New York is a tongue city. Katz’s has been slicing it by the pound for many years. It’s a Jewish traditional. My grandfather Sam typically ordered a tongue omelet, an object of perverse and horrified fascination. I’d sooner have bit off my very own than sampled that factor. However the universe laughs final, finally. I’ve since eaten tongue, fortunately, hither and yon. On tacos or in mole, as an antipasto or the garnish on a Boulud-ified wedge salad. However I’ve by no means encountered any tongue as tonguelike because the ox tongue at Somssi within the Village, the place it’s scored, grilled, and glazed and offered undisguised, as recognizable because the nostril in your face. It’s the uncommon entrée that provides itself as much as be French-kissed.
It takes a certain quantity of chutzpah to serve a dish like this, not least when it’s one in all solely 4 entrée choices, and a certain quantity of finesse to tug it off. Somssi (pronounced SOHM-she), which opened on a stretch of MacDougal Avenue dominated by the alfresco aperitivo sippers at Dante, has each.
Somssi is the most recent restaurant from the Na:Eun Hospitality group, which incorporates J.P. and Ellia Park’s Atomix, the every-award-winning tasting counter; the couple’s unique restaurant, the prix fixe Atoboy; and Naro in Rockefeller Heart. Somssi’s proprietress is Ahris Kim, Na:Eun’s former director of operations, nevertheless it represents a gaggle effort. J.P. is listed as its “culinary director,” consulting on the menu with Yoonsoo Park of Atoboy and Naro; former Atomix chef Daniel Gronert is within the kitchen. The Parks are the bulk house owners and leased Kim the area (it beforehand housed one other Atomix outcropping, Acru). These back-office dealings aren’t of especial curiosity to most diners, and I like to recommend treating Somssi as what it successfully is, a sparky little sibling to a by-now very august elder. I used to be dutifully wowed by my meal at Atomix after I lastly managed to crack a reservation, nevertheless it’s neither possible nor cost-effective to eat there frequently.
Somssi has, if not a chip on its shoulder, then a spring in its step. It will be shabby to advocate it as a option to get your Park repair on a (relative) finances, however extra to the purpose, it wouldn’t be fairly correct. I discovered myself considering of it as a school-play manufacturing to Atomix’s grand opera, beginning with the haunted-farmhouse interiors with their mismatched chairs, fraying lace curtains, and homely nonetheless lifes, via to the frankness of Jenny Eagleton’s wine listing, with its chatty marginalia (“Winery est. 1130” “Possibly it’s a rosé, possibly it’s a pink, who is aware of”). And that is all earlier than Somssi slips you the tongue.
It’s served like a steak, tender however with a non-soft chew, slightly paying homage to uncured pastrami. It’s glazed in a sweetened sake-and-soy tare that jogged my memory of Nobu’s well-known black cod with miso, pricked up by a pat of wasabi. Regardless of a thoroughgoing incorporation of Korean and Japanese components and flavors, Somssi doesn’t really feel overtly “Korean,” even whereas spiking the beef-and-pork ragù on its linguine with mustard-green kimchee. As a substitute, the restaurant feels each playful and good. There are the broad strokes of the neo-bistro playbook right here — just a few crudi, a lone pasta, a pair bigger cuts of meat, the requisite branzino — however Somssi, which implies, roughly, “ability developed via expertise,” makes good on its purpose to goad diners slightly farther from their consolation zones. What might’ve been simply one other lamb chop is a much bigger, gamier mutton chop, two bones bisected down their peppered equator to disclose the pink meat inside, wearing a cumin-rich sauce for a chophouse tackle Sichuan cumin lamb. Schnitzel is threaded via with shrimp farce earlier than being fried in each bread crumbs and sesame seeds, for a schnitzel à la shrimp toast.
Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically exact cooking, comparable to an ornate potato presentation with caviar and uncooked scallops with strawberries and Thai basil. Hugo Yu.
Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically exact cooking, comparable to an ornate potato presentation with caviar and uncooked scallops with strawberries… extra
Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically exact cooking, comparable to an ornate potato presentation with caviar and uncooked scallops with strawberries and Thai basil. Hugo Yu.
Not each dish rises to the identical degree, and on a small menu, misses can really feel magnified — a not-especially-interesting fennel salad, a dessert course (olive oil cake, fig-leaf custard and granita, or a scoop of popcorn-flavored ice cream) that didn’t do a lot for me whichever manner I performed it. However I discovered the little-sister power of Somssi extra successful than any of its stumbles. “Need me to shake it?” a host-cum-server, one in all a pair of wisecracking guardians at Somssi’s door, requested, seasoning a brown-paper lunch bag of French fries with furikake or kimchee-cheddar seasoning (the higher choice). Then, cackling, he broke into slightly dance.
A number of blocks away, one other little-sibling restaurant is shaking, too. Noury is the second restaurant from the crew behind Kiko, a Japanese-y bistro I admired in Hudson Sq.. Husband-and-wife crew Alex Chang and Lina Goujjane (he cooks, she somms) personal Noury, too, however the restaurant is as a lot a showcase for chef de delicacies Joji Miwa. If Kiko was Japanese-y, Noury is izakaya-ish, a rotating number of small plates in a extra informal, compact, one-room setting. (Kiko, as I wrote final 12 months, is ryokan-chalet — I’ll be glad to see its barroom roaring hearth once more when the climate cools.) Miwa, who cooked in Japan earlier than returning to his native U.S., Greenmarkets up the izakaya requirements: on one in all my visits, shira-ae, a creamy dressing fabricated from silken tofu, blanketed pink cherries, and sugar snaps; on a later-summer follow-up, fats figs. Jimmy Nardello peppers and hunks of nectarine (by the point you learn this, their season might be almost over) make a phenomenal salad, heated by ginger ponzu and a fragile snowfall of dried bonito flakes. I notably loved hand rolls of eel brushed with ankimo (monkfish liver) earlier than being grilled, and lengthy, skewered hen tsukune (meatballs), free and crumbly and able to sop up a pool of prepared egg yolk.
Izakayas are ingesting dens, and whereas the atmosphere at Noury is extra neighborhood restaurant than dim watering gap, Goujjane and her drinks crew supply a properly chosen wine listing and plenty of sakes (seven of them by the glass), in addition to just a few menu objects seemingly designed to soak them up. (The prawn-and-onion kakiage, a server joked, is kind of a non-trademarked Bloomin’ Onion.) I additionally wouldn’t skip sweets. Miwa’s Zerbinati melon parfait, a tall soda-shop glass layered with ice cream, tapioca, melon jelly, and a salty sake-lees sabayon, makes dreamy use of the season’s sweetest, sunniest cantaloupes, a skinny slice of which crowns the highest like a bright-orange grin.
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