60 new york | august 19–september 1, 2019
PHOTOGRAPH: LIZ CLAYMAN FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINEfood
Edited by
Rob Patronite and
Robin Raisfeld
key:The rating scale of 0 to 100 reflects our editors’ appraisals of all the tangible and intangible factors that make a restaurant or bar great—or terrible—regardless of price.
IzakayaenFrançais
At Maison Yaki, the skewers are Japanese, the sauces
are French, and the portions are tiny.
byadamplattA
fter managing,by some mira-
cle, to manufacture a first critical
success, talented young chefs like
Greg Baxtrom, whose hit restau-
rant Olmsted is still drawing crowds out
in Prospect Heights, tend to be faced with
a variety of perilous follow-up options.
There’s the prudent, non-expansionist
“tend your garden” option (à la Gabrielle
Hamilton at Prune), which will
keep your regulars in the neighbor-
hood happy but may not result in
a financial windfall anytime soon.
There’s the fast-casual scheme
(upon which many a dream of
culinary fortune has been ship-
wrecked) and the franchise-deal-
in-Vegas (or Manhattan) option
(ditto). There’s the shoot-for-the-stars
“World’s 50 Best Restaurants” alterna-
tive (also risky), or the more deliberate
neighborhood-empire-building strategy
pioneered by various chefs and restaura-
teurs (David Chang, Danny Meyer, Jody
Williams and Rita Sodi) over the years in
their different corners of the city.
Or you can do what Baxtrom does with
his eagerly awaited follow-up, Maison
Yaki, and cherry-pick elements of these
different timeworn options to create an
antic mash-up genre all your own. The
bar-restaurant, which opened a couple of
months ago in a narrow space across from
Olmsted, is being billed for local regulars
as a kind of Japanese-style gastropub,
albeit one with a French-accented menu
with its own ready-made fast-casual logo
on top (a chicken wearing a beret, for the
record). The wait staff are dressed
in striped black-and-white outfits
like servers at some random tour-
ist restaurant on the Côte d’Azur.
The specialty of the house is that
old Japanese fast-casual standby
yakitori, grilled on bamboo sticks,
and nothing on the napkin-size
fold-up menu (which is neatly
affixed to a pair of red plastic chopsticks)
costs over ten bucks.
With a bar at each end of the room and
rows of slightly cramped counter-style
tables in between, Maison Yaki looks like
it’s been designed for quick turnover and
with a maximum kind of happy-hour
expediency in mind, but look closer at
the menu and you will see all kinds of
elevated, “50 Best”–list touches hiding
in plain sight. There are dense Japanese-style sandos constructed with large cro-
quettes made from a mix of beef tongue
and brisket to enjoy before the yakitori
skewers arrive, and little pots of grainy,
fat-streaked duck rillettes topped with
an eggy, housemade sabayon touched
with wasabi. Seven dollars buys a stack of
tender frogs’ legs seized in a delicate tem-
pura batter, and if butter-soaked escargot
is your particular thing, you’ll find them
at this neighborhoodizakayaserved with
plenty of shiso and garlic and baked in
drifts of panko bread crumbs.
All of these fusion creations are mini-
size, or at least mid-mini-size, and
designed, as in a classic izakaya, to be con-
sumed with a steady stream of modestly
priced beers, wines, and batched $9 house
cocktails (try the sake Negroni or the Ves-
per martini for maximum dizzying effect).
Like the drinks, the food is designed to be
ordered again and again, which is what
I did with the superb croquette sando
(squeezed between toasted moons of bri-
oche) and the frogs’ legs, which are lighter
and far more tender than most local
examples of this classic dish. The pommes
dauphine have a similarly ingenious, user-
friendly quality (they’re served, like haute
cuisine tater tots, in a twirling paper cone),
as does the salmon tartare, the elements of
which (capers, onions, chopped eggs, and
crème fraîche among them) are meant to
be mixed in a little white bowl and scooped
up with housemade crackers.
I counted 12 varieties of yakitori on my
little fold-up bar menu at Maison Yaki, not
including the “skewer of the day,” which on
one of the nights I dropped by consistedGOOD
Maison Yaki
626 Vanderbilt
Ave., at Prospect
Pl., Prospect
Heights
718-552-2609
maisonyaki.comMaison Yaki