The New Yorker - USA (2019-12-02)

(Antfer) #1

THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 13


PHOTOGRAPH BY AMANDA HAKAN FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE


1


TABLESFORTWO


Il Fiorista
17 W. 26th St.

The other night at Il Fiorista, a new
restaurant in NoMad, a burly, bearded,
and surprisingly poetic server caught a
request for a cocktail recommendation
and dived for the end zone. “This one’s
like running down sunlit streets in Tus-
cany and throwing confetti in the air,”
he said. “And that one’s like getting into
a new car and driving through smoky
hills with citrus turns.”
Il Fiorista (“the florist,” in Italian) is
not a subtle place. Well into November,
a large potted hydrangea tree sat on the
sidewalk beside the entrance. Inside, din-
ers are met by an enormous table topped
with a towering arrangement of budding
branches, plus botanical-themed prod-
ucts and bouquets for sale.
Both food and drinks follow suit, with
almost every dish and cocktail featuring
some combination of leaves, herbs, seeds,
berries, and blossoms. Tequila is mixed
with flowering coriander, sesame, lime,
and acacia honey for a tart margarita-
adjacent concoction called Sparkle. Gin,
which is made from juniper berries and
other botanicals, might fit the bill on

its own, but the Jitterbug Perfume adds
hibiscus, rose hips, and camomile for
good measure.
I found little to fault among the
tipples that I tried, except that the rye-
based Drunken Sunflower, which is al-
legedly flavored with toasted sunflower
seeds, turmeric, and popcorn shoots—
tiny sprouts that grow out of popcorn
kernels if you soak and plant them—
tasted mostly like whiskey. (Not much
of a complaint.) The food was more of
a gamble.
Il Fiorista—which bills itself as an
“education center” (there are workshops
covering subjects like wreath-making
and flower fermentation)—is the brain-
child of an Italian couple, a former law-
yer and a former private-equity investor
who moved to New York in 2017 with
no prior restaurant experience. They had
the good sense to hire a chef, Garrison
Price, from Il Buco, one of New York’s
best Italian restaurants, and his pastas
are wonderful. Saucy stewed lamb with
sage and sweet, oily chunks of eggplant
mingle with fluted torchio, a short shape
that evokes an unfurling rose. Chewy
house-made squid-ink anelli (stubby
tubes) are slick with a gently smoky chili
oil and strewn with sautéed calamari
and fennel.
Everything else is hit or miss. Hewing
too closely to the floral theme can mean
missing the garden for the flowers, so to
speak. A salad of purple chicory, topped
with rye bread crumbs that were seasoned
with dried geranium, tasted a bit like
potpourri. Seeded crackers, which came

with a sunflower-seed dip, had a slightly
slimy texture and made me think of bird
food. The grass-fed steak with flowering
marjoram, green chili, and sweet-potato
leaves, though admirable from a sustain-
ability standpoint, was so lean and mild
in flavor that I found myself wishing that
someone had offered the cow some bacon.
But I very much enjoyed the sweet-
potato sourdough, which actually tasted
of sweet potato and came with cultured
buttermilk, dyed green with nasturtium
leaves and pooled on top of cultured
butter. The cool, tangy escabeche of
plump mussels, tender new potatoes,
and cabbage, finished with flowering
dill, is worth ordering. At lunch, the
poached-tuna salad is a fun spin on a
niçoise, with coins of pickled carrot in
place of olives, whole anchovies coiled
on top of soft-boiled egg halves, and
extra-crunchy gem lettuce dressed in an
umami-rich fennel-pollen vinaigrette.
Daytime is perhaps the best time
to eat here; the beautiful dining room,
designed by the architect Elizabeth
Roberts, with a psychedelic pastel motif
hand-painted on the walls by the artist
Leanne Shapton, is especially lovely in
natural light. On a recent afternoon,
a woman eating alone seemed beside
herself with pleasure. “I just love the
concept!” she said, relishing a glass of
white wine and a slice of angel-food cake
topped with grapefruit curd. A server
with Pre-Raphaelite red curls wandered
dreamily through the room, tucking
stems into vases. (Dishes $14-$28.)
—Hannah Goldfield
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