New York minute/Late September 2009
The lame: Laut off Union Square, where my consort and I stopped for a fast late lunch after the Greenmarket and spent most of it wishing we had walked the extra blocks to Tue. The waiters were all welcoming and smiling, but the room smelled like a urinal cake and a group with a screaming child made it hard to hear with all the hard surfaces in the strange design. And while my steamed dumplings (at $6, a buck apiece) were amazingly light, with a superb dipping sauce, they could have been filled with either mushrooms as billed or ground pork — impossible to determine what I was ingesting. Poor Bob chose the enticing-sounding masak kicap: “cinnamon, turmeric, star anise, ginger, garlic, shallot, onion, bell pepper, sweet pea, tomato, sweet soy sauce.” Rather than being amalgamated into a sauce, half the things on that list seemed to have been just tossed onto the chicken and vegetables. The unsatisfying mess came with a big mound of brown rice, but the same $9 would have bought two good courses farther away. WIGB? Not likely. This place makes Spice seem polished.