{"id":904,"date":"2026-07-12T12:38:53","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T12:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=904"},"modified":"2026-07-12T12:38:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T12:38:53","slug":"the-stellar-new-restaurant-thats-put-a-museum-on-the-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=904","title":{"rendered":"The Stellar New Restaurant That\u2019s Put a Museum on the Map"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner\u2019s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Richard Olney, the great American food writer and Francophile, who spent most of his adult life on a hillside above Solli\u00e8s-Toucas, did not really believe in recipes. He thought exact measurements were shackles for a cook, and considered the precision of his contemporaries\u2014Julia Child, among others\u2014to be a kind of bad faith. What Olney did believe in, with something approaching religious conviction, was the importance of ingredients: the best meat and produce, from the best farms and shops, at the best time of year. He was perhaps most obsessed by, and most fastidious about, salads, to which he devoted pages and pages of near-philosophical instruction across his dozen or so cookbooks and memoirs, though all that, too, ultimately boiled down to a theory of superlatives. Each element earns its inclusion by the cook\u2019s instinctual assessment of its perfections, rather than some sort of static recipe-card diktat.<\/p>\n

Read more The Human Cost of DOGE\u2019s War on U.S.A.I.D.<\/a><\/p>\n

Tucked away on the menu at Zoli, the excellent new restaurant that now anchors the East Williamsburg contemporary-art complex Amant, is \u201cthe Olney salad,\u201d which carries no further explanation. On my first visit, I misread the words as \u201cthe only salad,\u201d and asked a server to elaborate. \u201cIt changes all the time,\u201d they said, \u201cbut it\u2019s the best lettuces, the best herbs, the best oil, the best vinegar.\u201d I love a restaurant shibboleth\u2014and if Olney is on the menu, the meal\u2019s almost certainly going to be something special. What arrived was a salad that I\u2019m fairly sure the marvellously cranky man would have adored: a mountain of greenery, fluffy as an eiderdown, dressed in a perfectly smooth salt-edged vinaigrette. True to promise, it was slightly different on each of my subsequent visits, more ruffly-leaf lettuce one day, more red oak the next. It was tarragon-forward on a Wednesday and bursting with mint by Thursday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Amant, the sprawling four-building, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot campus where Zoli lives, is the project of Lonti Ebers, a serious art collector and a MOMA<\/em> trustee married to the Canadian billionaire Bruce Flatt. The space opened, in 2021, to real notice in the art world and comparatively little beyond it\u2014but Zoli, which opened in the spring, has put the museum on the map for people who don\u2019t otherwise monitor the gallery circuit. The kitchen belongs to the chef Ned Baldwin, who, for more than a decade, has run Houseman, on Greenwich Street, one of Manhattan\u2019s great under-the-radar restaurants. Much like Houseman, Zoli threads a very fine needle: warm and refined, familial and intellectual, drawing on a broadly eclectic pantry that has everybody eating well and living in harmony. Early one evening, a preschooler in heliotrope leggings was rolling around on a banquette, just barely avoiding the airspace of a pair of severe, linen-clad galleristas in vintage Ann Demeulemeester clomp boots, who sipped their glasses of pink Grenache and took in the gymnastics with equanimity.<\/p>\n

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The room itself, designed by the Brooklyn firm G.R.T. Architects, splits the difference between industrial brutalism and mid-century sleekness, and somehow avoids the predictability of either. Cinder-block walls, left raw and touched with an oatmeal cast, have the unexpected texture of a waffled blanket. A cherrywood staircase whips upward through the center of the triple-height room, toward a private dining space and a lushly landscaped rooftop bar; the same honey-colored timber shows up in the bannister, the millwork, the bones of the place. On the main level, the dining room and the bar are separated by Pierre Huyghe\u2019s \u201cSatellite,\u201d an aquarium installation\u2014three tanks, murky and rock-filled, with the occasional antenna-waving crustacean\u2014that lends the otherwise sunny interior a faintly sinister edge of imminent apocalypse.<\/p>\n

Read more The Summer I Surrendered to Wilson Phillips<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Where Houseman\u2019s food is posh-rustic and a little lusty, Zoli\u2019s menu is frillier and just a bit more challenging. Oddness and novelty are often the preferred culinary language of the art world, but this kitchen\u2014which Baldwin runs alongside the chefs Danny Roberts and Aimee Li\u2014earns its experimental flourishes by delivering pleasure at every turn. Fuzzy-fresh cucumber leaves, marinated in a chilled dashi vinaigrette, riff cleverly on spinach ohitashi<\/em>. Duck hearts are grilled and skewered, gesturing at metaphor whether you want them to or not. Saut\u00e9ed daylily shoots\u2014an uncommon ingredient enjoying a well-deserved moment, with its meaty mouthfeel of jackfruit, and that faint chlorophyll snap of asparagus\u2014get tossed with bitter greens in an anchovy-spiked vinaigrette. Fascinating things are happening with chilled seafood: raw oysters dotted with bright-green cucumber dashi; large mussels marinated in something sharp and vinegary; a composed dish of surf clam, gloriously chewy, sliced into sashimi-like slivers, in a tart tamarind dressing scattered with peanuts and chiles and cilantro.<\/p>\n

The menu\u2019s puckishness fades slightly as we move on to larger dishes: there\u2019s a snappy goat sausage, straight out of the Houseman playbook, and a tender bison steak for the red-meat needers. A crisp-skinned half chicken arrives sliced into long strips, on a shimmering puddle of kombu-infused jus. The seafood is far more fun: I loved a fillet of fluke, doused in a lovage-scented cream sauce bubbling with fish roe of varying hues and sizes, and a whole butterflied black bass with a garlicky Basque pil-pil<\/em> sauce makes for an attractive centerpiece. Whatever you get, add a side of fries. They\u2019re enormous squared-off planks of potato, crisp outside and creamy within, and they\u2019re just spectacular, served with a swirl of saffron-tinged rouille. Pair them with the bar\u2019s bracing fennel Martini\u2014a variation on a Gibson, with pickled fennel in lieu of the onion\u2014and I promise you\u2019ll come out happy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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With its timing, its dramatic staircase, and its proximity to many, many millions of dollars\u2019 worth of art, Zoli has drawn inevitable comparisons to Marcel, the ritzy new restaurant anchoring the Sotheby\u2019s headquarters, in the Breuer Building, on the Upper East Side. Art and food are old bedfellows, but each restaurant is specific to the institution in which it is (to borrow a term of art) sited, and the two aren\u2019t after the same end at all. Most noticeably, where Marcel is a cathedral of luxury, Zoli seems primarily interested in matters of playful exploration, both material and emotional. (Ebers has said that the restaurant is named after her beloved, and entirely imaginary, dog.) You can taste it in the desserts: a chocolate layer cake laced with fermented black garlic\u2014the edge of sulfur operating something like miso swirled into butterscotch\u2014and an airy cheesecake funked up with shavings of fresh Taleggio. It\u2019s weird, but it really works.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science\u2014and Anything Trump Doesn\u2019t Like<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Helen Rosner writes that Zoli, which anchors the sprawling East Williamsburg art space Amant, earns its experimental flourishes by delivering pleasure at every turn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-food-scene"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Stellar New Restaurant That\u2019s Put a Museum on the Map - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=904\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Stellar New Restaurant That\u2019s Put a Museum on the Map - 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