Absolutely Fabulous Foraging, and More (and Less), On a Plate at This, the World's Coolest New Rooftop Museum Restaurant
It's all happening at NYN ESTI at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (ΕΜΣΤ)
THE ACROPOLIS VIEW IS FREE. The rest will set your palate free….
At Nyn Esti, which no one knows about yet except, it is rumored, this column and a close friend of Madonna, exciting things are happening. If after several days of pottering about the Greek capital you can’t stand the thought of one more gyro platter, welcome to foodie nirvana. No stodgy thinking allowed.
Get ready for a deep dive into a gastronomic journey. By the time I arrived, the museum was already closed, meaning a guard had to show me the way in through a side entrance to the elevator — the feel of going to a secret club in the Meatpacking District, the kind that no longer exists.
What I found was a complete habitat that reminded me of the pictures of dining rooms aboard sleek megayachts, with the floodlit Parthenon appearing to float above, just beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. Specially designed ceramics are displayed on an elongated sculptural table, beyond which is the gleaming open kitchen.
Actually, gastronomic laboratory might be a more accurate way to describe the space where the talented young chef, Stamatis Misomikes, and his culinary accomplices execute the “Biotope” menu that he named as a sort of homage to the landscapes of his native Rhodes.
Foodie fiends have probably heard of restaurants like Copenhagen’s Noma, where the fruits of botanical foraging figure prominently on the menu. There is a strong element of that here, and as Zeus is my witness, the end results are not for everybody. But there is a discovery aspect and a social one, too, a sort of modern Mediterranean take on a “Babette’s Feast.”
The tasting menus weave together different techniques with an emphasis on Greek flora and fauna: the chef incorporates products from small producers from various parts of Greece: organic vegetables from Argolida, near Epidavros; beef from Naxos; fish and seafood from the islands of Kalymnos and Rhodes; flour straight from a farm; and foraged mushrooms and wild herbs.
For Superman it was kryptonite, while for this correspondent it’s mushrooms and seafood, but cauliflower was generally substituted for the former and that worked out fine. Some seafood was presented in the form of loukoumades, fried Greek honey puffs — looked wonderful, but I had to skip it.
The debonair restaurant manager, Vasslis, and gracious Mina, a server from Alexandria (the one in Egypt), brought out small plate after small plate, each one a sort of canvas on which was placed one of Mr. Misomikes’s gastronomic installations.
Some of the dishes, not all of which I partook, included mini Greek tacos with chickpea leaf and smoked eel; doughnuts with blue crab and fava bean cream; pizzettes with crispy crust of Florina pepper, radish, granola, and basil; five-grain risotto with lightly charred squid tagliatelle; and organic greens with a scoop of feta cheese ice cream (not as bitter as it sounds) and petimezi sauce, which is a kind of grape molasses.
“Is this what they served Bezos on his yacht last summer?” someone asked aloud at one point as the table became a sea of the kinds of dishes that one could imagine to be the culinary mainstays of your typical Bond villain or tech tycoon. Yet the luxury here is more in the innovation than the price tag: a three-course menu without drinks costs about $54, while tasting menus range in price between about $60 and about $120 (without drinks).
Desserts were welcomed, if only because sugar always tastes sweet no matter how one doctors it up. One dessert involved delicate vanilla cream, green apple, and some wisps of meringue that prodded me like the memory of a French pastry. Another involved spun sugar, an exhilarating granita of red forest berries, and a thin cookie in the shape of a butterfly. (Rhodes, incidentally, has so many butterflies a valley was named after them.)
Another dining companion gave this postprandial assessment: “I think I’m drunk on food.” Like me, though, she had nothing alcoholic to drink, though the artsy cocktails do bear special mention. For one thing, next to a $40 martini, Nyn Esti’s creations are reasonable by comparison at $18.
They are fun, too, each one inspired by a well-known painting. In different company, I might have gone for a Banksy-inspired “Balloon Girl,” with Japanese whisky, salted caramel, bitters, and “acids.” Wait, who am I kidding? The “Trouble in Paradise,” inspired by the eponymous Cecily Brown tableau, had my name written all over it: dark rum, passion fruit, macadamia, more of those mysterious “acids,” cacao, and coffee.
Is all this too much flavor to process? Probably. But with no invitation to Mr. Bezos’s yacht, the mighty Koru, in my future, an evening on this Grecian roof makes for a pretty decent substitute.
This story was first published in The New York Sun