It’s a chilly early November evening, every stylish person around me is wearing a barn jacket, and I’m eating an apple cider donut. Is it 2014 in my college town in the Massachusetts Berkshires, or is it 2024 at hip restaurant in the East Village on the eve of the decline of the American experiment?
When the Claud team opened Penny, the raw bar and wine bar above it, the new spot was an instant hit; it’s no surprise, then, that former Claud chef de cuisine Nick Tamburo’s new New England- and seafood-inspired concept in the East Village is a hot table. I visited last week with a dear friend who, appropriately, I met at the aforementioned New England college.
Tamburo has partnered with celebrated sommelier Nikita Malhotra, formerly of Momofuku Ko, who has come on as beverage director. The cocktail list is full of cheeky nods to New England flavors, from a deliciously fragrant rose-y twist on a cranberry Cape Codder to a green apple tequila highball that tastes like a Downeast cider to a spirit-forward number named for Boston icon Ben Affleck. For the temperance-inclined, there is the infamous Moxie, an old-fashioned soda that tastes a bit like birch beer.
Located on a basement level, Smithereens has a cozy tavern feel that brings to mind the Colonial era and is appropriate to the theme. The food menu is inspired by coastal New England foodways as well as a creative approach to seafood in general. It’s a small enough menu that if you were to go with a group, you could potentially try almost everything; as a party of two, we had to be more selective.
We started with the tuna appetizer. Succulent, fresh pieces of raw bluefin, both lean and fatty, were served with slivers of Asian pear that lent a hit of sweetness to the dish. This was an immensely satisfying start to the meal. Next was the pièce de résistance: the lobster roll. Few dishes evoke summers spent on the New England coast like the humble lobster roll, and everyone and their mother has an opinion about who makes the best one. But I can safely say this is one of, if not the best one I’ve had in New York. The massive Smithereens version is a cold, mayonnaise-based lobster roll, not the hot buttered kind favored by those who swear by Connecticut style. It’s served on a Martin’s potato roll — the platonic ideal of a simple bun, if not the most morally upstanding one. The lobster is cooked very delicately, so it is tender and never rubbery, and the mayonnaise it is tossed in is infused with lobster stock, making it very flavorful, and bonito flakes, giving it a crucial umami element. Yet it isn’t overly cheffed up: Tamburo’s innovations are all attributes, and it’s still fundamentally the same food you get at a dockside shack on the coast of Maine, which is a good thing.
We shared a second entree as well: the hake with clams. A simple steamed piece of the mild, flaky white fish is served in a creamy sauce inspired by New England clam chowder. Whole belly clams, onions, and potatoes complete the chowder effect. As a lover of New England style (and New England style only) clam chowder, I was excited about this dish. Unfortunately, as clammy as the sauce was, the flavors were not all that interesting, and the fish itself felt lacking. I felt it either needed more of the sauce, so that the experience of the dish was more like an actual chowder, or the fish needed a more interesting seasoning or rub so that it could hold its own if the chowder element was indeed meant to be secondary. Frankly, I would have rather seen Tamburo present his cool, Claud-trained, New York-inflected take on the classic clam chowder tradition, as he does with the lobster roll; the fish-with-a-chowderlike-sauce didn’t quite work for me. Next time, if I were looking for an entree beside the wonderful lobster roll, I would try the barbecue monkfish tail or the special fried fish collar, which — I only learned after it was too late — is prepared Nashville hot chicken style. Both sound interesting and promising.
Then it was time for sweets. If you’ve read about Smithereens, you may have seen that there is a candied seaweed millefeuille of sorts on the dessert menu; sorry, but nothing can make “candied seaweed with black licorice” rise to the top of a list of dessert offerings for me. (If we’re doing New England, can we maybe have a maple dessert? I’ll wait until tapping season if I need to.) We opted for the apple cider donut, that most traditional of New England sweets, and were glad we did. Those who are familiar with it know that the warm, fried, cinnamon sugar-coated treat is the quintessential end to a fall apple-picking outing; they also know that, while it may well be enjoyed with a carton of the orchard’s finest fresh apple cider, an apple cider donut is not typically particularly apple-cidery. This one is different. The recipe’s liquid is apple cider, and the cinnamon sugar mixture the donut is rolled in includes apple and malic acid. It sets a formidable new standard for apple cider donuts.
Smithereens is a place where you can sip a chic cocktail and have a creative seafood dish and feel that you are trying something new and foodie and interesting. But it’s also a place where someone who misses New England’s charms can simply snag a lobster roll, a nostalgic soda, and an apple cider donut and have a little piece of home right in the East Village. It takes vision to hit the overlap in that kind of Venn diagram; it requires successfully executing a specific concept without being campy or compromising on taste, and that’s notable. And for my friend and me, whose friendship developed against the mountainous backdrop of a bucolic New England town, there was no better place for a gossipy weeknight dinner.
TL;DR: WHAT WE ATE
Loved: lobster roll, apple cider donut, cocktails
Liked: tuna
Should have skipped: hake with clams