A Tasting Menu That Uses Every Last Scrap
At first, the most intriguing thing about Cynthia was that it made you work for it. Another upscale West Village restaurant in an ever-deepening sea of upscale West Village restaurants, Cynthia stood out by eschewing online reservation platforms in favor of old-fashioned e-mail. Send a note, wait for a reply, hope. I found this both intriguing and intimidating: the possibility of human rejection was far more daunting than a search result reading “No tables available for your selected date.” Fortunately for the anxious among us, and less fortunately for those still loyal to the dying rituals of interpersonal correspondence, Cynthia has recently moved to online reservations. A concession to scale? A move to boost business? Either way, the path to booking a table is easier now, and—considering how overtly excellent I found Cynthia to be—that’s entirely a good thing.
The restaurant, which opened in May, is a co-production between the restaurateur Claire DuBois and the chef Sherry Cardoso. Cardoso has a blue-chip pedigree (Per Se, Brooklyn Fare) but is best known, in the public imagination, for her star turn on the most recent season of “Top Chef,” in which she made it to the final three before losing, in a real nail-biter of a season finale. Cynthia is named for DuBois’s aunt, Cynthia Peck, the matriarch of the late Southern California stalwart Angelo’s and Vinci’s Ristorante, a red-sauce joint that she and her husband operated for decades. Unlike that spot, which was enormous and famed for a degree of raucousness, Cynthia is a tasting-menu restaurant, refined and notably tiny. You’ll likely brush elbows with your neighbors, and you’ll absolutely be able to eavesdrop on their conversation, though you might find yourself just too busy paying attention to the food, which is punchy, witty, and utterly thrilling.
The meal is listed as six courses (seven, if you spring for a Wagyu supplement, eighty dollars for two), but what you’re served is actually closer to a dozen, because several courses feature suites of dishes, built around shared ingredients and interconnecting elements. A corn course, for example, has three parts: first, a quenelle of corn ice cream, soft and summer-bright, set over ribbons of marinated summer squash, confettied with fluffy shaved foie gras and bits of nori. Next, kernels of corn stud a beurre blanc draped over faceted hunks of summer squash with sweetly charred edges. Last, and almost dessert-like, is an intensely concentrated corn posset, dense and rich as cream cheese, under a cloud of sheep’s-milk-cheese foam and a dark dusting of the corn’s burnt husk. The dish is finished with a blob of caviar—the good stuff, platinum osetra. For once, in this caviar-obsessed town, a dish that justifies the use of roe by properly framing its delicate salinity.
Each of those corn preparations was entirely successful on its own; each could have served as a full course, a started-and-finished thought. I felt the same way about the lobster, which came in two parts: hunks of firm tail meat were served in a Thai-inflected red curry, intensely herbaceous and rich with coconut milk, and scattered with fresh-shaved black truffle; the more tender meat of the claw and knuckle was presented in a “taco,” with a tortilla made of pressed plantain, one of the menu’s many nods to Cardoso’s Brazilian upbringing. In the finale of “Top Chef,” one of Cardoso’s mentors warned her away from presenting multi-dish courses, lest one dish overshadow another. The only time this happened at Cynthia, though, was in the supplementary course of A5 Wagyu, a three-parter, in which a brisket-filled dumpling and a B.L.T.-inspired roulade of thinly sliced tongue both felt like drab afterthoughts compared to the main event: glimmering slices of rib eye, impossibly well marbled, served with creamy dollops of eggplant purée. Maybe the abundance just works better in a restaurant than it does at a judges’ table; there is an animalistic delight in being on the receiving end of so much thoughtful variety, even if, by the end of the proceedings, you may be approaching an Adephagian degree of stuffed.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
Cardoso’s approach also lends itself quite elegantly to another element of Cynthia’s culinary philosophy, an emphasis on low-waste cooking. Some ingredient scraps and stems are ferried off to the bar, where they infuse liquors or ferment into tepache. Others are stewed with aromatics and oil to make a riotous take on XO sauce, funky and inky and complex, which gilds the hunks of squash under their corny beurre blanc. Bits of pickled veg and infused butters come with the bread course, and the Parker House-like bread itself is multicolored thanks to leftover bits of beet and ramp and carrot. Even the seeds strained out of lemon juice are pressed into service in a marmalade that’s given to diners as a little take-home treat. This is sustainability theatre, a convoluted puzzle of ingredient inputs and outputs that is entirely unsustainable as a way to actually live—unless you have a kitchen staff and a room of paying customers. Still, it’s awfully entertaining to see all the clever ways Cynthia pulls it off.
As at many tasting-menu restaurants, you’ll receive your menu only at the end of your meal. To begin, instead, each diner is presented with a card printed with something between a manifesto and a poem: “There is no summer quite like a New York summer,” it begins, and continues with a litany of the attributes of eggplant, tomato, watermelon, et al. Honestly, it’s fiddle-faddle, self-serious and not nearly poetic enough; a meal that’s this well executed doesn’t need all that throat-clearing. In recent weeks, the restaurant has added an à-la-carte menu—it’s available only at the bar, which takes up a third of the petite room. I won’t argue the wisdom of that as a financial choice—can any restaurant survive these days if it doesn’t offer a burger?—but it does risk dampening Cynthia’s special, strange, sui-generis specificity. At the close of dinner, after all of those double and triple dishes, dessert arrives in the singular, and I don’t need a poem to convey the beauty of its simplicity: a swirling scoop of watermelon sorbet served on top of coconut foam and crowned with cubes of cantaloupe and honeydew. I can see it, and taste it, right there on the plate. ♦
