We Are So Back

Ambition, personality, and creative vigor have returned to the city's restaurants

- By Matthew Schneier

The other evening, I broached the seemingly impregnable defenses of what appeared to be a Bond villain’s fortress. Nearly inaccessible from the street — its windows veiled, its entrance unmarked — it was, on the inside, an enormous warehouse, one side a “lounge” and the other a restaurant, nearly unbookable for weeks. Two bar seats were the concession to my arriving, unreserved, with the intention to wait as long as it took. “I have to be honest with you,” a kind hostess told me in an antechamber, as long curtains swished behind her, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

We sat anyway and selected drinks from a cocktail list divided florologically (“Daisy and Shochu,” “Cucurbits, Nightshades, and Agave”). “Psycho Killer” buzzed on the speakers. An enormous acrylic painting of a chicken bore down from a brick wall. It put me in mind of a restaurant the ladies might’ve visited on Sex and the City, not least when a waiter came over to reminisce about the space’s recent former life as a taxi depot, or was it a rubber factory? Then the antelope tartare arrived.

God, I thought, not for the first time in four months of eating out nightly, it’s nice to be back in a capital-R restaurant. Here at Ilis, the menu is a mix of Nathan Myrhvold and Lewis Carroll. We dined on aerated eel and sipped cold tomato soup from the lips of a giant clam, its carapace spice-dusted like a margarita’s rim. “Give the sumac a little kiss,” the bartender instructed, and bottom’s up. You may not want aerated eel every night. But when a clam, trussed in twine like an Araki nymph, offers a kiss you pucker up.