Everyone’s Eating at Bridges

Once and again, favor settles onto a certain restaurant, subject to a logic only its own. The diners’ diners, the sport eaters, and the socially fluent suddenly agree that a new place is “It,” and renown gathers like a heat dome. At the moment, Bridges is that place. My phone buzzes with renewed interest from long-lost friends: “Hi my hun!!” a pal freshly returned from Paris texted. “Do you know who to email for bridges resy?” “Oh, it’s a great place for a first date,” a MoMA curator I met out and about told me, “that you want to be seen on.” On two recent visits, I ran into the same food-world stalwart, once with friends and once entertaining a table of 20-something food influencers, one capping his clout with a YES CHEF trucker hat.

Chef, in this case, is Sam Lawrence, an Australian who cut his teeth at Estela and grew to become the culinary director for Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant group. It’s no insult to say that Bridges is recognizably Estela-ish, a callback to an era of designer dining that borrowed less from the lusty bistro playbook of recent years and angled itself in a cooler, more clinical direction. The best dishes at Estela, and here at Bridges, have the feel of well-designed science experiments, small, spare arrangements reduced to their essentials, underpromising and overdelivering. Even the menu styles, with their allusive/elusive poetry, delivered in floating lists (“fried arroz negro, squid, and romesco” at Estela, “sweetbreads, leeks, and mustard” at Bridges) that raise more questions than they answer, play to the theme. There’s a chilly chic to Bridges’ Billy Cotton–designed dining room with its chrome-and-concrete scheme — a nod to the Brutalism of the nearby Chatham Towers.

Lawrence’s cooking is harder to pin down. The chef himself notes French technique and Basque flavors that seem to be in the city’s ether right now. (Basque at Bridges, Basque at Aaron Crowder’s Eel Bar, Basque at the small but bustling Mesón in Brooklyn …) There’s Japanese (umeboshi in the béarnaise), Cantonese (XO-style sauce in the pommes purées), and Australian (a dessert of meringue with lemon and coffee), too.

Where it all comes together, it sings. My table gobbled up an oddly delicious appetizer of sardine and anchovy on little batons of sourdough toast. It’s not complicated cookery, but it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to double down on oily fishiness and a chefly eye on textures to keep it more interesting than what might otherwise have been a throwaway hors d’oeuvre: the voluptuous chew of escabeche’d sardine, oil-fattened anchovy, and a sliver of bull’s horn pepper with the same half-yielding bite. That pliant texture is one that Lawrence returns to again and again. It’s not cooked so much as cured: literally in the case of cured tuna wrapped around plump dates (devils on seahorseback?), more figuratively in a luxe platter of crab legs half-poached in scented butter in their own cracked shells.

Much attention has been paid to Bridges’ Comté tart, which would be not much more than a cousin of quiche had the various textures not been sanded or puffed: the shell a crumbling, dessertlike malted-barley shortcrust, the filling mousse-y and egg-risen. “I’d take a wedding cake of that!” one of my fellow diners cried — hold the vin jaune-doused mushrooms on top. It rhymed, texturally, with a chawanmushi-style custard, dotted with lobes of uni and a little pâté of raw shrimp.

If talk of texture and raw shrimp whets your appetite, Bridges is a restaurant for you. You don’t have to be brave, exactly, but you do have to be game. There’s not a single vegetarian option among the main courses — at least not when I was there, though Bridges has been iterating admirably, and new dishes have appeared and disappeared in its opening weeks — and the menu is not quite so easygoing and sop-centric as at the many kid’s-menus-for-adults establishments currently thronged around town. I could quibble with this or that. Most of the dishes are pretty brown, and there’s not much in the way of fresh vegetables. (A squash salad’s sprigs of puntarelle are a little cruciferous, and Little Gems with Asian pear and trout roe are a bit expendable.) But the big swings at Bridges are more compelling than a line out the door for nouveau pizza rolls. You should try the soy-glazed sweetbreads. You should try a Macedonian Riesling — by the glass!

Ambition is sexy. The room is sexy. How often will the hot spot also be as uncompromising as this? Once and again, most likely, but not more than that. That’s the thing about bridges: They’re going somewhere.