News

The Modern and the Bar Room at the Museum

of Modern Art

9 W. 53rd St., New York. 212-333-1220. Dinner for two

in The Modern, $440. Lunch

for two in the Bar Room, $150.

Both with wine, tax and tip.

Imagining that Toronto is the centre of the universe is a game we like to play. When the Royal Ontario Museum opened C5 this summer, we (and they) crowed that it was a world-class resto, très New York. But is it? The obvious comparison is with the restaurants in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Where the ROM has a huge international catering company doing its food, MoMA has Danny Meyer, a local chef (Union Square Café) made good. Both museums have similar food programs, ranging from family cafeterias to gourmania. MoMA has more (more rooms, more way stations between the hoi polloi and the high-end), C5 has a more dramatic room, but the question is: In a shootout over food and service, which room wins?

The Modern, as MoMA calls its primo resto, isn't a patch on C5 for glamorous design - it just works better. No need to don sunglasses when the sun is setting on MoMA. The Modern is a long, narrow ground-floor room with a chunk of the second floor cantilevered out over it, hung on pillars. Out of architectural necessity, grace has been created. God is in the details - gorgeous ceiling panels, fab black leather chairs and banquettes, and a million-dollar view - and the sculpture garden, which is furnished with a huge Calder and a Picasso goat.

Getting a reservation at the Modern is New York at its least attractive: Twenty-eight days in advance, you're allowed to request a table, electronically or telephonically. No to 7 p.m.; it's 6 p.m. or 8:45.

At the restaurant, a phalanx of greeters, seaters and coat takers process you. It's as personal as a visit to the doctor. And yet once seated, it all changes. Our server, who resembles Leonardo DiCaprio, knows the nuance of every plate. The water is Badoit, France's best, and they bring not one but two amuses. First is tiny spelt crepes wrapped round smoked salmon and salmon caviar. Second is perfectly balanced lobster-coconut bisque poured over raw swordfish (soft), tapioca (crunchy) and potatoes (smooth) for a soaring concerto of taste and texture.

Forget à la carte, Alsatian chef Gabriel Kreuther, who learned his chops at the superlative Jean Georges, offers three tasting choices: three courses for $85, or seven for either $125 or $138. We swoon our way through the latter two, each plate a tiny invention, but never cluttered. Where C5's food is merely lovely, the Modern's is art.

Thin, moist venison carpaccio is wrapped round tiny sticks of celeriac, strewn with julienned heart of palm, sauced with sweet/hot reduced chili sauce with a hint of caramel. One perfect grilled scallop sits atop barely wilted endive batons in lighter-than-air beurre blanc, under a cloud of ginger foam. The other menu pairs tuna and scallop tartare with American farmed caviar atop tiny cucumber slices in decorous rows bordered by emerald parsley oil.

Then cometh dreamy snail ravioli with a flavour burst of perfectly poached quail eggs. Then a miniature black casserole sealed with sesame-seed-studded puff pastry, holding wild mushroom and snail stew; the waiter pours on pale green chive foam. Taste bud heaven. As is perfectly cooked cod coated (astonishingly) in crispy chorizo, atop harissa oil. There is tender duck breast crusted with a marmalade of black trumpet mushrooms, served with a small pasta pinwheel of duck confit and a sauce of reduced sweet Banyuls wine.

The other menu continues its parade of pleasures with sweet lobster atop melt-in-the-mouth leek ravioli and sweet red pepper jus, simultaneously intense and light. Then barely poached New York foie gras with tiny shards of almost candied fennel spiked with cardamom and orange.

The sole miscalculations are leaden pea purée and an acrid cocoa truffle sauce on the squab, in an otherwise unbroken string of epicurean home runs. The sweets are not as spectacular as the savouries, but the pastry chef almost redeems himself with a half dozen tiny chocolates, each scented with a different spice.

Lunchtime at the Modern is when corporate titans tie on their midday feedbags. While tourists and ordinary people eat upstairs at the Café, the Modern is the elite's cafeteria, which makes lunch reservations even harder to get than dinner. The merely well-off book in the Bar Room, next door, less formal, slightly less stratospheric prices. No tablecloths, very noisy, but still that (almost as) clear and interesting food.

The Bar Room menu is tapas style. First comes intense wild mushroom soup with a side of small crispy chorizo ravioli. A poached egg hides in a canning jar atop lobster chunks with sea urchin foam on top. The foam is too subtle, but runny egg on lobster is nursery food nirvana.

Chef does ultralight roasted garlic gnocchi topped with deep-fried fresh sage leaves, with two sides, one fortunate (wild-mushroom stew) and one less salutary (deep-fried sweetbreads that are channelling chicken fingers). We are not enamoured with either grilled shrimp (tough) or country sausage (bland), but we know the junior restaurant always gets slippery seconds.

However, any notion that our gastronomic standards meet the Big Apple's is torpedoed by the Bar Room's lunch entrées. Their take on salade niçoise is almost-raw tuna with crisp crust of panko with corn nuts, roasted asparagus, white and purple fingerling potatoes, tiny green beans and sweet tomato-inflected vinaigrette. Their play on chicken Caesar is perfectly braised hearts of romaine under moist chicken in a rich sauce of egg yolk lightly flavoured with Parmesan and anchovy.

Tender quail comes with a sweet/hot stew of chorizo and barley with toasted almonds for crunch and hot yet light chorizo sauce for zing. These are heights C5 has yet to scale.

jkates@globeandmail.com