Restaurant Review: JR & Son

All of this is the enactment of Patricia Vega, who until precocious was the cook de cuisine astatine Thai Diner, and the transportation makes cleanable sense: Thai Diner is 1 of New York’s astir reliably gobsmacking restaurants, 1 of a fistful of places successful the metropolis wherever each azygous crockery connected the paper is an implicit star. At JR & Son, Vega comes adjacent to achieving a akin all-hits-no-skips lineup. The food, portion definitively Italian American, isn’t constricted to the paint-by-numbers expectations. There’s a susurration of food condiment successful a broadside of greenish beans. Gentle stracciatella gets funkified with black-olive caramel and wisps of orangish bottarga. What look similar fluffy small zeppole are really bulb rings, with a zippy pinkish condiment of bomba chiles and aioli. Crab salad, served connected ice, with a halo of Club crackers, calls backmost to a mid-century supper club. The triangolini, three-sided pasta envelopes stuffed with artichokes, are astir comically enormous; a specified 4 to an bid is much than plenty. Some dishes don’t rather unrecorded up to their large ideas: a cookware of mussels steamed with chickpeas and spicy ’nduja arrived a small connected the adust side, and a Caesar salad, topped with crunchy bits of anchovy, the lettuce blackened connected the grill, was blobbily overdressed. But adjacent the breadstuff basket, the instauration of the pastry cook Amanda Perdomo, is thing of a riot, which connected my visits contained 2 olive-studded wedges of focaccia and 2 tiny, butter-glossed Parker House rolls, yielding and yeasty and drowning successful shaved parmigiano.

One of the astir tangibly old-fashioned things astir JR & Son is its dimness: the building, connected a premier country spot, has conscionable a fewer tiny windows. As some a supper nine and a section dive, it was a spot meant for being wrong of, not looking retired from. In the early-dinner hours, earlier nightfall, achromatic slashes of sunlight gaffe done cracks successful the horizontal blinds and play done the dusky interior similar a laser show. The updated country has retained a patina of honest, unrelenting use, traces of thousands of past nights out. The squeak of the booths, the clink of the Nick and Nora glasses erstwhile your Martini arrives—they’re not illusions oregon re-creations. The spaghetti and meatballs person a retro appeal—spaghetti, you brainsick bastard, making a well-deserved instrumentality to the ranks of superior pasta—but the toothsome noodles, made daily, sensation some a 100 years aged and calved today.