May 07, 2008

Momofuku Ko is NYC's 'it' restaurant of the moment

Everybody wants to go to Momofuku Ko.

To amp up the oft-unrequited love offering, there are only 12 seats in the restaurant and only two seatings a night. Reservations are taken online only, and to thwart scalpers, you must first provide your credit card number and e-mail address to create an account to merely enter the long-shot derby to secure a seat. Six days a week, the reservation form at 10 a.m. opens up all the slots for dinner six days hence. Seconds later, they're gone. (Ko is closed Tuesdays.)

Expect the competition to get even worse now that the New York Times has granted Ko three-stars.

Ko was opened March 12 in the East Village by 30-year-old David Chang, who last year was named best chef in NYC in the James Beard Awards for his Momofuku Ssäm Bar. (He also runs the nearby Momofuku Noodle Bar.)

The style of food is what Ko calls "delicious american food" and Frank Bruni of the NY Times describes as Asian-French. "You’ll love it, provided you ever get access to it," he writes. The paper isn't the first to fall for Ko.

From the Wall Street Journal review:

Mr. Chang has crafted an inventive menu filled with delightful dishes such as a plump hen's egg split open into a flood of caviar, and escargot and asparagus "lasagna" touched off with both crumbled and whipped ricotta. A simple amuse bouche featuring a miniature English muffin slathered with pork fat and topped with chives gave off a mouthwatering Sunday-brunch smell as it sizzled on the stove. Strips of soft fluke in a buttermilk sauce tinged with Sriracha, an Asian hot sauce, and filled with poppy seeds provided an incredible juxtaposition of varying tastes and textures -- crunchy, soft, milky and just slightly spicy all at once.

Over three visits, I watched as the chefs cursed, drank coffee, shouted, devoured pie, talked about cars and cursed some more. Some will find it juvenile and unpleasant, but those chefs also happen to cook. And that they do quite well.

This is food you haven't tried before.

“We charge cook’s prices” is how Chang puts it to one of the patrons at the bar. He is standing with the rest of his cooks, who look the way top-line restaurant cooks usually do, which is to say pallid and harried, with assorted random baseball caps on their heads and their sleeves rolled up to give their burn marks full display. The first impression you get at Momofuku Ko, in fact, is that this is a kind of kitchen slave’s revolt, an operation run by hypergifted line cooks for the benefit of their downtrodden, misunderstood, back-of-the-house brethren.

May 7, 2008 10:30 AM in Downtown, Foodology, Techology

®Copyright 2008, All Rights Reserved