Baldwin's Restaurant a New York Times Critic's Pick
Zoli, the latest restaurant venture from chef Ned Baldwin '94, was reviewed in The New York Times.
Writes Ligaya Mishan in her review for The New York Times:
"Zoli is a bit of an oddball, which makes it immediately more interesting than most restaurants.
"It has the veneer of a grit-chic spot, sheathed in cinder block under a yearning, church-high ceiling that is almost Californian in its wealth of space, on a tumbleweed block of warehouses in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The restaurant is part of the Amant contemporary art complex — but adjacent, not inside it, with a separate entrance and mostly nonaligned hours.
"Three enormous fish tanks, 500 gallons each, loom in the dining room. They are not utilitarian, like the tanks you find at seafood restaurants in Chinatown, stocked with doomed eels and lobsters. Nor are they innocently ornamental. The French artist Pierre Huyghe has lined them with sludge and debris, in homage to the mucky bottom of English Kills, the malodorous nearby tributary of the Superfund-designated Newtown Creek.
"Three monumental fish tanks, an installation by the French artist Pierre Huyghe, house fluorescent GloFish and scuttling horseshoe crabs.
"Denizens of these tanks will never end up on your plate. To the left flit electric yellow GloFish — a trademark, not a species — engineered with a gene for fluorescence. To the right are horseshoe crabs, the ocean’s great survivors, whose anatomy has gone essentially unchanged for nearly half a billion years.
"The seafood that dominates the menu is more familiar, until it’s not. The chef, Ned Baldwin, is a fisherman and the son of a fisherman, and brings that patience, discipline and brine-in-the-blood to the kitchen. Everything is precise in texture, like a spear of charred squid, tender but resilient, over tomatillos cooked down to tartness and smoke, or fleshy mussels with just the right bounce, in a paprika-brash marinade leavened by daubs of cool aioli."