Two Star Success for ABC Cocina

[benjamin petit for the ny times] dan kluger"For his next trick, Jean-Georges will open a Spanish-inspired, small plates restaurant." These were the words we started tossing around last summer after we caught wind that Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Dan Kluger would be opening a restaurant in the former Pipa space inside the ABC Carpet & Home building. Now that ABC Cocina is open, and has been for three months, Pete Wells has filed a review.

"There’s an alchemy at work at ABC Cocina," he writes, "The kind that can turn the last thing you’d want to order into the first thing you’ll ask for next time around. For me, it was the vegetables with brown rice, which I expected would taste like a tea made by steeping the yellowed pages of the “Moosewood Cookbook” in warm kombucha and straining it through Pigpen’s bandanna. It was, in fact, one of the freshest, cleanest vegetable dishes I’ve tasted all summer."

The success with which Vongerichten and Kluger coax flavors from farm fresh produce is no surprise – their scope of vegetable prowess has been on display at ABC Kitchen since 2010. A few things miss the mark at Cocina, but the restaurant is run by chefs that have a focused and learned approach to cooking – one they have built into a restaurant that New Yorkers are excited to eat at. ABC Cocina is another in the growing canvas of two-star restaurants opening in the city. More on that here. [NYTimes]