Of all the alerts and inquiries I’ve received from restaurants — soliciting my preferences, my allergies, my aversions, my occasions — one recent text caught my attention. “Zoli here,” it read. “We’re reaching out to inform you that Amant will be hosting a live noise-music show in the gallery abutting the restaurant.” The noise show on the night of my reservation, featuring one of Sonic Youth co-foundrix Kim Gordon’s bands, among others, might mean “a slightly different dining experience than is traditional,” the message warned, offering to rebook me, if I wished, to “a night that better suits your needs.”
It’s the usual assumption that restaurants want to meet diners’ needs every night. Zoli, which sits on the multimillion-dollar Amant art campus in East Williamsburg, a museum of the challenging and the pathbreaking, can afford not to. The menu trusts that you can see your way out of your comfort zone for the greater good; at this restaurant, much like its one-night-only soundtrack, the static is the spark.
The Amant is a 31,000-square-foot concrete bunker spread over five buildings, staging exhibitions and hosting residencies, that is inspired by the collection of its patron, Lonti Ebers, a MoMA trustee. Ebers commissioned Satellite, a large-scale Pierre Huyghe sculpture, for the dining room — three giant murky fish tanks filled with rocks, ad hoc detritus, and a few tiny iridescent fish and crabs, the whole thing designed as if extending from Newtown Creek, the local waterway and Superfund site. There’s a grim, or maybe it’s grimy, mystery to the thing; the aquarium glass flickers between clear and opaque like a piscine peep show.
Ebers may be the guiding force behind Amant writ large, but she selected Ned Baldwin to oversee the food. She and her husband, the Canadian billionaire Bruce Flatt, have been loyal customers of Houseman — Baldwin’s creative but accessible first restaurant with a popular burger and busy brunch — and she left her chefs to respond to the space and the art as they saw fit. “It was always going to be an evolution from Houseman’s palette aesthetically,” Baldwin told me. That’s an understatement. Duck hearts and day-lilies, giant surf clams and pickled green blueberries: not quite the stuff of a neighborhood bistro. Here in the outer reaches, Zoli charts its own course for whoever cares to trek out.
What comes across most clearly is that the three cooks running the kitchen — Baldwin, Danny Roberts, and Aimee Li — are experimenting and entertaining themselves. Ingredients have a way of migrating around the menu, looking for forever homes. They’re cooking in a style I’ve come to think of as Estelacore: a little esoteric, a little cross-cultural, a little composée. A new catch or batch with a long-stewed, pickled, or fermented sauce, a marriage of the fresh and the preserved. Small plates sail out in quick succession, a skewer of squid in clover-green tomatillo sauce, a spicy, garlicky pile of marinated dandelion greens in a finger bowl. This kind of cooking has been shorthand for kitchen ambition for some years now (see also: Bridges) and the trio does it well. (Roberts worked for a time at Altro Paradiso, Estela’s normier sibling.)
The kitchen’s spare plating style matches the starkness of the restaurant itself. Hugo Yu.
The kitchen’s spare plating style matches the starkness of the restaurant itself. Hugo Yu.
I came to see Zoli as a kind of through-the-looking-glass counterpart to Marcel, an equally cold-baroque art temple–slash–canteen on the Upper East Side, two mammoth stone rooms with statement staircases. Marcel, which sits at Sotheby’s, is dedicated — too much, I’ve argued — to the preconceived notions of its pampered clientele. Zoli isn’t. “I initially thought that we were going to be feeding the art-maker kids of East Williamsburg,” Baldwin told me, before the grandeur of the space and the fine-dining tilt of the menu made clear that demographic would not be, at the very least, its only clientele. (I did spot at least one tattooed head in the dining room.) But some of that spirit of provocation and play endures, switching into and out of visibility like the fogging fish tanks.
A perfectly nice roast chicken, served in flaglike stripes, is here for the cautious, and you can cobble together a steak-frites if you care to, though it’ll be bison instead of beef. But having come this far, why not let yourself be surprised? I had a fine, golden-fried nugget of sweetbreads in a smokily sweet burnt-onion sauce and a butterflied sea bass, splayed flat as a paperback in a drooling sauce of pil pil (the Basque garlic emulsion) and nam jim (a chile-hot Thai vinaigrette), a happy marriage of acid and base across continents and sense.
Not everything works. From next door, belching metallic gurgles alternated with screeching. “Very Twin Peaks,” my sister-in-law opined. Dessert was listed as “chocolate cake.” Only after it arrived at the table did we learn it was interleaved with black-garlic buttercream. (“I’d like to not tell ’em,” Baldwin said about the garlic, “but you kinda have to — allergies.”) It looked perfectly innocent on the plate but had a dark, savory vigor that made me shiver a little. Three of the cake-tasters at my table said they could live without the garlic; one said she’d be adding it to all her cakes going forward. Not all noise is music, but all music is noise.
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