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 a 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?
Eel Bar felt great. Its room was sexy, all textured glass and stainless steel. Rather than one long galley, the bar here looked out over the dining room, and the dining room looked back over the bar — you could make eyes across the room, if the mood struck. Eel Bar was a perfect vibes restaurant in the complimentary sense, like all the group’s establishments. Founding chef Nick Perkins cut his teeth, not to mention met several of his partners, at Diner in Williamsburg. Diner, Andrew Tarlow’s first venture, was a previous generation’s vibes restaurant, where the cooking was quality but the ambience was never taken for granted.
Like Tarlow and his team before them, Perkins and his partners — Nialls Fallon and Perkins’s wife, Leah Campbell; and, later, Taylor Ward among others — understood that food alone wasn’t enough. The light had to be right, the soundtrack had to be perfect, the interiors had to be just so, like the apartment build-out you’d have done for yourself if you had just enough cash but not more. The food was always good but not showy, recalling the coastal cuisines of Spain, Portugal, and Italy without ever landing on one specific reference point. You got the feeling that these were chefs cooking for themselves and their neighbors, not for stars, turning up the dials in ballsy, cost-conscious, approachable ways. Roe, not caviar. Horseradish, raw onions, and anchovies everywhere as amplifiers. The burgers, too: lamb with anchovies at Hart’s and Cervo’s, beef with anchovies and ripe Roquefort at Eel Bar. Extra on extra. Game on!
When Hart’s opened in 2016, in an unprepossessing shoe-box space next to the elevated Franklin Avenue C train, I lived a ten-minute walk away and wandered in uninvited during the friends-and-family pre-opening. I was neither friend nor family, until I was. It was easy to become a regular there, the way I’d always hoped it would be somewhere. Cervo’s followed, in 2017, then the Fly, a more casual chicken spot with an island-taverna energy.
In short order, each of the group’s restaurants went from if-you-know-you-know to everybody-knows. Reservations for a comparatively tiny number of tables and bar seats became scarce. Michelin took notice of Hart’s and then Cervo’s, a place where only the luckiest diners get a seat back. (Servers navigate the narrow passage between bar seats and one row of tables in the front room like flight attendants.) What used to be these restaurants’ peculiarities — a very Spanish appreciation for vermouth, bitter greens, all that mayonnaise — became the norm.
But something at Eel Bar didn’t quite work. The food wasn’t as polished as it was at Cervo’s. The potato salad, snowed over with roe, was kind of gloopy. Chicken-and-pork meatballs were good, and so were the fries, but serving them together diminished both, weirdly. Eel Bar was hot, there was no question. But it wasn’t great. And Cervo’s, which hovered over the place like a grandstanding big brother, was as it had been, only three blocks away.
It’s an unfortunate reality for restaurants that heat tends to gather at the outset, when everything is least tested. That’s not always the best time to visit. Eel Bar needed to stretch its legs, establish its rhythm. Seven months in, the restaurant has gotten its footing. During a few revisits this month, I found it markedly improved since my meals there last year.
The menu hasn’t changed dramatically, but the confidence and ambition have. Like Cervo’s, Eel Bar feels more like a bar that serves food than a restaurant that serves drinks, and if that’s the case, these are lucky drinks. You will, no question, leave redolent of anchovy, whether you start with a pickled-cucumber Gilda or not, and I wouldn’t suggest wearing anything you’ll worry might get stained with oil. There are still a few dishes that are simple to the point of silliness — that potato salad, onion petals with shavings of cheese — but Eel Bar’s chicken al ajillo, with its blackened skin and scattering of braised beans and Basque peppers, is as good as chickens I’ve paid twice or more to eat at fancier restaurants. A rabbit for two is even better: half a bunny braised in cider with big hunks of carrot and mushroom, the love child of a pot roast and chicken soup, served with a few bare salt-boiled potatoes. Pair it with a sharp, inky salad of tardivo with feathery slices of Garrotxa, a semi-firm Spanish goat cheese that cuts through it all nicely.
If you compare Eel Bar with Cervo’s, as I did, you will still find overlaps. The kitchens are clearly splitting deliveries of seafood and citrus. Sometimes the win goes to one, sometimes to the other. Cervo’s mussels escabeche, usually a terrific dish, was rubbery when I had it recently; Eel Bar’s fried interpretation was better. Both restaurants are doing a soupy bomba rice, not quite risotto: Cervo’s, with spinach and razor clams, got over on Eel Bar’s, with chorizo and just-seared scallops, which wanted a little more acid.
Together, they feel like two halves of the same whole. Crowder is Crowder, wherever he cooks. Yet he has pulled Eel Bar to where Cervo’s was, so now the choice between the two can safely be made on mood. Where Eel Bar is New Wave sexy (“It feels like inventive sushi rolls could be served here,” a friend said), Cervo’s charm is warmer and more Old World, all wood paneling and sherry-colored light. The soundtrack is smoother, the seating more cheek-by-jowl. Is tonight incandescent or neon? Now that the heat has cooled, the choice is yours.
Eel Bar
Where’s the…?
No, there is no eel served at Eel Bar. Yes, the servers have heard the joke already, and no, they don’t want to talk about it.
When Wet Ain’t It
The bar’s “filthy martini” is a better dirty than most, with just enough brine and a splash of sherry.
Haute to Go
This group also runs Minnow, a tinned-seafood concern with sardines, mussels, cod liver, or landlubbing snails you can take home.
More Reviews
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