New York is a tongue town. Katz’s has been slicing it by the pound for decades. It’s a Jewish classic. My grandfather Sam often ordered a tongue omelet, an object of perverse and horrified fascination. I’d sooner have bit off my own than sampled that thing. But the universe laughs last, eventually. I’ve since eaten tongue, happily, hither and yon. On tacos or in mole, as an antipasto or the garnish on a Boulud-ified wedge salad. But I’ve never encountered any tongue as tonguelike as the ox tongue at Somssi in the Village, where it is scored, grilled, and glazed and presented undisguised, as recognizable as the nose on your face. It is the rare entrée that offers itself up to be French-kissed.
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to serve a dish like this, not least when it is one of only four entrée offerings, and a certain amount of finesse to pull it off. Somssi (pronounced SOHM-she), which opened on a stretch of MacDougal Street dominated by the alfresco aperitivo sippers at Dante, has both.
Somssi is the newest restaurant from the Na:Eun Hospitality group, which includes J.P. and Ellia Park’s Atomix, the every-award-winning tasting counter; the couple’s original restaurant, the prix fixe Atoboy; and Naro in Rockefeller Center. Somssi’s proprietress is Ahris Kim, Na:Eun’s former director of operations, but it represents a group effort. J.P. is listed as its “culinary director,” consulting on the menu with Yoonsoo Park of Atoboy and Naro; former Atomix chef Daniel Gronert is in the kitchen. The Parks are the majority owners and leased Kim the space (it previously housed another Atomix outcropping, Acru). These back-office dealings aren’t of especial interest to most diners, and I recommend treating Somssi as what it effectively is, a sparky little sibling to a by-now very august elder. I was dutifully wowed by my meal at Atomix when I finally managed to crack a reservation, but it’s neither feasible nor cost-effective to eat there on a regular basis.
Somssi has, if not a chip on its shoulder, then a spring in its step. It would be shabby to recommend it as a way to get your Park fix on a (relative) budget, but more to the point, it wouldn’t be quite accurate. I found myself thinking of it as a school-play production to Atomix’s grand opera, starting with the haunted-farmhouse interiors with their mismatched chairs, fraying lace curtains, and homely still lifes, through to the frankness of Jenny Eagleton’s wine list, with its chatty marginalia (“Vineyard est. 1130” “Maybe it’s a rosé, maybe it’s a red, who knows”). And this is all before Somssi slips you the tongue.
It’s served like a steak, tender but with a non-soft chew, a little reminiscent of uncured pastrami. It’s glazed in a sweetened sake-and-soy tare that reminded me of Nobu’s famous black cod with miso, pricked up by a pat of wasabi. Despite a thoroughgoing incorporation of Korean and Japanese ingredients and flavors, Somssi doesn’t feel overtly “Korean,” even while spiking the beef-and-pork ragù on its linguine with mustard-green kimchee. Instead, the restaurant feels both playful and smart. There are the broad strokes of the neo-bistro playbook here — a few crudi, a lone pasta, a couple larger cuts of meat, the requisite branzino — but Somssi, which means, roughly, “skill developed through experience,” makes good on its goal to goad diners a little farther from their comfort zones. What could’ve been just another lamb chop is a bigger, gamier mutton chop, two bones bisected down their peppered equator to reveal the red meat within, dressed in a cumin-rich sauce for a chophouse take on Sichuan cumin lamb. Schnitzel is threaded through with shrimp farce before being fried in both bread crumbs and sesame seeds, for a schnitzel à la shrimp toast.
Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically precise cooking, such as an ornate potato presentation with caviar and raw scallops with strawberries and Thai basil. Hugo Yu.
Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically precise cooking, such as an ornate potato presentation with caviar and raw scallops with strawberries… more
Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically precise cooking, such as an ornate potato presentation with caviar and raw scallops with strawberries and Thai basil. Hugo Yu.
Not every dish rises to the same level, and on a small menu, misses can feel magnified — a not-especially-interesting fennel salad, a dessert course (olive oil cake, fig-leaf custard and granita, or a scoop of popcorn-flavored ice cream) that didn’t do much for me whichever way I played it. But I found the little-sister energy of Somssi more winning than any of its stumbles. “Want me to shake it?” a host-cum-server, one of a pair of wisecracking guardians at Somssi’s door, asked, seasoning a brown-paper lunch bag of French fries with furikake or kimchee-cheddar seasoning (the better option). Then, cackling, he broke into a little dance.
A few blocks away, another little-sibling restaurant is shaking, too. Noury is the second restaurant from the team behind Kiko, a Japanese-y bistro I admired in Hudson Square. Husband-and-wife team Alex Chang and Lina Goujjane (he cooks, she somms) own Noury, too, but the restaurant is as much a showcase for chef de cuisine Joji Miwa. If Kiko was Japanese-y, Noury is izakaya-ish, a rotating selection of small plates in a more casual, compact, one-room setting. (Kiko, as I wrote last year, is ryokan-chalet — I’ll be glad to see its barroom roaring fire again when the weather cools.) Miwa, who cooked in Japan before returning to his native U.S., Greenmarkets up the izakaya standards: on one of my visits, shira-ae, a creamy dressing made of silken tofu, blanketed red cherries, and sugar snaps; on a later-summer follow-up, fat figs. Jimmy Nardello peppers and hunks of nectarine (by the time you read this, their season will be nearly over) make a beautiful salad, heated by ginger ponzu and a delicate snowfall of dried bonito flakes. I particularly enjoyed hand rolls of eel brushed with ankimo (monkfish liver) before being grilled, and long, skewered chicken tsukune (meatballs), loose and crumbly and ready to sop up a pool of ready egg yolk.
Izakayas are drinking dens, and while the ambience at Noury is more neighborhood restaurant than dim watering hole, Goujjane and her drinks team offer a nicely chosen wine list and a number of sakes (seven of them by the glass), as well as a few menu items seemingly designed to soak them up. (The prawn-and-onion kakiage, a server joked, is more or less a non-trademarked Bloomin’ Onion.) I also wouldn’t skip sweets. Miwa’s Zerbinati melon parfait, a tall soda-shop glass layered with ice cream, tapioca, melon jelly, and a salty sake-lees sabayon, makes dreamy use of the season’s sweetest, sunniest cantaloupes, a thin slice of which crowns the top like a bright-orange grin.
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