The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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Crown Shy
70 Pine St.

Last month, Kwame Onwuachi, the
twenty-nine-year-old chef and founder
of the Washington, D.C., restaurant Kith/
Kin, published a memoir, titled “Notes
from a Young Black Chef,” about his life
and career so far. On Twitter, he was com-
mended for, among other things, “naming
names” of superiors who he alleged had
mistreated and humiliated him during
his time as an intern and a line cook at
some of Manhattan’s toniest restaurants.
One of the chefs he worked for at Eleven
Madison Park, though, was different: “a
father figure” and a “healthy sane pres-
ence” who oversaw a kitchen that was
“focused and quiet, intense but not un-
friendly,” where Onwuachi was put on
the fast track to a promotion.
That chef was James Kent, who left
Eleven Madison Park in 2013 to run the
kitchen at the NoMad Hotel, where he
worked until he decided to set out on his
own. In March—along with Jeff Katz,
who is also a managing partner at Del
Posto—Kent opened a new restaurant
called Crown Shy, on the intimidatingly
cavernous ground floor of one of the

financial district’s most beautiful Art
Deco buildings. Being a good guy does
not, of course, equate to being a good chef,
but in the case of Kent, a forty-year-old
New York native who also happens to be
a skilled graffiti artist, one gets the sense
that it doesn’t hurt. At Crown Shy, the
enormous open kitchen feels like a point
of pride not only for the superior level of
cooking but also for the diversity of the
young staff, which includes a noticeable
number of women and people of color.
Every meal begins with one of the
pastry chef Renata Ameni’s miniature
loaves of warm pull-apart bread, contain-
ing pockets of olive tapenade, topped with
crunchy brown-butter solids, dehydrated
black olive, and lemon zest, and served
with a cool smear of whipped, salted lab-
neh. To follow, there are “snacks,” which
seems, at first, far too pedestrian a word
for, say, handsome canelé-shaped fritters,
dusted in chili, mustard, and lime powders
and oozing obscenely with Gruyère, or
for an impressively airy white-bean hum-
mus, swirled with spicy ’nduja, sprinkled
with pine nuts, and accompanied by bub-
bly-skinned, stretchy fried bread, leavened
with yogurt and as puffy as a blowfish.
Part of Crown Shy’s charm, though,
lies in how carefully it walks the line
between elegant and fussy, from the
dining room’s matte-leather banquettes
and granite tables to the servers’ casual
but chic nineties-inspired uniform of
light-wash jeans, crisp white T-shirts,
and loafers or black Converse sneakers.
One of the best dishes I tried on a re-
cent visit was also the simplest: a bowl

of caramelle pasta, which looked like
little enclosed canoes, filled with goat
cheese and topped with tender sliced
morels and a chiffonade of parsley, in a
sauce that tasted purely and perfectly of
butter and wine. I was startled by how
much I loved an ordinary-looking bowl
of neatly cut carrots bathing in a foamy
white liquid. The carrots turned out
to be charred and caramelized on the
outside and lusciously soft and earthy
on the inside. The bisquelike broth was
impeccably salted, silky with a touch of
cream, brightened with lemon thyme,
and hiding sweet, tender, ever so slightly
briny morsels of razor clam.
It’s tempting to maximize on the
kitchen’s range by ordering only smaller
plates like these, which make up most of
the menu, but the entrées are excellent,
too. A perfectly grilled citrus-brined half
chicken came with an intensely fruity
fermented-habanero hot sauce that gave
it a vaguely tropical vibe; a medium-
cooked pork chop was as juicy as a rib
eye and piled high with bitter greens,
mustard chutney, shards of chicharrón,
and cubes of Asian pear. And then there
are Ameni’s desserts. A decadent sticky-
toffee pudding for two was brilliantly
balanced by quenelles of tart apple sor-
bet and dollops of Chantilly cream. A
gloriously large globe of inter-whorled
satsuma-mandarin sorbet and creamy
vanilla ice cream arrived with a cap of
warm toasted marshmallow and a skirt
of crackly honeycomb, a lovely expression
of restrained drama. (Entrées $29-$59.)
—Hannah Goldfield

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