One major theme of modern restaurants is what we might call Asian stoner food. This is the cuisines of Japan, Korea and other places as seen through bloodshot eyes, the cravings of a hipster whose late-night munchies send him out in search of tacos stuffed with bulgogi, pigs’ tails cooked in root beer and the like.
Another competing theme is fat-on-fat cuisine. It challenges our notions of appropriate caloric intake, treats foie gras as a sacrament and has rarely seen an ingredient that couldn’t be improved by cooking it with some part of the pig.
If these styles were two friends of yours, you would think they were both narcissistic, a little dangerous and more fun to be around than almost anybody else you knew. And you would pray that they never, ever hooked up.
But hook up they have, at a friendly and demented Greenwich Village tavern called Chez Sardine that Gabriel Stulman opened just after Thanksgiving. Mr. Stulman, an increasingly busy restaurateur, described Chez Sardine as “a very inauthentic take on a Japanese izakaya.” This is the kind of izakaya where a bite-size piece of hamachi sushi is crunchy with fried pork rinds, and where sashimi is slipped into a stack of flapjacks.
For connoisseurs of Asian stoner cuisine, this will sound like high-grade chronic. But the chef, and one of Mr. Stulman’s partners in Chez Sardine, is Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly, who spent four years at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, the Stanford of fat-on-fat cooking. So this is also the kind of izakaya where you can order a grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with foie gras, garnished with cucumbers pickled in rice-wine vinegar.
The first face you see when you walk into Chez Sardine is Pat Morita’s in a framed close-up from “The Karate Kid.” Mr. Morita, who spent part of his childhood during World War II in an internment camp in Arizona, holds his chopsticks midair, midlesson, although the lesson here is a nuanced one about the strange things that happen when Japanese culture comes to America.
by Pete Wells, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Rebecca Greenfield for The New York Times
