A Voce Madison

BLT Fish

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BLT Fish and A Voce Madison

BLT Fish and A Voce Madison

CreditDanny Ghitis for The New York Times

When a restaurant is founded by a chef whose kitchen acrobatics make us sit up and notice, it can be confusing for everybody when that chef moves on. Will the replacement be a caretaker cook mimicking the style that made the place exciting? Or will the successor be a creative whiz who can make the menu jump through a new set of hoops?

A Voce Madison and BLT Fish, two Manhattan restaurants that won enthusiastic three-star reviews from Frank Bruni in The New York Times shortly after they opened, have faced this question. Laurent Tourondel whipped up BLT Fish in 2005, but walked away from it and his other BLT restaurants around the country four years later in a messy split with his business partner. Andrew Carmellini put A Voce, as it was called then, on the map in 2006, but he is long gone, too.

The two restaurants didn’t capsize after their captains jumped ship, but some of the wind has gone out of their sails. The companies that own both restaurants are not run by chefs, which may explain why they have hired successors from outside; neither organization has the deep bench of up-and-coming cooks that a Daniel Boulud or a Mario Batali can draw on.

A Voce Madison is on its third chef. Mr. Carmellini was succeeded by Missy Robbins, who also opened the sister A Voce in the Time Warner Center. At the original, off Madison Square, she was replaced last summer by Ben Lee. Mr. Lee is an assured cook who earned his stripes working for Marc Vetri and Michael White, and under his watch the kitchen at A Voce Madison has taken an understated turn that still offers a rewarding interpretation of modern Italian cuisine.

He exerts a fine-tuned control on brawny, rustic flavors, setting octopus stewed in red wine on a savory semolina pancake with a thick ridge of concentrated tomato sauce and browned crumbles of fiery ‘nduja. He has a five-minute egg on toast that sounds like a desperation dinner scavenged from an empty refrigerator, but as the liquid yolk coats lightly pickled hen-of-the-woods mushrooms under a nutty Parmigiano-Reggiano cream, it turns out to be a very elegant appetizer.

There was an echo of Mr. White’s silky way with pasta in the fettuccine tossed with a meaty braise of rabbit with rosemary and black trumpet mushrooms, and in the tender yellow packets of agnolotti filled with lovely lemon-scented ricotta.

Other pastas lacked a sense of proportion, like the buckwheat pizzoccheri that needed more than a few stray leaves of chard to balance the gooey slick of melted bitto cheese. And one was just strange: the cassoncini, pale fried ravioli with a filling of mozzarella, anchovy and sundried tomatoes that tasted like pizza run through a blender.

In the main courses, Mr. Lee shows more nuance with seafood than with meat. A hulking braised lamb shank in midwinter was more blunt than focused, while a lukewarm pork chop that was probably never going to get off the ground didn’t get much aerodynamic lift from the mushy, oily mass of pine nuts and raisins on top. He brought more finesse to wild striped bass with fennel braised in orange juice, and to satiny olive-oil poached cod with sweet littlenecks.

A new pastry chef, Kristin Menton, is making desserts that are as charming as a handwritten thank-you note. A honey-lavender panna cotta with fresh peaches and peach sorbet had an understated hum of sweetness, and extracted a gentle perfume from the lavender without giving in to potpourri overkill.

Photo

An elegant appetizer at A Voce Madison: a five-minute egg on toast, with a liquid yolk trickling over lightly pickled hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.Credit
Brian Harkin for The New York Times

Service has been variable — so lethargic one night that it must have added an hour to the meal, almost pushy on another, when a server loomed over the table with a grappa bottle the size of a softball bat. “They make it for us. It’s very nice,” she said. We showed no interest, but still: “You want to try?” This time we said no. “Just a little bit?” At least she didn’t start swinging the bottle at us.

When Mr. Carmellini ran the shop, the food felt imperative, almost insisting that you give in to its full-flavored seductions.

Mr. Lee’s style doesn’t have the same strong personal imprint, but he has kept A Voce Madison among the city’s more enjoyable practitioners of contemporary Italian cuisine.

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BLT Fish, in Chelsea, was always a trickier proposition. The engine that drove its initial success was the tension between Laurent Tourondel’s sophisticated French technique and the crowd-pleasing trinkets he tossed out like Mardi Gras beads. (A meal might kick off with fried rock shrimp in Buffalo wing sauce and blue cheese.) The restaurant was serious and fun at the same time, “the culinary equivalent of a poetic page-turner or a mass-market movie helmed by an auteur,” as Mr. Bruni put it.

With the poet and auteur subtracted, the formula grew creaky. Last spring, the owners brought on a new chef, Luke Venner. Most recently the chef de cuisine at Millwright’s in Simsbury, Conn., Mr. Venner seems miscast here. He doesn’t hit the high notes as effortlessly as Mr. Tourondel did, so the populist touches don’t feel witty and self-aware anymore. They just feel like gimmicks.

Often enough, the kitchen outfits seafood in flattering ways. Very sweet raw scallops were minimally but effectively dressed with lemon oil and thyme leaves. Spaghetti in a parsley-crème fraîche sauce flickering with red Thai chiles provided a bright setting for sliced razor clams. Ham-hock broth, white polenta and sweet spring peas made for a winning version of shrimp and grits. Lightly charred octopus was served on briny, intense black olive purée above a bed of potatoes, which came together as a combined condiment and side dish.

But there are also sauces that don’t click, like the washed-out mandarin emulsion with halibut, or the dashi broth with scallops and nine kinds of mushrooms, which proved that more umami is not always the answer. There are odd pairings, like the curried oxtail stew served with smooth shrimp that refused to cling to the sauce. There is inattention to detail, like the crunchy, gritty morels in a thin, salty asparagus soup, or the branzino left to bake inside its salt crust until it was slightly dry and tough.

The prices at BLT Fish, never gentle, are hard to support now that the food is uneven. The branzino, meant for two, cost $68. A $70 seafood platter offered bland, not very tender lobster tail; undercooked mussels with their beards left intact, and big, rubbery shrimp. It held some very good tastes, too, but they delivered about $35 worth of pleasure, rounding up.

Desserts are a mixed lot as well, but the first choice should be the excellent tarte Tatin, baked in a little cast iron pot with a thick swirl of caramel. While you’re eating it, a glass jar of cotton candy arrives. In the beginning, this circus flourish was like a wink from a chef with the heart of a carnival ringmaster. Now it’s one of the few claims BLT Fish has to being more than another expensive place to eat seafood.