Even in New York, the city of excess, there can’t be many high-end restaurants whose response to a devastating kitchen fire at their premises is to say – once the fire’s out and the extent of the damage has been calculated – “Just send everyone to the other branch”
Even when both branches of Marlon Abela’s A Voce are functioning – as they are once again now, after three months of fire damage renovation of their Uptown restaurant on the third floor of the Time Warner Center – these are two very different rooms, with very different personalities.
Up at Columbus Circle, on the third floor of the Time Warner Center, A Voce’s is a large open space, with free-standing semicircular banquettes, the restaurant’s impressive wine collection displayed through glass panels along one wall, and views out over Columbus Circle. Reflected in the picture windows, huge roundelled light fittings set into the tiled ceiling resemble flying saucers advancing in formation on Columbus Circle’s steel replica of planet Earth. Something this room shares with the downtown branch are its slightly odd ribbed swivel chairs, comfortable enough but rather more businessy in style than the rest of the environment; somewhere, an office furnishing depot must have celebrated one of their biggest ever sales. Between these seats and the way in which various seats are set on raised platforms around the undulating space, this resembles nothing so much as an extremely fancy Business class departure lounge – which is not to denigrate A Voce’s design so much as to point out how right lots of lounge designers have been getting it.
A Voce, Columbus
Here, too, is a variegated crowd. At a table adjacent to mine, an evidently very good date is in progress: the two diners barely uncouple their mouths long enough to slurp up some noodles before returning to first base; elsewhere there are anniversary couples dressed to the nines, and some clumps of businessmen getting animated over first-quarter figures.
Downtown, a more modestly sized room on Madison Avenue is almost entirely patronised by business types: lone diners filling time spent awaiting their colleague with murmured Important Business Calls on their iPhones; a group of five men celebrating a promotion or retirement with (horrors!) a postprandial slug of grappa. The gender balance is skewed highly towards the male: I counted one woman for every three or four men. It’s a colder space, quite literally: the thermometer could have been notched up a little further, to compound this location’s cosier, dark-wooded ambience (though in fairness, when I visited, temperatures outdoors were plummeting, as was a quite astounding quantity of rain. “You must be very hungry to have come out tonight,” I was greeted as I slopped in from the downpour – “or completely mad.”) It’s a long, narrow space with windows onto 26th street.
A Voce, Madison
While the rooms and the ambience differs wildly between A Voce’s locations, the food and the standard are in general interchangeably excellent. Uptown, a gnocchi with guineafowl ragu and mushrooms with is the standout dish: earthy, autumnal, deeply savoury. Downtown, another poultry-and-pasta combination is the winner: a duck confit on papardelle with cocoa dusting, newly unveiled when I visited and, I suspect, destined to become one of those remove–from-the-menu-on-pain-of-death items that will bring diners back again and again (I’m already planning a return visit just for this dish). The menu, which is extensive without being overwhelming, includes all the kinds of Italian standards one would expect; grilled squid on a bed of lentils with slivers of nori seaweed; a well-flavoured grilled steak which could nonetheless have stood a little more of the caramelized, singed crust that barbecue aficionados call “bark”. I could live without ever seeing another deep-fried zucchini flower stuffed with ricotta which, though perfectly tasty, is cliché incarnate. (I have a friend who decries, very amusingly, the reverential way in which almost every restaurant staff announces the inclusion of quince jelly on a cheese plate: “Whoop-di-do, like I haven’t had that with every single cheese course I’ve had in the last ten years,” he sulks; I’m starting to feel the same about the zucchini flower.)
Desserts are relatively light: on Madison, an orange semifreddo is perfectly serviceable but outshone by a tremendous lemon and poppyseed gelato, one of those things one wonders why no-one’s ever thought of before (well, I speaking for myself, as someone who bakes lemon and poppyseed biscuits in vast quantities yet never thought to use the combination for ice cream). Up at Columbus Circle, a deconstructed version of a strawberry shortcake includes strawberry semifreddo and a punchily flavoured basil yoghurt sorbet; a portion of three bombolini, little sugared doughnuts with crème anglais and chocolate sauce, is sized generously enough to defeat even the sweetest-toothed.
Where the restaurants blur into one another rather than emphasise differences is in their cuisine. A lower-key dining experience can be had at the Madison Park branch; uptown’s is clubbier, buzzier, a touch more louche. The latter’s better for date night, the former for conversation where you want to hear what everyone’s saying. But really, as far as quality of cooking goes, you could visit either. Or both. C
A Voce, 10 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019, USA
+1 212 823 2523; avocerestaurant.com
A Voce, 41 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10010, USA
+1 212 545 8555; avocerestaurant.com
Neil D.A. Stewart’s novel The Glasgow Coma Scale is published by Corsair
