I can’t remember the last New York restaurant that frustrated me as much as Noksu.
My frustration won’t be widely shared, given how few people can afford to eat there. Dinner is $225 for about 12 courses, before tax, tip or drinks. Drinks can be paired with each course for another $175 (with alcohol) or $100 (without).
It would be easier to dismiss Noksu if it weren’t for the cooking of its chef, Dae Kim. This is the first kitchen he has run and he’s full of talent, a star in the making. But his ideas need to be shaped and formed, and the setting he’s working in is so generic that it distracts from what’s distinctive in his cooking.
Most of what holds Noksu back are things it shares with, and may have copied from, other expensive tasting-menu restaurants. It tries so hard to fit in with Atomix, Kono, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and other places that it forgets to assert any identity of its own.
Noksu got some press early on because of its location, one flight below ground inside the 34th Street-Herald Square subway station. Apparently, the concept of $400 dinners a few yards from the turnstiles and tracks struck a lot of people as novel. I’m not sure why. Another generation would have called it slumming.
A few minutes before each of the two nightly services, a rolling gate clatters up to reveal a locked door with a keypad. To get inside, I punched in a six-digit code that had been texted to me several hours before. Behind the door was a heavy, floor-to-ceiling curtain. By this point, I was prepared to see anything behind it. A private sex club? Agent Cooper?
But there was nothing like that, just the usual tasting-menu layout, a counter of banded marble facing a stainless steel kitchen where half a dozen cooks in white jackets stood intently over rows of white porcelain bowls, heads bowed like monks.
They stayed in that position, making tiny adjustments to whatever was in those bowls, for about 10 minutes. I had time to settle in, ask for a drink and look around. Time to wonder whether Noksu’s secret door inside a subway station was supposed to remind me of the secret door at Brooklyn Fare (inside a supermarket near the jams and jellies) or the one at Frevo (behind one of the artworks hanging in a storefront gallery) or the one at the Office of Mr. Moto (opened by a code embedded in a cipher).
And I had time to ask why so many tasting-menu restaurants, no matter how they disguise their entrance, look the same inside: the long counter of polished stone or wood or steel; the upholstered stools so tall and heavy that servers need to help you get into and out of them, as if you were a small child getting into a highchair; the blank, windowless walls.
There are restaurants like this in almost every major city now, imitation pearls on a string that circles the world. Once the door closes, you could be anywhere, or nowhere. How did chefs who prize both originality and a sense of place decide that the most appropriate backdrop for their food would be copycat rooms done in a blank-faced global style?
Noksu’s design doesn’t do Mr. Kim any favors. Neither does the playlist, which runs through the most obvious megahits of the ’80s by Toto, Don Henley, even Huey Lewis and the News. It’s as if you’d accepted a dinner invitation from Patrick Bateman.
Mr. Kim has a collection of gifts that any young cook might covet: an eye for arranging dishes that invite you in by holding back a few secrets; an affinity for seafood, which is at the center of nearly every course; an impressive technical control that allows him to spherify truffle juice and spin fragile rye tuiles in Spirograph lattices.
Over and over, he pulled off complex dishes that would be tricky in a kitchen twice as big as Noksu’s. There was a miniature tart not much larger than a bottle cap, filled with firm raw fluke, maitake mushrooms glazed with Madeira, and crunchy threads of leek. Marinated rock shrimp were folded inside a slice of raw bluefin, scored for tenderness; this all-seafood wrap was surrounded by a dark and quietly spicy liquid that tasted of long-caramelized onions and carrots. (It would be delicious over prime rib, too, if this were that kind of restaurant.)
Sardines cured in plum vinegar were garnished with individual potato chips and wisps of radicchio in an uncannily smooth Caesar dressing. Many courses made my eyes go wide with something like wonder. There were filigrees of wildflowers, mysterious little tuna-belly creatures with mustard-seed eyes and microgreen antennae, and something that looked like a slice of black truffle but melted like butter.
I never doubted Mr. Kim’s skill, or patience, or readiness to spend a huge amount of labor on dishes that take less than a minute to eat. But what he is trying to say, I’m not quite sure. He was born and raised in South Korea, and the early word put out by the restaurant suggested he would be interpreting Korean cuisine. That doesn’t seem to be his goal. Kimchi and other Korean ingredients show up in minor roles, but this is modern global tasting-menu cuisine, built mostly upon Japanese and French foundations.
There were dishes so uncannily good they made me suspect Mr. Kim was receiving secret transmissions from another world, like the medium-rare slice of wild coho salmon with a pistachio-celery sauce on one side and a fluffy swoosh of yuzu hollandaise on the other. And I would not want to have missed the moment when, after the gentle Impressionist brushwork of the seafood courses, he suddenly goes Damien Hirst, serving a delicious and completely unadorned squab, its crisp skin lacquered with red vinegar and malt sugar like a duck in a Chinatown window and its deep-fried head cradled in the curled toes of its foot.
The boldness of that squab represented tasting-menu cuisine at its best. One night, though, it was followed by a venison dish served at room temperature; I could only pick at it.
Lukewarm food is so common in this style of cooking that somebody in the movie “The Menu” tells the autocratic chef, “Even your hot dishes are cold.” Some of the film’s dialogue turns up at Noksu almost verbatim, as when a server volunteered that one dish is “so beautiful I can’t eat it.” Each course was served with precise instructions on how to transport it from plate to mouth. Not that I blame the servers. When diners at restaurants like this aren’t given any instructions, they become so confused they’ll ask what “chef recommends.” Seeing a restaurant full of grown adults waiting for permission to eat with a spoon really makes you wonder how it is that humans haven’t died out yet.
How can the people behind Noksu not see what was obvious to the makers of “The Menu” — that the conventions of tasting menus have become laughable clichés? There was a time when excellent restaurants took pride in catering to diners’ preferences. Noksu won’t even change a dish for a life-threatening allergy: a disclaimer on the website reads, “We are not able to accommodate vegan / vegetarian / celiac diets as well as any allergies or aversions to seafood, shellfish, dairy, or allium. Chef Dae has designed the menu to be eaten as an entirety to maximize the flavor profile.”
I am allergic to the term flavor profile, but I still wanted to love Noksu. At times, I convinced myself that I could. I think, though, that its pleasures and flaws are hopelessly tangled up. If there’s a secret code that unravels them, I hope somebody sends it to me.
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