Restaurant Review: Noksu – The New York Times

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 costs $225 for about 12 courses, before tax, tip or drinks. Drinks can be paired with each course for an additional $175 (with alcohol) or $100 (without).

It would be easier to dismiss Noksu without the cooking of its chef, Dae Kim. This is the first kitchen he’s managed and he’s full of talent, a star in the making. But his ideas need to be shaped and formed, and the framework in which he works is so generic that it distracts from what is distinctive about his cooking.

Most of what holds Noksu back are things he shares with other expensive restaurants with tasting menus and may have copied. He tries so hard to fit in at Atomix, Kono, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and other places that he forgets to assert his own identity.

Noksu attracted press attention early on because of its location, one flight underground inside the 34th Street-Herald Square subway station. Apparently the concept of $400 dinners just feet from the turnstiles and train tracks seemed new to many people. I do not know why. Another generation would have called it slumming.

A few minutes before each of the two nightly services, a rolling gate opens to reveal a locked door with a keypad. To get in, 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. At this point, I was ready to see whatever was behind this. A private sex club? Agent Cooper?

But there was no such thing, just the usual tasting menu layout, a striped marble counter facing a stainless steel kitchen where a half-dozen cooks in white jackets stood intently over rows of white porcelain bowls, heads bowed like monks.

They stayed in that position, making small adjustments to what was in those bowls, for about 10 minutes. I had time to settle in, ask for a drink and look around. It’s time to wonder if Noksu’s secret door in a subway station was supposed to remind me of Brooklyn Fare’s secret door (inside a supermarket near the jams and jellies) or Frevo’s (behind the one of the works of art hanging in a storefront gallery) or that of Mr. Moto’s office (opened by a code embedded in a number).

And I had time to wonder why so many tasting menu restaurants, no matter how they disguise their entrance, look the same inside: the long counter of polished stone, wood or steel; the padded stools so high and heavy that the waiters have to help you in and out of them, as if you were a small child climbing into a high chair; empty walls without windows.

There are now restaurants like this in almost every major city, imitation pearls on a string that circle the world. Once the door closes, you could be anywhere, or nowhere. How did chefs who value both originality and a sense of place decide that the most appropriate backdrop for their cuisine would be copied rooms done up in a global, empty style?

Noksu’s design does Mr. Kim a disservice. Neither is the playlist, which includes the most obvious megahits of the 80s from Toto, Don Henley, even Huey Lewis and the News. It’s like you accepted a dinner invitation from Patrick Bateman.

Mr. Kim has a collection of gifts that any young cook might covet: a flair for preparing dishes that invite you in while keeping a few secrets; an affinity for seafood, which is the center of almost every dish; an impressive technical mastery which allows him to spherify truffle juice and spin fragile rye tiles into Spirograph lattices.

Time and again, he produced complex dishes that would be delicate in a kitchen twice the size of Noksu’s. There was a miniature tart not much bigger than a bottle cap, filled with firm raw fluke, Madeira-glazed maitake mushrooms and crunchy leek threads. Marinated sea shrimp was folded into a slice of raw bluefin tuna, marked for tenderness; this wrap composed entirely of seafood was surrounded by a dark, slightly spicy liquid with the taste of long-caramelized onions and carrots. (It would also be delicious on a prime rib, if it were that kind of restaurant.)

Plum vinegar-cured sardines were topped with individual potato chips and sprigs of radicchio in a strangely sweet Caesar dressing. Many classes have made my eyes widen with something akin to wonder. There were filigrees of wildflowers, mysterious little tuna-bellied creatures with mustard 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, patience, or willingness to put a tremendous amount of work into dishes that take less than a minute to eat. But what he’s trying to say, I’m not sure. He was born and raised in South Korea, and the first words released by the restaurant suggested he would interpret Korean cuisine. That doesn’t seem to be his goal. Kimchi and other Korean ingredients appear in minor roles, but this is a modern tasting-menu cuisine, built primarily on Japanese and French foundations.

There were dishes so strangely good they made me suspect Mr. Kim was receiving secret transmissions from another world, like the slice of medium-rare wild coho salmon with pistachio-celery sauce on one side and a swoosh soft Dutch yuzu on the other. . And I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the moment when, after the gentle impressionistic brushstrokes of the seafood dishes, out comes Damien Hirst suddenly, serving up a delicious, unadorned squab, its crispy skin lacquered with red vinegar and malt sugar like a duck in a Chinatown window and its fried head cradled in the curled toes of its foot.

The audacity of this squab represented the best of the cuisine on the tasting menu. One evening, however, it was followed by a venison dish served at room temperature; I could only deal with it.

Lukewarm dishes are so common in this style of cooking that someone in the movie “The Menu” tells the autocratic chef, “Even your hot dishes are cold.” Some of the film’s dialogue appears almost verbatim in Noksu, such as when a waiter said a dish was “so beautiful I can’t eat it.” Each dish came 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 that they ask what “the chef recommends.” Seeing a restaurant full of adults waiting for permission to eat with a spoon really makes you wonder how come humans aren’t extinct yet.

How can the people behind Noksu not see what was obvious to the creators of “The Menu”: that tasting menu conventions have become laughable clichés? There was a time when great restaurants prided themselves on catering to diners’ preferences. Noksu won’t even change a dish for a life-threatening allergy: a disclaimer on the website says: “We are unable to accommodate vegan/vegetarian/celiac diets and seafood allergies or aversions.” , shellfish, dairy products or allium. Chef Dae designed the menu to be consumed in its entirety to maximize the flavor profile.

I’m allergic to the term flavor profile, but I still wanted to like Noksu. Sometimes I convinced myself I could. I think, however, that its pleasures and its faults are hopelessly intertwined. If there is a secret code that decrypts them, I hope someone sends it to me.

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