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At the original Tasting Room, Colin Alevras served as the chef and his wife, Renée, as the hostess, and that’s how the duties are divided here. The menu, printed daily, is still obsessively market-driven (you could describe it as Haute Barnyard, too) and replete with esoteric seasonal ingredients (dandelion greens, emmerite beans, lovage) and the names of many of the farms that grow them. But it’s been blown out to include many new dishes, several of them priced considerably higher than any of the old ones (in fairness, the dishes also tend to be larger). Once you get over this sticker shock, however, it’s clear that Alevras has been somewhat reinvigorated by his new surroundings. He has a special knack for highlighting unusually earthy ingredients and shuffling them together in a deceptively simple, pleasing style. I’ve been eating around town for several years now, but I’ve never enjoyed silvery fillets of butterfish served cold, in the escabèche style, over a pile of pimiento peppers, pickled onions, and the kind of long, sinuous lunga beans you see ladies carrying around in bundles down in Chinatown, as I did here. Lamb shoulder is served as an appetizer in cool pink slices, with a nutritious Greenmarket weed called lamb’s quarters and a sidecar of sweet green-tomato chutney. And if you’re a connoisseur of orange surf clams, you’ll find them mixed into a cold salad one evening (with potatoes, puntarelle, and a sprinkling of tomato seeds), or floating in a giant clam shell as part of a creamy, garlicky chowder, mingled with bits of braised pork and croutons of crunchy farm bread. — Adam Platt

Cold roast lamb shoulder, guinea hen, roasted porcinis, bread pudding

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New York Magazine Reviews

• Adam Platt's Full Review (10/2/06)

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• Where to Eat 2008 (1/7/08)
• Celebrate Earth Day at These Sustainability-Minded Restaurants (4/23/07)