cherrypatter nyc
and great ideas for what to do too!
matsugen: good value at an unlikely spot
high end japanese is something i am a huge fan of, though i don’t often get to indulge that particular craving given the incredible costs associated with such a splurge. so while maybe some day i will go to masa, i am not expecting it to be until the kids are finished with college (that will be a while). so i was pretty excited to hear that matsugen was offering a pretty reasonable (considering their usual prices) prix fixe meal at $35 a head.
at matsugen, the kitchen is run by the matsushita brothers, with fancy restaurants in tokyo and honolulu, whose specialty is hand made soba although matsugen seems to offer a super wide range of all other japanese food which is a little disconcerting (it’s no honmura an). our prix fixe meal included a soba option. i chose the cold seiro soba with sesame sauce and j had the soba served with the hot chicken and scallion broth. i thought my cold noodles were perfect. a nice portion, excellent tasting slightly salty sauce that adhered well to the noodles, and the noodles themselves were light and not at all gummy. the hot noodles seemed less special — something we could get nearly anywhere and if that were the case i’d rather go some place like soba-ya.
in addition to the soba, the prix fixe included five other decent size servings field greens with maine lobster (and they didn’t skimp on the lobster), miso soup with fried tofu, sashimi, shrimp, tempura and vanilla caramel pudding for dessert. surprisingly, j and i both thought that the tempura was the best thing on the menu. the shrimp and vegetables, which included a pumpkin, were so lightly fried and fresh that allowed the flavors to shine through. and while we though that the sashimi was quite good, others have not been so thrilled especially when paying full market price.
matsugen’s space made us somewhat nostalgic, as the restaurant was designed originally by richard meier for jean-georges vongerichten’s (who is also minimally involved in matsugen) not so successful fancy chinese spot 66. the space has changed a little but remains serene and very white and they still have those huge fishtanks.
and while we weren’t starving at the end of our meal (and j. definitely needed a bit more to eat that night), we were very satisfied, and happy with the outing and deemed it a good value. the only downside of our meal was our waiter. he was in the pushy department leading us to get the edamame which were good but not something we would have ordered. i was disappointed to see this behavior at a restaurant of this caliber. i mean really, we were there at 6 p.m. so i think he should have just been happy to have some customers at that point. nevertheless, i’m hopeful that was just a random misstep and that if we feel like really splurging, matsugen may be a good place to do it as long as we can get that prix fixe. matsugen, 241 church street at leonard street, manhattan, new york, .