Mr. Donahue’s
Keeping good small restaurants to myself is not what I’m paid for. Sure, I’ve enjoyed finding empty seats every night I’ve eaten at Mr. Donahue’s andRuffian Wine Bar & Chef’s Table. Yes, I worry that both places would capsize under the strain of a party of six, let alone a full crew of hungry New York Times readers. But I didn’t take a newspaper job to keep secrets. I did it for the company stock.
The smaller of the two is Mr. Donahue’s, although this is like a contest between a lentil and a chickpea. There are four chairs at two tables. Very nearby at the counter are five stools. Sitting at one, you see dime-store jars of hard candy, a lamp with a fringed pink shade, a Depression glass vase under a cloud of baby’s breath. You see a wicker monkey hanging by one arm above a window into the kitchen, where chickens make leisurely circles on a rotisserie.
Most of these items were bought by the couple who own the restaurant, the chefs Ann Redding and Matt Danzer, who also own Uncle Boons. But the way they’ve put it together, everything just seems to have gradually accumulated over the decades. It’s as if you’d stepped into one of the little lunch counters with unpremeditated décor that used to be found in this part of town before it was called NoLIta.
Five main courses and about twice as many side dishes are spelled in white on a letter board that has a blue-and-red Pepsi logo at the top. You pick two sides and a sauce at no extra cost. They will be served next to your main course on a sectioned china or glass plate, each in its own well, another tune from the past.
We’re not supposed to want to eat this way anymore. Maybe that’s why, when I got my chicken-fried pork cheeks with Swiss chard and crab imperial, I was filled with gratitude. The chard was cooked with a little garlic and lemon and bread crumbs. The crab tasted of mayonnaise and Tabasco and had been browned and warmed inside a heavy foil dish in the shape of a crab shell. I spread it on saltines from a crinkly cellophane wrapper and ate it with the sensation of having found something I’d lost such a long time ago that I’d forgotten about it.
Ruffian Wine Bar & Chef’s Table
Under rough whorls of golden batter, the cheeks were more tender and juicy than chicken-fried steak ever is. I ate them with a fine sauce of button mushrooms and Marsala, not too sweet. The romesco sauce — unorthodox, with more spicy red oil than usual — was very good with a whole porgy or the broiled steak of steelhead trout that replaced it. Honest-to-goodness gravy, rounded and meaty-tasting, is what you want with the heroic slab of roast beef. The beef was thoroughly rosy except at the edges, where it had a salty, crunchy, herb-flecked crust.
The rotisserie chicken tasted like rotisserie chicken.
With so few voices in the room, you almost always hear the music, which is soft and sounds as if it were coming from a tube radio that is still picking up an AM show that was broadcast a couple of years before the Beatles played Shea Stadium. It’s all big bands and crooners singing sweet words that are sad underneath, like “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.” (The only place he’ll be seeing her is in his head.)
Cheap nostalgia hands you a fake past to make you smile. True nostalgia is mixed with pain because it conjures a past that was real and isn’t coming back. The nostalgia Ms. Redding and Mr. Danzer bring to Mr. Donahue’s is the second kind. Every detail shows their longing for the bygone world of Mr. Danzer’s grandfather Frank Donahue. He was a detective. His police cap sits on a shelf.
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For dessert, there is a root-beer float, if that’s what you want. Me, I’ll probably keep ordering the banana pudding forever, or until this mirage on Mott Street goes under and joins the past.
Just west of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, Ruffian Wine Bar & Chef’s Table has more seats but not much more space. There’s barely enough room to squeeze your way to an empty stool at the concrete counter. The ones who are really in a tight spot, though, are the two chefs, Josh Ochoa and Andy Alexandre.
Jammed behind one end of the counter, they arrange cheeses with house-made jam, warm some marinated olives that are as smoky as bacon, toast sliced baguettes for a knockout tomato chutney, plate some crisp, young radishes with bagna cauda, spread out sliced cross sections of fennel bulbs marinated simply and deliciously with sherry vinegar and fennel seeds, and plunge an immersion blender into batters that will go into the tiny convection oven and emerge as three-inch soufflés.
The cheese soufflé, almost like a tower of soft scrambled eggs, makes a lush spread for toast darkened with a swirl of balsamic vinegar. The last time I went, it had been replaced by an equally good one with crab.
I expected to like the beef tartare, but its sherry vinegar dressing made it too soupy and sour. I had no expectations of lentil salad, but it’s one of the best things on the menu. A variety of lentils and other legumes are firm, separate, not at all mushy, seasoned with dried chiles and curry leaves, swirled with yogurt sauce, and sprinkled with crisp threads of sev, the chickpea-flour snacks. Suddenly, dull old lentil salad is an exciting Indian street festival. (Mr. Ochoa and Mr. Alexandre met Patrick Cournot, an owner and a sommelier at Ruffian, when they all worked at Tabla.)
There is usually a savory pie, either a big and imposing thing to be carved into wedges, or a small turnover filled let’s say with a well-seasoned mince of rabbit meat.
The profiteroles are odd and overelaborated, with an acidic cream of mandarin oranges. The chocolate soufflé is better, if you have time to wait. In this kitchen, the only way to cook is one dish at a time.
But of course you have time; you’re here to drink wine from a list that evidences Mr. Cournot’s open-minded curiosity. Like every other wine bar in town, Ruffian stocks some stars of the natural wine movement. It’s also picking up on the Georgian signals coming out of the Caucasus. But other choices show an independence from the latest trends, like a violet-scented pinot noir from Chile.
Elena Hull Cournot, Mr. Cournot’s wife, has given this tight alley a surprisingly light, almost airy design, although the detail I remember most is the portrait of a horse on the back wall. She painted it with it a garland of orange flowers around its neck, like a lei. It has kind eyes and a nonjudgmental expression, fine traits in a portrait that hangs in a bar. A friend who has a lot of horse sense said, “The horse looks wise.”
Horse, I’ll be seeing you.
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