But in this smaller, more placid space, there’s an edited, unhurried quality to the cooking, and the pride of ownership is apparent in almost every dish. Not surprisingly, his cooking there was disorganized and overambitious he seemed bent (as I wrote at the time) on packing as much of his impressive culinary repertoire into the menu as he possibly could before, inevitably, moving on. Fraser’s last restaurant, Compass, was (and is) famous for giving chefs the ax. He is the restaurant’s executive chef and proprietor, and this is the first place he can call his own.Ĭomfort is an elusive quality in such a rough-and-tumble profession, even for the most promising cooks. It’s not much as upscale restaurant dining rooms go (the tables have no tablecloths, the brick walls are fixed with panels of wood, like in a spartan recording studio), but for an accomplished culinary ronin like Fraser, it represents a major step. A tall glass door leads to a midget-size bar area, which leads to the dining room (which fans out from the front, like a dovetail). The Museum of Natural History is a block away across the street is a foreboding, windswept expanse of asphalt. Dovetail is seven blocks north of Compass, just off Columbus Avenue. In this city, he has run a very good Greek restaurant, called Snack Taverna, and a not very good one, on West 70th, called Compass. Fraser is a veteran of some of the world’s great kitchens, including the French Laundry, in Napa Valley, and Taillevent, in Paris. The author of this unexpected little miracle is a chef named John Fraser, who has worked in this neighborhood before.
“We’re way too close to our apartments to be eating at this kind of restaurant.” “This feels all wrong,” one of them said. They ate, put down their spoons, then looked around the room in a kind of stunned, slightly suspicious silence. Peering at these novelties, the local gastronomes looked, for a brief, startling moment, like those shaggy, uncomprehending apes in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There were ravioli made with shaved beets arrayed on the plate, and servings of a melting gelée touched, the waiter said, with fried capers and vodka. But when the pre-meal amuses arrived, their chatter momentarily ceased. At least that was the early consensus among the neighborhood gastronomes assembled at my table on a recent evening. With its slightly awkward, preciously ambitious name, its modest size, and its bland, modishly stark interior, Dovetail could be any one of the numberless dining establishments that open every year, then quietly close, on that vast restaurant killing ground, the Upper West Side.
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