Bar Room at the Modern

For the second stop on our Restaurant Week tour, we went to the Bar Room at the Modern. The casual half of The Modern, Danny Meyer's much-praised new restaurant overlooking MoMA's sculpture garden, the Bar Room is a marriage of minimalist cool and Gotham chaos, with its long, blank entrance and dark metal fixtures running headlong into a cacophonous crowd and a glass wall of riotous greenery. The menu is stocked with a miscellany of small plates that encourages exactly the kind of sharing and interchange and all-around disorder that would have driven Mies van der Rohe to kick a hole in a frosted glass window.

We started with scallops with a lobster consommé and pears and an Alsatian sausage with turnips (again, autumn is just around the corner). The scallops and consomme were spiced with Asian pears, making them almost woody, and the sausage was wonderfully crumbly and spicy. Our mains were a lemon-pepper pappardelle with mushrooms, peas, and ricotta and a sliced hanger steak with bok choy, blue cheese flan, and a mustard jus. Both were exceptionally satisfying dishes. We finished off with a chocolate cremeux with coconut tapioca (the cremeux part was good, the tapioca was, well, tapiocan) and a great dessert called a “caramel chocolate dome”—coffee-soaked ladyfingers smooshed into caramel pudding and covered with a hard caramel crust, surrounded by thin sheets of chocolate and served with an amaretto-inflected scoop of vanilla ice cream. They had a special wine list for RW, and we drank a crisp and light Torrontes and an oaky Tinta del Pais. We loved pretty much everything about our meal here and can’t wait to go back.

Photo: thanks