It took me a while to come around to Bridges. A critic likes to lift the veil on new finds, not just hit the “like” button on a viral smash. But this stylish It-restaurant has been overflowing with It-people and It-hype from the moment its doors opened in Chinatown last September. Reservations locked up quickly, and the buzz could have out-shrieked a car alarm. You don’t need a restaurant critic to help you find a place like that. Just follow the sirens.
When I finally decided to go see what all the hoopla was about, I realized that this glamorous hot spot was in fact just a front for a piercingly intelligent and original restaurant, with a kitchen whose dexterity and finesse handily outshone the dining room’s influencer glow. A meal at Bridges can feel like discovering that your hot date also has a sizzling wit and a Ph.D. Four meals later, I feel it’s time to introduce Bridges to the folks.
Let’s start with the casually elegant room, designed by Billy Cotton. It’s done up in wolfish grays and subtle beiges, and its Brutalist chic is accessorized with chrome-framed chairs and terrazzo-like flooring. Low-slung sconces cast the sort of indirect light that makes everyone look like an A-lister. A glass-brick wall between the dining room and the bar evokes the power-suit 1980s, while the very 2020s crowd on either side is swathed in quiet luxury and loud conversation.
This stark décor is canny scene-setting for the chef Sam Lawrence’s spare compositions, plated without filigree or flourish. Because hiding beneath all this minimalism is a richly layered cuisine that runs from the rustic (a generous slice of tête de cochon) to the baroque (beets, pomelo and caviar, dazzlingly seasoned with vinegar-doused walnut praline). Bolstered by classic technique, Mr. Lawrence alludes to French, Basque, Cantonese and Japanese traditions with imaginative precision. In dish after dish, he comes up with something novel and fresh.
The Comté tart, one of his most swooned-over menu fixtures, is a stark yellow wedge topped with mushrooms — chanterelles in fall and winter, and morels dotted with sweet green peas as spring arrives. Yet departing from a standard quiche, Mr. Lawrence keeps the mushrooms and custard separate until serving. Without vegetables to dilute the texture, the custard bakes up impeccably silky, with a smooth, flan-like density that contrasts with its crisp, malted barley crust. And the mushrooms, sautéed in sherry, become winy, chewy morsels that pop against all that louche, cheese-spiked creaminess. The accumulation of small, considered tweaks like these set the cooking at Bridges apart.
Mr. Lawrence, an Australian, spent his formative years working at the fashionable Bones restaurant in Paris, and soaking up that city’s culture of cosmopolitan, casually hip bistros like Le Baratin and Le Dauphin. He moved to New York a decade ago, eventually becoming the culinary director of Ignacio Mattos’s mini-empire. At Bridges, which he owns with the front-of-house guru Nicolas Mouchel, his cooking unites a Parisian reverence for haute cuisine with an intuitive, experimental streak. Mr. Lawrence knows when to play it straight and when to take risks, often in the same dish.
He has taken several runs at the sardine appetizer. It began as a fairly classic Spanish tapa called matrimonio, where a sardine and an anchovy find themselves nestled side by side on roasted pepper-covered toast. Then the anchovy vanished, and a pair of sardine fillets rested on pickled persimmon, whose subtlety, however, was no match for the funk of the fish. The newest version is the most daring and effective, with each sardine reclining on a twin bed of rosy rhubarb, simultaneously syrupy and bracingly acidic. It reminded me of the sweet-tart interplay of escabeche and pickled herring — and also of Lucy and Ricky’s bedroom.
Like many of Mr. Lawrence’s dishes, it succeeds on two levels at once —intellectual, if you like to think about what goes into these things, and purely sensual if you don’t. You don’t need to ponder the culinary references to love the way these supple fillets, gently perfumed with thyme, mingle with the intense fruit notes of the rhubarb and the crunch of the toasted bread. You just take your bite and sigh.
Similarly, you don’t have to study up on Japanese chawanmushi (steamed egg custard) or Taiwanese xian dou jiang (hot soy-milk soup) to appreciate how Mr. Lawrence melds the two into a wobbly sea urchin pudding topped with pliant crescents of sweet, raw red shrimp from Montauk. Nonetheless, supply-chain nerds like myself may be pleased to know that Bridges buys its soy milk from the venerable Chinatown favorite Fong On, where they still make it from scratch.
Other dishes seem to spring delectably from an alternate universe. Soft, sashimi-like slices of raw tuna, cut from both the loin and belly, are stuffed with earthy black trumpet mushrooms and sticky pieces of dates. Shoots of puntarelle curl around asparagus spears and fava beans over a pool of brown butter-spiked labneh. Burnished duck breasts, aged in-house and lightly smoked, are hidden beneath ruffles of rainbow chard, and served with a buttery potato purée swirled with shellfish-spiked chile crisp. And, in what’s possibly my favorite dish on the menu, scoops of nutty vin jaune gelato are topped with Manzanilla caramel, the scooped-out guts of ripe passion fruit and just the teensiest pinch of flaky salt.
Not everything lands. Given Mr. Lawrence’s adventuresome spirit, it’s no surprise that some ideas are still being worked out. The smoked eel dumplings are inconsistent, arriving sometimes buoyant and vibrating with fresh horseradish, and other times tepid, leaden and bland. The Treviso salad with trout roe (now off the menu) was very consistent — discordant and dull. And though I’ve given them several second chances, I can’t find the love for overly savory meringues with lemon and coffee.
Still, even those misses hold my interest. The food at Bridges is thrilling and insightful, and it keeps getting better. Plus, everyone looks fabulous eating it.
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Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting.
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