylish, slightly theatrical legacy play that nonetheless knows how to have fun. The cooking is neither strictly French nor Italian—there are French quantities of butter and an almost Italian ecstasy about vegetables—but it delights in boldness rather than subtlety: Scallops Cardoz arrives with a layered masala and cardamom-and-makrut-lime basmati; a revived, creamy Billi bi mussel-soup idea becomes a sauce for poached halibut with a saffron note; and the Chicken Gran Sasso (listed at $45 per person, effectively a $90 bird) is served in two courses—light meat first, then the dark—yielding both ermine-white breast slices with peppers and rapini and a second plate of crisp-skinned thighs and a leg atop roasted potatoes with an intense brown gravy. There are occasional nouvelle-cuisine fussy touches—a sardine toast plated with extraneous garnishes, a precarious crab mille-feuille—but foam is often put to good use (most memorably in the Duck‑Duck‑Duck Tortellini, which deploys duck three ways: farce, demi‑glace, and a foie‑gras foam). Even the salads are boldly dressed (a chicory salad sharpened with plenty of cheese), and the dessert program—built on the work of pastry veterans and led here by Jeffrey Wurtz—is intelligently bright: a toasty coconut sorbet, a passionfruit semifreddo companion, pistachio gelato with cherry syrup, and the theatrical, brilliant A.B.C. grapefruit sorbetto finished tableside with Dolin dry vermouth, all of which leave the meal feeling rich, dramatic, and very, very fun." - Helen Rosner
