Caviar & Banana
12 East 22nd Street
New York, NY 10010
P: (212) 353-0500
Cuisine: Brazilian fusion
Price: I’m a New Yawka
Ahh, haunted restaurant that you are. (Rocco’s, of “The Restaurant” fame, was here before it went under.)
The decor was possibly the best thing about this restaurant.
No, I take that back. The sorbets were definitely better than the decor, but it was a close one.
I started off at the bar, as I was a good 15 minutes earlier than my dining companions, and was a little surprised to discover that not one drink was under $10. Most, in fact, hovered a little above at $12, and I just wasn’t in the mood to pay that much for a drink that may or may not appeal. I opted for a glass of the fizzy sangria, which was alright, by no means spectacular, but appealed to my wallet as it was only $8. (I lied. But that was the only alcoholic drink that dipped below the $10 mark.)
Once everyone arrived, we were seated at a round table pretty much in the middle of the room. I glanced around and wasn’t pleased to see that the room was laid out a bit peculiarly: random round tables sprouted up, mixed with some regular “4-tops” and “6-tops”. I shrugged and took my seat, although I felt a little uncomfortable with my purse slung on the back of the chair, as that put it in the reach of anyone walking by.
The waiter brought us plantain chips (yummy, though a tad bland) and “caviar” (hence the name, “Caviar & Banana”, though they don’t actually serve any caviar with anything)- sago balls flavored with what we determined to be a little [too much] soy sauce. Mixed with the chips, it was a bit too salty, so instead, a few of us resorted to eating the chips plain or dipping it in a jar of house “barbecue” (???) sauce we found on the table, which was pleasantly sweet and tangy at the same time.
We opted to start with a sampler of 4 tapas-sized dishes; most had Spanish names that I will butcher (and am not sure I’m getting the right ones, actually, since it was a month ago that we went, and I have just Spanish names to look at on Menu Pages right now), so I will just describe them best I can: shrimp “salad”, white mushroom in herb vinaigrette, tuna something, and jelly & what we discerned to be a kind of cheese. The shrimp salad was grey and scary looking, unimpressive; the white mushrooms were also a strange color (no, not white) and undistinctive; the tuna was dry and bland; the jelly and cheese, however, was very tasty and interesting. The cheese genuinely had no flavor of its own that I detected but simply was there for a textural distinction from the jelly, and just went nicely with the sweet tartness of the smooth, soft jelly. (Cranberry jelly perhaps?) We all appreciated that dish the most, as even the cheese haters enjoyed it.
For our entrees, despite most of us wanting to try the dish that the menu boasted was created for the President of Brazil, we all decided on other dishes except one person. She would turn out to love her dish the most. Two people opted for different variations of the Moquecas- Brazilian coconut stews- and the last person chose duck, I believe. (My apologies, again, as I said, this was over a month ago). I chose the Azul Marinho, which was terribly boring and bland. I actually began dipping pieces of the fish, which was cooked properly but just extremely tasteless, into the barbecue sauce I mentioned earlier in an attempt at getting some enjoyment from my dish. The plantains, stewed? braised? on the bottom were an interesting complement texture-wise but otherwise, the dish was flat out unimaginative and blah. From the comments being tossed around the table, we were all not exactly thrilled with our food, except the one of us who had stuck to our original choice of “the dish created specifically for the President of Brazil.” She actually really liked her dish, though I think in the end, still decided it wasn’t worth the price paid.
Dessert was a molten chocolate souffle made improperly in the wrong kind of dish, as you can see, and a sampling of sorbets: caramel or coffee?, passion fruit, vanilla bean, and mango. The mango sorbet was heavenly, the vanilla bean was very nicely flavored, passion fruit isn’t meant to be eaten like that, and the last one was delicious as well (it had a crust on top of caramel or coffee cake, that was very delicious, I just wish I could remember what it was). The souffle was disappointing and nothing outstanding again.
Genuinely, this restaurant is haunted and doomed for failure, I think. Pretty much all of the food was hit-or-miss, and in our case, with 5 people ordering different dishes, we were more “miss” than “hit”, which was extremely disappointing.
Yvo says: Go if you must, just to see the dark blue walls, the restaurant where Rocco had his heart stomped on and his skills tested time and time again, but don’t expect too much from the food…
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