Where Dinnertime and Showtime Mingle
Julien
Jourdes for The New York Times
Projection screens surround diners in the back room at Monkey
Town.
By PETER MEEHAN
Published: December 21, 2005
THIS weekend, at the culmination of Monkey Town's "porn
week," there will be a double feature to go with dinner
in the restaurant's back room. It is a rare opportunity
for diners to assess the comparative virtues of homemade
movies featuring Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton on gigantic
projection screens while dining and reclining on bedlike
couches.
Part video parlor but all restaurant, Monkey Town is nothing
if not unique. Montgomery Knott came up with the formula
in 2003 when he rented a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
to house a video installation of his own. He persuaded some
good friends of his to cook and serve food. Among them was
Coleman Lee Foster, who was cooking at Chanterelle at the
time.
Events there featured video art or live music or, on one
occasion, the combination of "America's Funniest Pet
Videos" (played at one-third speed), dinner and hot
stone massages. They proved popular enough that Mr. Knott
and his partners decided to invest in a permanent home.
That home is a converted garage on the East River end of
North Third Street in Williamsburg. The back room, lined
with daybeds and four projection screens, is a more professional,
permanent version of the original, which was on Leonard
Street. (A schedule with movie times and program descriptions
is at monkeytownhq.com.) The front room, with a huge jungle
mural on one wall, a series of God's eyes ornaments on another
and an oversize chandelier, is free of performance: it's
a dining room. (On some nights diners can shave a few dollars
off the bill by weaving God's eyes for the wall during their
meal.)
It was a daring step for the group to take. It is one thing
to cook food that pleases when most of a diner's attention
is absorbed in a sensory-saturating environment; it is quite
another to make it work when the food is the star attraction.
To his credit, a good deal of Mr. Foster's cooking is worth
the attention.
He has billed the inventive, quirky menu at Monkey Town
as "classic dishes from a country that doesn't exist."
His meatballs earn my nomination for the national dish.
A set of three arrives on shiso leaves ($7), which your
jumpsuit-clad waiter will instruct you to eat along with
the meatballs. The tidy little panko-coated and deep-fried
meatballs, which are dotted through with cashews and dried
apricots and spiked with a hint of kaffir lime, teeter on
the edge of excess but don't go overboard.
An appetizer of fried fish batons ($7) is served with two
dipping sauces that rope in almost as many ingredients as
the meatballs to a similarly direct and controlled effect.
One is a rosewater yogurt tartar sauce, the other a yuzu
aioli.
Not all the international ingredient wrangling works.
The promise of a hybrid posole-miso soup ($6) sounds too
good, too rich, to be true, and it is. The result is soupy
in a way that neither posole nor miso soup regularly is:
watery and unfocused. It is the taste of an unrealized idea.
But for every misfire there are plenty of dishes that hit
their mark: unctuously tender and deeply flavored braised
short ribs ($14) over fried oatmeal cakes; Mediterranean-leaning
braised squid in couscous ($12) with pine nuts, raisins
and bonito flakes.
Grilled striped bass ($19) is firm and moist, and complemented,
not dominated, by a pistachio-herb crust. It is served with
gingered red cabbage and perfectly roasted cubes of sweet
potato that are at once salty and sweet, crispy outside
and tender within. The dish has a little too much going
on, but too much of a good thing can be hard to argue with.
The two desserts on the menu at the moment have a little
too much of one thing going on: Indian spices. The milk
chocolate curry mousse ($6) has a dusty turmeric aftertaste,
though the chickpea brittle it comes with is not without
charm; the cardamom in the crust of a rose and pomegranate
cheesecake ($7) overwhelms the rest of the ingredients.
As much of Williamsburg steadily marches on toward its fate
of high-rises and higher rents, it is heartening to see
a good-humored arty project like Monkey Town put down roots,
even more so on account of its adventurous and often rewarding
cooking.
Monkey Town
58 North Third Street (Wythe Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn;
(718) 384-1369.
BEST DISHES Curry fish fry; kaffir lime meatballs; braised
squid; grilled striped bass; braised short ribs; pickled
vegetables.
PRICE RANGE Starters, $6 to $8; main courses, $10 to $19;
sides, $4; desserts, $6 to $7.
Julien
Jourdes for The New York Times