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A qualified bravo! for Encore

Take One

No critic eats alone, even when they do. That’s why, even though it was just my wife and I dining at Encore, it was actually a table for five.

With the exception of Jeffrey Steingarten, nobody was born with an instinct for judging restaurants on fine, distinct points of principle. If we’re being honest, critics read everything they can and fake it until they make it. Having been off the review circuit myself for a year, I bundled up a few of my favorite critics’ personalities and lugged them to a weeknight table at Encore, a relative newcomer to the restaurant alley straddling the Theater District.

Encore has done an impressive job differentiating its look and layout from Hemingway’s, the previous tenant. Comparing a seat in the dimly lit, brick-lined enclave to a chair at a table in the open-plan dining floor, then to a seat at the long, thick, room-owning bar is like comparing three different restaurants that happen to serve the same exact menu. Looking at the menu, too, you get the sense it might have been three different restaurant ideas, joined by committee under one roof.

Halibut entrée.

Iceberg salad with applewood-smoked bacon and heirloom tomatoes.

From the soups, salads, and appetizers, you get an impression of an Italian-leaning steak place, with the usual caprese, calamari, and antipasto, with a whole lot of aioli. Then you spot the sushi menu, pitching ten of the classic American sushi-joint staples—avocado, California, tempura, spicy tuna (lather, rinse, repeat)—and another dozen specialties. The bar and lunch menus show a familiarity with working-class meals done in white-napkin style, but the entrées suggest an entirely different, far more adventurous cook. This person’s not afraid to serve you locally sourced chicken, let alone serve it on a couscous salad.

Chef, author, and professional player Anthony Bourdain has suggested, in his not-actually-there way, that a restaurant trying to hit a bunch of price points and culinary styles at once isn’t inspired—it’s trying too hard to pay the bills. Valid point, but, given a choice of creative sushi or boilerplate $8–$16 appetizers, I’d rather take the roll. The “pep roll” had peppered tuna, crunchy blue crab, and “crunch” outside, and tasted a lot like slightly peppered crab with a french fry wrapped around it. I know a lot of people that could launch an entire drive-thru franchise concept on that description. I’ll even suggest Captain Ron’s Crispy Crab for a modest branding credit.

Filling out our pre-entrée grazing, the wife selected an iceberg wedge with pickled red onion, a mixed bleu cheese and ranch dressing, and applewood smoked bacon, and I went in for a special grilled romaine salad with heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella. The wife said the lettuce was crisp, the dressing perfectly poised between sweet and tangy, and the bacon generous, so she called it perfect. The grilled romaine tasted like a whole lot of essence de grill rode along with the salad onto the plate. Aside from annihilating its vegetarian credentials, it was just overwhelming and hard to finish.

I had a glass of Mirassou pinot noir to fight back against the taste of char, and my wife a Grey Goose martini to balance all the heady bleu. In picking over the entree and sushi pages for a main course selection, two of my inspirational companions felt they had to chime in. Frank Bruni, the most recently departed New York Times restaurant critic, thinks that diners should skip dishes “most like dishes you've seen in many other restaurants,” as well as the “aggressively fanciful,” because they lack heart and vanity, respectively. Also, anything that mentions truffle oil, which is sage counsel.

Then again, economist and food blogger Tyler Cowen says that the item with the least appealing base ingredients—think monkfish specials—are usually revelatory, as the chef wouldn't put it on the menu unless they could really work it into something good. Working through these prisms, I singled out the Moroccan spice-roasted local free-range half-chicken, served with a saffron Israeli couscous salad and curry sauce. The wife, who pretended not to hear the guests inside my cerebellum, picked an Alaskan halibut roasted with preserved lemon and chervil, accompanied with artichoke caper risotto and broccolini in a lemon beurre blanc.

I tasted real flavor all the way through my chicken, and appreciated a pan sauce that was reduced just enough to stick without smothering. I imagined the pairing of the olive-flecked, salty-starchy couscous with the deep and rich chicken was something the chef had worked out in his own eating, so I lifted my Mirassou to my cognitive companions. The wife's halibut was cooked well, but the sauce tasted like nothing so much as mustard, and there was a lot of it. The risotto, she said, was more like rice cooked with too much water, and half of both became lunch for her less mustard-averse husband.

Having already stuffed ourselves on breadsticks, salads, sushi, and hefty entrees, neither of us could rationalize dessert. Bolstered by my internal panel discussion, I said I enjoyed a menu that offered a number of surprises. The wife reminded me that perhaps a restaurant could be a more selective curator of its actual treasures, rather than just putting it all out and hoping you've got a wise friend—or three—with you.

Encore, 492 Pearl St., 931-5001, encorebuffalo.com

Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer and senior editor at Lifehacker.com. He lives in Buffalo.