Secession

Sometimes I have to wonder about chef David Bouley. Just as the culinary establishment begins bracing for the worst financial crisis of our lifetime, New York’s most famously eccentric, notoriously combustible chef moves forward with a massive expansion. If all goes well, by late next year he’ll be running half a dozen projects just up the avenue from Wall Street.

Secession, the rapid reboot of the Austro-Hungarian Danube, is the unlikely opening salvo in Bouley’s play for Tribeca domination. The new brasserie features a mismatched polyglot menu as sprawling as a Greek diner’s, served in a chaotic belle epoque setting that’s shrouded in a conversational roar.

Where its precursor was a study in highbrow decorum—the gorgeous original dining room, with its Klimt-inspired tableaux and plush velvet curtains, was mostly left alone—Secession is an end-of-the-world party, whose clients are a Liebling-esque vision of jowly gluttons.

Navigating the manic, poster-size menu—featuring in excess of 50 dishes—is more dizzying than a spin on the Cyclone. It’s the food Bouley presumably craves—a high-low fridge raid of Italian, French, Japanese, American, Thai and Austrian fare.

If you surrender to the chaos, dinner here can be a lot of fun. In fact, I’d suggest expanding the menu, not scaling it back, squeezing desserts in up near the “oysters & clams” (there are more than a dozen categories of savory food) so you can really mix and match. How about a banana parfait with your fried calamari, profiteroles with your French onion soup? It’s no less jarring than a dinner of pâté de campagne, penne pomodoro and Thai coconut soup.

Desserts are the best part of a meal here, which is why I’m taking the unusual step of endorsing them early—and advising restraint elsewhere. Bouley’s pastry team works wonders with ice cream. The prune-Armagnac is an alcohol-soaked revelation and a fine match for a dense pecan-caramel iced German chocolate cake. A luscious quenelle of raspberry ice cream accompanies a crumbly pistachio meringue topped with fresh raspberries and pistachio cream.

Kidding aside, there is in fact a very good reason for ordering dessert with your starters: If you’re as intolerant as I am of interminable waits, you’re unlikely to make it to the end of the meal. Despite a glut of waiters buzzing around, the service is as out of control as the menu. While the front-of-house crew is apologetic and pleasant—“I must have pressed coconut soup instead of coconut shrimp; why don’t you try it while I bring your order?”—45 minutes between courses would try the patience of a priest. Particularly when the food is so uneven.

A half hour into dinner one night, after weighing our myriad options, we took the plunge and ordered. One of the odder components of this very odd restaurant is the consulting hand of chef Cesare Casella. Though you’ll find more inspiring cuisine at his new Salumeria Rosi on the Upper West Side, the man is responsible for the one dish at Secession that everyone around us seemed to be ordering: A side of Tuscan fries—perfect golden batons tossed with roasted garlic, hot chili and rosemary—were the second best thing I sampled (after dessert).

That versatile nibble seemed to go with everything we ordered—even as the dishes clashed with each other. It takes a leap of gastronomic faith to move from a pedestrian trio of terrines, to a Franco-Japanese salad of limp dashi-marinated hearts of palm, to fried shrimp in the same shredded coconut crust you’ll find at every suburban chain restaurant in America.

While those flaccid starters marked an inauspicious debut, the entrées began to pick up the slack. They shared the trait of being well suited for voracious tackling. A whole buttery lobster roasted in its shell with lemon thyme and powdered grapefruit was pure decadent Bouley. Leg of baby goat, slow cooked over potato disks, had the fatty, falling-apart texture of good brisket and came with a pair of equally tender goat chops. A well-seasoned halibut filet, simply poached, delivered a hearty bistro bang with its al dente beets and drizzle of horseradish cream.

Still, given the significant upgrade from starters to mains, I couldn’t help but wonder if successful ordering here isn’t entirely a matter of luck. As with most kitchen-sink menus, the best way to avoid unpleasant surprises is to stick with the stuff that makes the most sense given the setting—the roasted chicken, say, instead of the shrimp kebab with passion-fruit–tamarind dressing.