Richard Olney, the great American food writer and Francophile, who spent most of his adult life on a hillside above Solliès-Toucas, did not really believe in recipes. He thought exact measurements were shackles for a cook, and considered the precision of his contemporaries—Julia Child, among others—to be a kind of bad faith. What Olney did believe in, with something approaching religious conviction, was the importance of ingredients: the best meat and produce, from the best farms and shops, at the best time of year. He was perhaps most obsessed by, and most fastidious about, salads, to which he devoted pages and pages of near-philosophical instruction across his dozen or so cookbooks and memoirs, though all that, too, ultimately boiled down to a theory of superlatives. Each element earns its inclusion by the cook’s instinctual assessment of its perfections, rather than some sort of static recipe-card diktat.
Tucked away on the menu at Zoli, the excellent new restaurant that now anchors the East Williamsburg contemporary-art complex Amant, is “the Olney salad,” which carries no further explanation. On my first visit, I misread the words as “the only salad,” and asked a server to elaborate. “It changes all the time,” they said, “but it’s the best lettuces, the best herbs, the best oil, the best vinegar.” I love a restaurant shibboleth—and if Olney is on the menu, the meal’s almost certainly going to be something special. What arrived was a salad that I’m fairly sure the marvellously cranky man would have adored: a mountain of greenery, fluffy as an eiderdown, dressed in a perfectly smooth salt-edged vinaigrette. True to promise, it was slightly different on each of my subsequent visits, more ruffly-leaf lettuce one day, more red oak the next. It was tarragon-forward on a Wednesday and bursting with mint by Thursday.
Amant, the sprawling four-building, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot campus where Zoli lives, is the project of Lonti Ebers, a serious art collector and a MOMA trustee married to the Canadian billionaire Bruce Flatt. The space opened, in 2021, to real notice in the art world and comparatively little beyond it—but Zoli, which opened in the spring, has put the museum on the map for people who don’t otherwise monitor the gallery circuit. The kitchen belongs to the chef Ned Baldwin, who, for more than a decade, has run Houseman, on Greenwich Street, one of Manhattan’s great under-the-radar restaurants. Much like Houseman, Zoli threads a very fine needle: warm and refined, familial and intellectual, drawing on a broadly eclectic pantry that has everybody eating well and living in harmony. Early one evening, a preschooler in heliotrope leggings was rolling around on a banquette, just barely avoiding the airspace of a pair of severe, linen-clad galleristas in vintage Ann Demeulemeester clomp boots, who sipped their glasses of pink Grenache and took in the gymnastics with equanimity.
Where Houseman’s food is posh-rustic and a little lusty, Zoli’s menu is frillier and just a bit more challenging. Oddness and novelty are often the preferred culinary language of the art world, but this kitchen—which Baldwin runs alongside the chefs Danny Roberts and Aimee Li—earns its experimental flourishes by delivering pleasure at every turn. Fuzzy-fresh cucumber leaves, marinated in a chilled dashi vinaigrette, riff cleverly on spinach ohitashi. Duck hearts are grilled and skewered, gesturing at metaphor whether you want them to or not. Sautéed daylily shoots—an uncommon ingredient enjoying a well-deserved moment, with its meaty mouthfeel of jackfruit, and that faint chlorophyll snap of asparagus—get tossed with bitter greens in an anchovy-spiked vinaigrette. Fascinating things are happening with chilled seafood: raw oysters dotted with bright-green cucumber dashi; large mussels marinated in something sharp and vinegary; a composed dish of surf clam, gloriously chewy, sliced into sashimi-like slivers, in a tart tamarind dressing scattered with peanuts and chiles and cilantro.
The menu’s puckishness fades slightly as we move on to larger dishes: there’s a snappy goat sausage, straight out of the Houseman playbook, and a tender bison steak for the red-meat needers. A crisp-skinned half chicken arrives sliced into long strips, on a shimmering puddle of kombu-infused jus. The seafood is far more fun: I loved a fillet of fluke, doused in a lovage-scented cream sauce bubbling with fish roe of varying hues and sizes, and a whole butterflied black bass with a garlicky Basque pil-pil sauce makes for an attractive centerpiece. Whatever you get, add a side of fries. They’re enormous squared-off planks of potato, crisp outside and creamy within, and they’re just spectacular, served with a swirl of saffron-tinged rouille. Pair them with the bar’s bracing fennel Martini—a variation on a Gibson, with pickled fennel in lieu of the onion—and I promise you’ll come out happy.
With its timing, its dramatic staircase, and its proximity to many, many millions of dollars’ worth of art, Zoli has drawn inevitable comparisons to Marcel, the ritzy new restaurant anchoring the Sotheby’s headquarters, in the Breuer Building, on the Upper East Side. Art and food are old bedfellows, but each restaurant is specific to the institution in which it is (to borrow a term of art) sited, and the two aren’t after the same end at all. Most noticeably, where Marcel is a cathedral of luxury, Zoli seems primarily interested in matters of playful exploration, both material and emotional. (Ebers has said that the restaurant is named after her beloved, and entirely imaginary, dog.) You can taste it in the desserts: a chocolate layer cake laced with fermented black garlic—the edge of sulfur operating something like miso swirled into butterscotch—and an airy cheesecake funked up with shavings of fresh Taleggio. It’s weird, but it really works. ♦
