On a recent evening, a man carried a plate piled with shavings of jelly made from tendon meat through a dimly lit dining room at I Cavallini in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He set the dish silently on a table, where more slippery, delicate chunks of jelly that had been spooned over top quivered on impact.
Despite appearances, it was not some ritual exhibition of medieval delicacies, nor a teleportation visit to a dinner party in 1959, but Friday night at one of New York City’s hottest restaurants.
I Cavallini’s nervetti, a Northern Italian dish, is just one of a host of savory gelled and aspic dishes wiggling onto the hottest menus in town, suggesting that New Yorkers are indeed ready for this jelly.
At the new Chinatown wine bar Lei, hopeful diners clamor on Doyers Street for one of the 28 seats, so they may sample the chef Patty Lee’s grid of celtuce shingled with bands of translucent kombu jelly, which look like laboratory slides and taste like sour cream and onion potato chips with the help of fried shallots and red vinegar.
At the East Village bistro Claud, the chef Joshua Pinsky serves foie gras with an puckery jelly made from verjus, honey and chardonnay vinegar. In the West Village, at the French restaurant Zimmi’s, the chef Maxime Pradié offers as a special a terrine of poached and roasted vegetables suspended in a gelatin-spiked court bouillon, served in Lynchian slabs reminiscent of terrazzo floors.
New Yorkers say that the post-Covid dining era, during which simplistic comfort cuisine overtook trendy restaurants, created an appetite for something more thought-provoking.
“We’re now emerging from this period where every restaurant has ‘the burger’ on the menu,” said Mihir Gokhale, a litigation consultant who recently dined at Cove in Hudson Square, where the chef Flynn McGarry tops smoky fluke — cured with cherry leaves, wasabi and sudachi — with a spoonful of fluke-stock gelée. And as food becomes increasingly globalized, flavors alone are not enough to woo diners. “We know what a satsuma tastes like for example,” Mr. Gokhale, 35, said. “But a new technique can make you pause, if it’s interesting enough.”
And at a time when one can interact solely with artificial intelligence by day and eat a conceptually optimized meal from an e-commerce billionaire by night, “food that feels like it’s made by humans and has that ability to bring you back to the present is definitely more important than ever,” said Yasmin Shahida, a public relations professional who recently ordered the celtuce and kombu jelly at Lei.
Aspic and gelée, noted Mr. McGarry, have long been a staple of Continental fine dining, and gelatinous preparations have been served in international dining rooms for centuries. But now, “you can sit at the bar and eat a fluke jelly,” he said. The chefs embracing the jiggle cite fundamental techniques from old-school French, Chinese, Japanese and Korean cuisines, though the results are distinctly contemporary.
“It’s turning a dish on its head,” said Maddie Cleland, a 34-year-old nonprofit manager, of the celtuce and kombu jelly at Lei, which was inspired by the texture of the Chinese starch jelly dish liangfen. “When I think of a jelly, I don’t want it to be what my grandmother used to make. I want it to be new, and feel modern and veggie-forward.”
Even the otherwise-faithful rendition of oeuf en gelée at the rebooted Le Veau d’Or on the Upper East Side arrives with a planetary ring of chipped, jelled consommé and a smattering of dramatic herb shreds.
Some diners see the onslaught of savory jelly as the final frontier of nostalgia cuisine.
“We are, without question, in an era that is reviving dishes that might’ve been a staple for Julia Child, that went out of fashion in the rip-roaring 80s,” said Brandt Gassman, 43, a film producer. In the past four weeks, he has consumed two orders of the wispy tendon dish at I Cavallini and one order of a yanang leaf–flavored aspic tossed with asparagus and herbs at Narkara, a new Northern Thai restaurant just north of Union Square. “I get tired of oysters and little croquettes,” he said. “To see something like gelatins and aspics on more menus breaks up the experience of being a frequent diner in New York.”
Rocky Romruen, 36, a founder of Narkara, believes diners are similarly seeking experiences far outside their comfort zone. “New Yorkers are more adventurous than they’ve ever been,” he said.
Jelly is a utility player in the kitchen. Some restaurants are turning to coagulated textures as a way to concentrate flavor, said Mr. Pinsky of Claud. Consider a loose sauce versus a gelatinized bite. “In a liquid state, you couldn’t get as much on your spoon enough to actually hit your palate. Gelatin allows you to put it in your mouth and chase it around with your tongue,” he said of his verjus gelée.
Flavored jelly is also a way to season a dish without sprinkling salt all over a crunchy element like celtuce, which would cause the stems to go limp, said Ms. Lee, the chef at Lei.
And then there’s the stun factor. “The art of staking places out and having that experience where you’re finding something magical and special — that era is over,” said Nick Curtola, 43, the chef and a partner of I Cavallini. “Social media has oversaturated the food world, where nothing feels like a surprise anymore.” Sheets of jellied tendon, on the other hand, have the potential to jolt a diner from an algorithm-induced haze.
A jelly dish is a rejection of efficiency, pointedly analog and naturalistic. “It forces you to slow down,” Ms. Shahida said. “It’s not something you can crunch your way through. When you’re eating something gelatinous, it makes you pause. It has to be served cold and when it melts that flavor releases. It makes you feel present.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
The post New York Is More Than Ready for Some Savory Jelly appeared first on New York Times.
