Thirty Acres, Two Stars

[robert stolarik for the times]For his last review of 2012, Pete Wells landed at a restaurant in Jersey City. Thirty Acres is the vision of chef Kevin Pemoulie and his wife Alex. Pemoulie has five years of chef de cuisine at Momofuku Noodle Bar on his resume and the glowing two-star review is likely to bring a few new customers to the PATH in the ensuing weeks. "A restaurant like Thirty Acres would be a find in any state," Wells writes. "It is the kind of place that can redraw regional boundaries, making the Hudson River no more of a barrier to eaters in search of inventive cooking than the East River has become in the past few years. For those who live near a PATH station, it may be easier to reach than several talked-about restaurants in Brooklyn."

Wells has a few gripes with the reservation policy (only available for groups of 5 or more), but likes just about everything else in the 32-seat restaurant, including "the servers, who are unusually friendly and free of pretense," and "the pastel portraits of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on corrugated cardboard."

Thirty Acres is B.Y.O.B. and the menu makes for a wonderful canvas to be painted by a slew of different wine. Smoked quail with walnut bread pudding, cranberry bbq sauce, and kale, gnocchi with mushrooms, sauerkraut, sour cream, mustard, and ricotta salata, and steamed cod with mussels, kielbasa, Old Bay, and celery make excellent partners for those old rieslings and expressive zweigelt some of us might have laying around. [NYTimes]