To describe Smithereens as a New England-style seafood spot is like calling “Moby-Dick” a story about fishing. The restaurant is darker and weirder, a love letter to the North Atlantic at its most ominous and brooding, written in seaweed and smashed lobster heads. Even the martini tastes like a gulp of saltwater, the last memory of a drowning man.
The chef, Nicholas Tamburo, grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts, heir to a regional culinary tradition largely unknown to outsiders beyond baked beans and chowder. To make anadama bread — folklore has it that the name comes from a fisherman grumbling about his wife (“Anna, damn her!”) — he researched recipes from more than a century ago, when frugal cooks eked out staples down to the last kernels. True to those origins, he starts by boiling cornmeal into porridge, to give the bread a sinking softness, then adds molasses. The result, fortified by rye, is dense yet tender, with a muted sweetness. Out of thrift, indulgence.
Then history goes out the window. Among the small plates that follow at this staunchly idiosyncratic East Village restaurant might be a wreath of amberjack, sunnily sour from a gloss of yuzu vinaigrette, under fresh horseradish heaped in delicate curls like Parmigiano over pasta. Bluefin tuna keeps company with skinny strips of braised kombu and rhubarb in pleated hunks, softened up by a pour of tart white verjus, liquid shio koji (a blend of fermented rice, salt and water, lending a faintly floral funk) and warming ginger. What makes this more than just a good crudo are the tiny, half-hidden nubs of oil-cured black olives, briny and buttery, with a half-remembered bitterness.
Previously the chef de cuisine at nearby Claud, Mr. Tamburo here reveals a protean mind, elaborating and extending the ocean theme. Lentils are simmered not with ham bone but with the skin from a smoked eel. Skewers of abalone, grilled over charcoal, are repeatedly dunked in a yakitori-style tare of dried fish bones and manzanilla sherry, with its exhilarating hit of sea air. They share a plate with egg yolks cooked at low temperature into a fudgy dome, resting in the luster of an abalone shell.
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