Perennial

Photo: Mireya Acierto

What does one say about a restaurant where the experience is great one bite and bad the next? Where the service is enlightening on Tuesday and dismissive on Friday? I guess the thing to say about a restaurant of that sort is that it’s inconsistent. And since inconsistency is the opposite of what a restaurant should be, I suppose that should make Perennial—where I had these experiences—a bad restaurant.

But it’s not a bad restaurant. I know, because even after two uneven experiences there I remain smitten with the cheerful, sunny dining room, a place that evokes an easy lifestyle, a place where it’s hard to feel anything but relaxed. In fact, based on the room alone, I’d say this is the best of Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz’s restaurants.

I know, I know—I’m supposed to love BOKA more. Who wouldn’t love a restaurant whose chef just earned a Best New Chef nod from Food & Wine? But BOKA does lack something that Perennial has, and that’s a breezy nature. The intersection of luxury and casual is a place that many restaurants have aimed to arrive at. None in my recent memory has done it as well as Perennial. To wit: While expertly rattling off the various aromas I’d get from a glass of wine I was considering, my server also managed to gently tease me. Like that, he had me eating out of the palm of his hand.

Not literally, of course. I was actually tearing into smoky confit of chicken legs, which were presented with two mounds of blue-cheese foam. As a rule, I’m over foam, but this stuff was different: It was substantial, with a bold Roquefort flavor and a consistency thick enough that you could spoon it wherever you liked and it wouldn’t disintegrate. Unfortunately, a few days after trying it, another magazine food editor wrote a mean-spirited diatribe against the dish, and the next time I visited the restaurant it was gone. In its absence I tried the “seasonal” tart, with onion, bacon and Gruyère. It was quiche, nothing less, and, unfortunately, nothing more—it bored my appetite out of me.

And yet I quickly got that appetite back. Chefs Giuseppe Tentori and Ryan Poli (it’s hard to know which one is really at the helm here) have a wizardly knack for injecting the essence of summer into some of their dishes, and it’s often an addictive flavor. Gazpacho brimmed with the fresh flavors of red pepper; grilled lamb chops, so juicy they dripped when poked with a fork, had that unmistakable charred flavor of a backyard grill. It would have been a fantastic dish were it not for the braised lamb also on the plate, inexplicably coated in a chewy layer of caul fat. Pork tenderloin arrived bursting with corn flavors—corn and fava-bean succotash, corn spoon bread, corn juice on the plate—sweet summer flavors that were ruined only by the overcooked loin. (Beautifully cooked pork cheeks were on the plate, too, a bit of a savior.)

My meals went on like this. Housemade linguine, good; “coffee and Baileys” bad. Rum cake, boring; scallops, perfect. Cheesecake, ethereal; chocolate cremeaux—well, the ganache was thick and unattractive, but the salty elements on the plate made for great contrast. I tasted it, considered it, tasted it again. And then I made up my mind: It wasn’t perfect, but it had potential. More importantly, I looked forward to returning and trying it again.