Flowering in Nomad
RESTAURANTS • First Person
It’s always a little surprising to emerge from the subway at 28th and Broadway in the middle of a full-blown Restaurant Neighborhood. Just a short walk from the station, across what was a dining desert as recently as the late aughts, there’s Andrew Carmellini’s Café Carmellini, Markus Glocker’s Koloman, and José Andrés’s Zaytinya — all glistening, ambitious hotel restaurants. (See also: The Ned, with a passable club restaurant where fine dining pioneer The Nomad once stood.)
Across from Carmellini and nestled between a sushi chain and an old-school trattoria, lies Lola’s, this spring’s worthy entrant on the scene.
Looks here are deceiving. Design-wise, it’s nothing fancy, with wooden tables running the length of the room and walls lacking decor, save lighting. But as we took in the scene from the back of the narrow, deep dining room, the cocktail list immediately demonstrate the more-than-meets-the-eye here, including a Carolina Old Fashioned made with bourbon and hot honey, and a drink called Leche de Tigre, which mixes mezcal with ceviche juice to create something extremely subtle and very delicious — exactly what I want to be drinking as the real New York City spring finally arrives.
As that spin on the old fashioned suggests, the food at Lola’s mixes traditions from chef Suzanne Cupp’s South Carolina roots and pan-Asian cooking. (Cupps herself is of Filipino-American heritage.) Crab-stuffed littleneck clams hit our table first, followed by lettuce wraps with fried tilefish with kohlrabi slaw and jalapeno tartar, both excellent. The ‘Union Square Bento’ that came next brought forth three separate plates of broccolini, cabbage pancakes, and crispy potatoes, all delicious.
Were Carmellini to serve that dish, it would likely come in a custom, hand-carved box, perhaps made from wood imported from the Tuscan hills. The absence of such a flourish here is a hint that this restaurant isn’t being opened with resources to spare. But the love is real. Throughout our meal, we watched the chef ferry dishes to diners’ tables, and for our mains — seared yellowfin tuna in a Thai curry, and crispy chicken thighs (a great take on fried chicken, served with hot honey and vinegar on the side) — Cupps dropped them off herself and said hello.
Lola’s is obviously a labor of love; it’s her first solo venture following stints as head chef 232 Bleecker and Untitled at the Whitney. Talking to the chef, we gestured to the front of the restaurant, where the floor-to-ceiling windows stare directly at Carmellini’s fine dining temple. Cupps graciously told us that she likes the way the archways of her restaurant’s windows mirror those stone arches of the grander building across the street. In Nomad’s modern age of gilded dining, how can you not want to root for her? –Lockhart Steele
→ Lola’s (Nomad) • 2 West 28th St • Tues-Sat 5-10p • Reserve.