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There is only one thing wrong with Liba, the first new restaurant in more than 20 years from the team behind 12 Chairs Café, the Manhattan staple that's been operating in SoHo with much fanfare since 1995: the music is loud. It’s not about the playlist (it’s great!), but just the volume that is too loud. And the fact that this is the complaint, at a brand-new restaurant with a brand-new menu inside a brand-new room inside the beautiful William Vale hotel, should tell you most of what you need to know about how good everything else is.
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Liba is led by 12 Chairs' own Chef Maayan Glass, who has spent more than a decade shaping the group's food and is now getting the biggest canvas of his career. The name, fittingly, means "core" in Hebrew, a nod to the idea that a meal's real center of gravity is the table itself, not any one dish. It's also, literally, the layout: the centerpiece of Liba, in both space and menu, is an 800-degree brick oven that anchors the open kitchen and does the heavy lifting on a good chunk of the dishes, starting with the brick oven bread.
Made from a 48-hour fermented dough laced with coriander seed, the bread arrives with an olive oil "butter" that will have you rethink both the olive oil and the butter currently stored in your kitchen. It's arguably the single best thing on the menu, which tracks, given that the whole roster of offerings is built around a confident, contemporary reading of Mediterranean cooking.
Generally, the shareable starters outperform the entrées—not because the entrées are lacking, but because the starters are where the kitchen's point of view is sharpest. The tartlet de Tunis, a classic Tunisian tuna sandwich reimagined as a single bite, is a highlight, as are the dolma and a crispy chicken cigar built on chicken confit. Order them all alongside the qatayef clouds, empanada-like pancakes stuffed with spinach and za'atar, the bluefin tuna carpaccio and the pide, a Turkish pizza dish with smoked eggplant, peppers and Spanish anchovies.
The larger plates specifically show off Liba's in-house dry-aging program: chicken thigh skewers with smoked squash, steak frites with tempura onion rings, lamb chops, a dry-aged ribeye and a kebab Napoleon—lamb and beef stacked on a hot steel skewer and served with tahini and bitter greens.
What unites the menu, top to bottom, is that everything is clearly the product of real thought and, while only most of the dishes land on taste and execution, all of them land on originality. That creativity carries straight through to dessert: a pistachio pavlova with sumac meringue is a must-order, as is the basbousa, a traditional semolina cake soaked in a lemongrass-and-orange syrup and served with vanilla ice cream whose name is often traced to an Arabic word for "kiss."
That uniqueness carries through to the cocktail list, too, and with enough conviction that you may want to skip driving to this pocket of Williamsburg altogether—take the subway, an Uber or just walk, because you'll likely want to work through more of the list than you planned. There's a Negroni Lavan ("white negroni," in Hebrew), built on lemongrass- and fennel-infused gin, blanc vermouth and bitters, and it tastes as elegant as it looks. The green tomato martini is exactly what it sounds like, in the best way, and the carrot sour (rye, smoked paprika, egg white) is another standout. According to a hostess on a recent Monday night, the gazoz, made with tequila, ginger, apricot liqueur and soda over pomegranate, is one of the house favorites.
Then there's the room itself, which can be described as industrial chic. Liba sits in the lower level of the William Vale, the Williamsburg hotel that already houses Andrew Carmellini's Italian restaurant Leuca, the skyline-facing Westlight rooftop bar and a 60-foot rooftop pool that ranks among the longest hotel pools in New York… which is to say Liba is now the fourth reason to find your way into this building. Step outside Liba's door and you land right next to Mister Dips, the hotel's Airstream-trailer burger stand, whose outdoor tables made for an easy, unhurried spot to linger with fellow diners after the meal on a recent Monday night. New York doesn't hand out many evenings that are neither too hot nor too cold, and there's something particularly good about talking outside, post-dinner on one of the ones it does, especially after a well-rounded meal.
What Liba also happens to be is the first kosher restaurant from the 12 Chairs team, a genuine win for kosher New Yorkers who are used to settling for less and a fact that functions less as an asterisk than as an addition. Nothing here reads as a compromise made for the sake of certification; it reads like a restaurant that would be this good regardless, and that also happens to solve a real gap in the neighborhood.
Loud as it is, Liba doesn't feel like a restaurant still finding its footing. It feels like a team that already knew exactly what it wanted to build, and simply needed a different space to build it in.