WEEK TWO READING

SOURCE:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/dining/fowler-and-wells-restaurant-review-beekman-hotel.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Frestaurant-review&action=click&contentCollection=dining&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&_r=0

You enter Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant near City Hall through what is suddenly the most stunning hotel lobby bar in New York City. The Beekman hotel’s bar is at the bottom of the atrium of the 1883 Temple Court Building, which rises up through seven floors of elaborate cast-iron railings to end in a soaring glass pyramid. It’s a striking room where you can sink into an armchair with a solidly built drink in your hand and get lost in the past, a quintessentially urban experience that most of the city’s grand old hotels no longer give us.

With Fowler & Wells, Mr. Colicchio tries to extend the atrium’s Gilded Age exuberance. He never quite gets there. The problem isn’t quality or effort: The cooking is spotlessly correct, the ingredients shimmer on the plate, the flavors all make sense, and the dining room is dignified in a way that makes you realize how undervalued that trait has become in restaurants. But the central vision tying it all together is fuzzy. The restaurant is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Choosing the $135 tasting menu one night, I got a seven-course tour of robber-baron dishes as interpreted by Mr. Colicchio and Bryan Hunt, the executive chef. The opener was a delicious variation on the theme of oysters Rockefeller. Watercress stood in for spinach, and the chubby Belon oyster had been poached in oyster liquor and crème fraîche seasoned with fennel and bacon: all the right flavors, rearranged.

Duck à l’orange was reworked, wonderfully, with kumquats. I smiled at how smart the chefs were to add a rippling charge to the sweetened citrus with ginger, mustard seed and vinegar made from oranges.

The meat of little lobsters had been chopped and replaced in the shells with a green slash of tomalley, tarragon leaves and chanterelles the size of shirt buttons. It was very good, but was the sort of dish that chefs of Mr. Colicchio’s generation have been cooking for a couple of decades. With the possible exception of its superb pastry crust, the same was true of venison Wellington, with chestnuts and black trumpets inside a ring of huckleberry sauce.

None of this is a problem in and of itself — good food is good! — but you might feel mildly let down if you believed the pre-opening press, which promised cooking inspired by an earlier era. At Le Coucou, Daniel Rose locates the energy in old-guard French dishes and then multiplies it, but the kitchen at Fowler & Wells often seems to be trying to get away from the past.

If you order à la carte, the historical references are hard to spot. The freedom the chefs take here can lead to some exciting turns of imagination. Pounded rabbit loin was fried into a long, crunchy schnitzel and served over chickpeas and pistachios; lemon confit and lots of thyme leaves snapped the dish into harmony.

There was a memorable monkfish cooked in hot wood smoke, served with freekeh and other grains cooked in reduced beet juice. The same grains, toasted to a crackle, had been tossed over the top. Warm crème fraîche softened the earthy taste of the beets, although I didn’t see the point of spiking this sauce with caviar.

The kitchen’s creativity seems to run out of gas at some points, though. There wasn’t a lot of flavor in firm lumps of sweetbread with brussels sprout leaves and pale bands of lardon, and not much surprise in the juxtaposition of roasted salsify, sunchokes and leeks over a pale sunchoke purée. There’s a pretty plate of raw fluke under red-rimmed wheels of radish and tiny globes of finger lime; it was as good as it is in other restaurants where I’ve had nearly the same dish.

The à la carte menu would be more tempting if it overlapped at all with the tasting menu. It wasn’t until my third visit that a server suggested the chef might be able to dislodge some dishes from the tasting menu to serve as an appetizer or main course. The two barely related menus make it hard to figure out what the Fowler & Wells experience is supposed to be.

The disconnection carries over to the atmosphere. Like the lobby bar (but not the hotel’s other restaurant, Keith McNally’s Augustine), the dining room interior was done by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, but seems to have been put together by two different Brudnizkis who may or may not be on speaking terms.

One Brudnizki went for a turn-of-the-century glint. There are tiered bronze chandeliers and walls overlaid with green and gold plaster until they look as if they belong in the ballroom of some faded Italian palace. In the middle of it all is an immense oval cabinet, with wine bottles on its marble top and stemware on shelves held up by bronze rails that rise into the air like the upper decks of an ocean liner.

The other Brudnizki commissioned huge grids of backlighted colored glass and brought in mirror tiles and sparkly faceted-glass sconces. The walls belong in “The Leopard,” but the mirrors and sconces are right out of “The Sopranos.”

The name Fowler & Wells is a muddle in its own way. Before the current structure was built, another building stood on the corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets. Among its tenants were Orson Fowler and Samuel Wells, a pair of phrenologists with a sideline in publishing.

The 19th-century belief that skull shape revealed character provides some amusing, arcane cocktail names. But in its day, phrenology wrapped a gauzy cloak of fake science around the ugly armor of racism. Fowler was close to several abolitionists, but he also wrote that the heads of black people made them “our best nurses” and “excellent waiters” while dooming them to language skills that were at best “middling.”

This is obviously not a side of phrenology that Mr. Colicchio, who is outspoken about his progressive politics, embraces. “We don’t want anybody to think we take it seriously, because it was used for some not very good things,” he said in an interview.

Later, I told him that the dining room staff was noticeably diverse. (One day I hope that will go without saying at restaurants all over the city.) “I’m not involved in hiring front-of-house staff,” he said. “But I’ve got to say, I feel pretty good about it.”

My service was sometimes jittery, but fast and attentive. A brisk professionalism is at work throughout the restaurant. The wine service and the list, overseen by Jarred Roth, is welcoming whether you have specific tastes or just a general notion of what you like.

Meals always ended on a high note thanks to the pastry chef, Abby Swain. She has a nimble mind and a sensible palate, a great combination that results in desserts like a baked alaska based on the flavors of Black Forest cake, or the panna cotta with poached quince and maple syrup.

Fowler & Wells has so many strengths that few people will leave unhappy. But they may wake up the next day with scattered impressions of what the place is about, until Mr. Colicchio and Mr. Hunt can bring more focus to the menu.