Top Pick
Eel Bar
252 Broome St., nr. Orchard St.eelbarnyc.com
WHEN EEL BAR opened last summer, the weight of expectation was heavy. For a certain kind of New Yorker—I am one—Eel Bar’s sister restaurants (Hart’s, Cervo’s, the Fly) represent a halcyon ideal of “our” places: cozy, boozy, tasty, and, for half a minute or so, semi-secret.
Not so at Eel Bar; it was jammed from the jump. Aaron Crowder, Cervo’s longtime chef and a partner at both restaurants, did double duty between the two, and the menus overlapped. You could get a very good half-chicken at either with good fries. Mussels escabeche at Cervo’s—spicy, coral colored, just barely cured in preserved lemon—became fried mussels, stained paprika orange, at Eel Bar. If you can popcorn a shrimp, why not a mussel?…
