River Café: Of Thyme and the River

Forsythia bushes may never bloom in the concrete dock of the River Café. But spring can always be custom-delivered. Now pots of spiky branches confetti’d with yellow press against the entrance – as if they were planted there. Tulips and azaleas line the gangway into the dining room. Floral explosions guard the floating barge, lashed into submission as the tide churns below. It’s time for ramps, the season’s elusive green onion. And for asparagus , the first peas, and earthy morels.

New Yorkers may take it for granted. Our sentimental nook under the crooning Brooklyn Bridge, reserved for ritual celebrations, an ardent hideaway for romance and seduction. But for the casually reckless traveler, it’s a must. Hopscotch the room to the babble of French, German, Japanese – not the usual Eurotwits we find flipping their ashes into the palms at Le Colonial. Here they are dressed (not draped, pierced, or bedraggled), calmly dropping $90 or $100 each for dinner, a bargain compared with Paris or Tokyo.

They’ve been everywhere, so chef Rick Laakkonen’s early-spring pea soup with frog’s legs in neat little ovals doesn’t faze them. And they appreciate the kaffir nage bathing his ginger-poached salmon. Even to me, wishing the neighborhood trattoria weren’t so greedy, wailing over $31 veal chops all over town, the River Café’s toll – the $58 prix fixe dinner, even the $78 tasting – now seems less arrogant.

Consider the gifts with you purchase. The theater of tugs and barges, dark and mysterious against Emerald Oz. The towers of gold and Lalique, even the neon. Ms. Liberty clear and insistent. The piano that blurs the din. Puddles of light and flowers to console those an aisle removed from the window. The feeling that the world is your oyster. And oysters on ice, too, with a sprinkle of Banyuls mignonette. Plated still lifes so beautiful that even those of us bored with carved-radish dragons and marzipan fedoras cry out, “Look at this quick – before I destroy it.”

No matter the hour or season – blinding summer sun, mauve-and-orange sunset rouging the granite, snow-piled ice floes smacking the moorings, even lunch with rain veiling the towers – it is magical. True, the service this afternoon is as dour as the skies; “bread for the table,” an Italian guest is forced to demand. But at night it is prompt, deft, intelligent, each dish described as the waiter surrenders it: the vinegar’s age, the provenance of the onion. And if that pretension disrupts your sensuous fork-play, a cease-fire is easily arranged.

I’m not sure I wouldn’t feel cheated sitting against the wall, back to the river, with only a strip of mirror to catch the Staten Island ferry lumbering into port. But from the first small giveaway – brandade with deep-fried capers, or rabbit rillettes, or caponata on toast – to the farewell goodies, lemon tartlets, candied orange peel, and lush chocolates, the conspiracy of indulgence is disarming.

Start with grilled octopus and manila clams, mixed with white beans and saffron-tinted pastina in a tomato-lemon-thyme broth. Or a bizarre toss of Savoy-cabbage risotto with lobster and cod cheek in a perfume of truffle oil, best of the appetizers (add $6 to the $58 prix fixe). Flying-fish roe painted green by wasabi surrounds ribbons of tuna and salmon tartare with a crunch of radish and a kick of daikon sprouts. Shards of aged goat cheese girdle an elegant stack of string beans, frisée, and duck cracklings in a lemon vinaigrette.

One evening the exquisitely crisped black sea bass on Swiss chard is the winner. On another, it’s cumin-and-pepper-rubbed squab with a white cheese flan, cipollini onions, hominy, and okra. The duck preparation changes – the thigh crackling in confit that I loved so much -- is disappointing a few days later, chopped into smithereens with the newest garnish, ramp-wrapped artichokes. Rare tuna is curiously bland, needing all the help it can get from salty fennel puree and the tang of aged balsamic vinegar.

Yes, the Four Seasons celebrated American cooking long before all-star teams of native-born whisks made it a cult. Bu the mushrooming obsession for American products took root at the River Café not long after Alice Waters, in Berkeley, was growing her own baby lettuces and persuading farmers to raise prepubescent carrots. Here, Michael “Buzzy” O’Keefe spent twelve years battling the city bureaucracy to build his café, with Americana the theme.

O’Keefe dispatched a retired chef known as Mr. Fish to the Everglades to contract for stone crab and cod cheeks. The game warden of the Rockefeller estate in Pocantino Hills sent venison. A policeman pal and his dad fished for scallops in Peconic bay. An assistant’s father made Smithfield hams, and bacon without nitrates, in Virginia. Chef Larry Forgione, recruited from the kitchen of Regine’s, presented his first menu to Buzzy in French. But Forgione quickly got the drift, and soon O’Keefe was subsidizing an upstate farmer to start a free-range-chicken ranch. The menu reads like a gazetteer. And this kitchen, with its own view of the skyline, became an academy of American cookery, producing a crop of masters: Forgione, Charles Palmer, David Burke.

Now, an ’89 alumnus, Rick Laakkonen, has returned – from France, Petrossian, and Luxe. He has the text and the tricks but, so far, not the soul. Oxtail and Swiss-chard pansotti with wild mushrooms and leeks in beef bouillon sounds wonderful, but it’s not. Lunchtime’s codfish cakes are listless and bland, though the corn-potato-and-lobster chowder is a rich reminder of how fabulous cream can be. My fussy gourmand friends who travel strictly by the stomach needn’t come here for gastronomic epiphany. Laakkonen is still new and fine-tuning. He’s a skilled craftsman. Will he ever be an artist?

The cellar is equipped for grand gestures, with rare old Cabernets, many from the private stocks of great vineyards, the ’74 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard in magnum and Robert Mondavi’s ’74 reserve among them. If your budget can’t swing a Corton-Charlemagne, a Gaya Barbaresco, Penfolds fabled Grand Hermitage, or an ’85 Petrus, there are choices from $18, half-bottles if you are two wanting first a white, then a red, then perhaps a Sauterne. And the $20 Shiraz from Rosemount was a hit with our crew.

That very first night, the desserts, most of them chocolate, are dazzling. The next day a new pastry chef arrives. At lunch, his sweet tabbouleh with tropical fruit in a handsome cookie cage strikes me as putting-on-the-ditz. Amazingly, the next night, the fruit is more pungent and citric, and the wretched thing is delicious. I almost always hate soufflés, too – so fluffy and sappy. But not Kurt Walwrath’s deeply intense bitter chocolate with cool berry sauce. It’s as stirring as the seriously chocolate marquise crowned with a silhouette of the bridge.

Buzzy himself was out in the kitchen this morning making sure the profile matched. “I don’t want it looking like the Verrazano,” he explains. Now if City Hall will only wake up and approve his latest waterside dream – he’s determined to build the Brooklyn Chocolate Factory in a warehouse next door, with a small retail shop to market the River Café’s irresistible bonbons. “The city has already spent a fortune to build a cocoa pier in Brooklyn,” O’Keefe says. “I plan to give it a workout.”