Helen Rosner writes about the new Vietnamese-inspired bistro from Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha, the chefs of the hit spot Ha’s Snack Bar, on the Lower East Side.
The new place is small, by most measures, though vastly larger than the Snack Bar, with a dozen marble-topped tables that tend to be populated by interesting-looking people wearing blunt bobs and enviable knitwear.
As at Ha’s Snack Bar, the food is an elegant wallop of neon flavors, foregrounding the punctilious greenness of Vietnamese herbs and the languorous funk of organ meats and offcuts, but now there’s room to breathe, to relax a little, to take it all in, to linger. There’s a neat stainless-steel bar running along one wall at which you could, in theory, nurse a glass of some minerally Old World red, or a ballet-pink lychee cosmo, though for the moment its seats are all given over to diners having a full meal. There’s even a coat check, by Jove! And unlike the Snack Bar, whose alcove-like kitchen runs on just a hot plate and an electric oven, Bistrot Ha has a more built-out setup, allowing Ha and Burns to sear and broil and finish dishes à la minute to their hearts’ content. The relationship between the two spaces reminds me of the way chic Parisian restaurants sometimes operate accessory caves à vin—more casual wine bars, often sharing the same kitchen but serving noshier food. One Burns-Ha restaurant is a snack bar, and the other’s a bistro, and the existence of each allows the other to be more unadulteratedly itself. One of my favorite Bistrot dishes—braised leeks standing upright in a sauce gribiche so chunky that it’s nearly egg salad—was also one of the best I had on my first visit to the Snack Bar, though the columns of leek have been updated with a finial of marinated mussels. A pho-spiced French-onion soup that I saw on the menu at the Bistrot one week was, by the next, moved around the corner to the Snack Bar. Burns explained to me, on the phone, that the dish just felt more right there, and I don’t know exactly why, but I get it completely. They’ve ported over, in the opposite direction, their signature vol-au-vent, which was once the centerpiece of the Snack Bar menu but is much more at home in the romantic light of the Bistrot. It involves a buttery bowl of puff pastry filled with an ever-changing array of fricassées; I relished one with tender hunks of stewed lamb shoulder in a grass-green sauce made of lime leaf and mint, equally reminiscent of British Sunday roasts and South Asian braises, though, another time, the pastry contained a take on shaking beef , with chewy steak and bits of onion, evocative mostly of week-night takeout. The daily specials tend to take the form of big hunks of meat—a mammoth pork chop one evening, strewn, Portuguese-ishly, with clams; a brawny steak another, sized to feed two or three. I don’t think you’d be unhappy if you ordered them, but main courses of that scale tend to hog the spotlight , and it would be such a sadness to miss out on the chance to sample the rest of the menu, with all its wit and weirdness. Burns and Ha play, so warmly, with reference, synthesizing and hybridizing: take the winky General Ha’s Fried Pig Trotter, featuring two marshmallow-soft pillows of meat and fat and connective tissue inside a crispy exterior, doused in an awfully familiar tart, ketchupy, sugary glaze. In their idiosyncratic take on tuna carpaccio, the paillettes of raw fish are sliced considerably thicker than you might expect so that the seafood’s sweet salinity isn’t lost against a sticky-sweet sauce sharpened with fiery slivers of pickled pepper. Vitello tonnato, a famously understated dish of cold meat under a silken sauce made from tuna, gets audaciously remade with paper-thin slices of pork loin, finished with a dark swirl of chile crisp so spicy it brought tears to my eyes. Some dishes were less swaggering but no less appealing: the savoy-cabbage wrapping of a domelike chou farci was filled with a boudin-meets-lion’s-head-meatballs mixture of pork and shrimp and rice, which had an almost maternal softness, its gentle flavors coaxed just to brightness by a spiced broth ladled over top. The menu at Bistrot Ha changes weekly, at minimum, reflecting Burns and Ha’s restless “both and” approach to cooking. The duo has drawn inspiration for Bistrot Ha from Paris’s legendary Bistrot Paul Bert, which once upon a time hosted a pop-up of Ha’s Đặc Biệt. There’s a characteristic nonchalance, a well-earned confidence in the restaurant’s power to delight. I loved an appetizer of fried sheets of yuba layered, napoleon-like, with a tangy paste of shrimp and spices, and soaked in fish sauce; its interleaving of flavors and techniques seemed to harmonize with the dessert menu’s dramatic ice-cream bombe, a spherical Baked Alaska featuring assorted strata of glacés, sherbets, and sorbets under pointy peaks of gooey torched meringue. I swung by the Snack Bar a few days ago and was surprised to note that, though it’s still plenty packed, it isn’t quite the mob scene it once was. Burns and Ha have removed some of the table seating, to allow for more bodies in the room, and to play up the snacky vibe. All fevers break eventually; what used to be a frenzy seems to have settled into something more sustainable, more livable. What’s here, and there—at the Bistrot and at the Snack Bar—feels better, richer, more humane. On the menu at both restaurants is Ha’s rustic pâté, served by the slice, each piece dotted with white bits of lardo and topped with fat raisins plumped up in a vinegary, fish-sauce-spiked agrodolce. The dish is ostensibly an interpretation of mắm chưng, a steamed Vietnamese meat loaf made with pork and fermented fish, though to tell the truth I couldn’t pick up anything besides a very French pâté de campagne. Still, it’s a marvellous piece of work: dense and jiggly and alive with spices, just as at home on the marble tabletops of the Bistrot as it is on the narrow counters of the Snack Bar. The pâté, like many of Bistrot Ha’s dishes, is served with a wedge of baguette so airy and crackly that I was shocked to learn it’s the same Balthazar Bakery loaf I pick up regularly from my local grocery store. Context, it turns out, is everything. ♦
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