The Brooklyn Papers / Greg Mango

Chef Ian Grant's bento box is an enticing assortment of (clockwise from top right) soy glazed Atlantic salmon, sweet and sour red cabbage, forbidden black rice with apples and apricots, and baby bok choy.

Tools

Print this story

Facebook this

Tweet this

Digg this

Del.icio.us

Email to a friend

Your name

Your email address

Recipients’ email addresses (Up to ten, separated by commas.)

Everything about Fort Greene’s Restaurant Gia is wonderfully contradictory.

From the outside, the two floors of the restaurant look starkly modern, like an annex of the Whitney Museum. The interior reflects the work of a Sybarite, but one who understands restraint.

Blame this wonderful oxymoron on Ian A. Grant, Gia’s owner and chef, who designed the decor as well as the menu. The restaurant opened in February and its name is a shuffling of Grant’s initials.

The restaurant’s wood floors are lacquered a gleaming black. Bookcases filled with art-filled tomes line one wall; a long limestone bar cruises the other. Wide stairs lead to the second floor dining room with its floor-to-ceiling window. Candlelit, black mahogany tables are laid with heavy silverware. The walls are tinted a pale lavender. Jazz plays quietly in the background.

In the hands of someone with a smaller vision, the room could be blunt and cold, but not here. Instead, Grant has created a serene, plush, romantic dining room, a tailor-made backdrop for the simply plated, vibrant flavors of his cooking.

The service is pampering, with maitre d’ Antonio guiding diners through the courses, and a waitress serving and replenishing rolls throughout the meal. A warm finger bowl, complete with a slice of lemon, is presented after the entree and before dessert. It’s the type of service one might expect from such high-brow restaurants as Fulton Landing’s River Cafe, and Manhattan’s Bouley and Jean-Georges, which makes sense as Grant cooked for all three.

His stints behind the stove of Jean-Georges and a "wonderful year" in Tuscany, where he had the luxury of "time to reflect on cooking," inform his "American with global touches" cuisine.

Those "global touches" are French, with a few Asian and Middle Eastern ingredients that make their mark subtly.

To begin, a waitress brings the tray of rolls and places a small, leaf-shaped dish of butter flavored with parsley on the table. They’re very good rolls, the seven-grain with walnuts, dense and chewy; the white dinner roll was just a white dinner roll, but a nicely flaky one.

The bread service, while pleasant, doesn’t clue diners into the excitement that awaits. Sauvignon Blanc transforms shallots and white truffle oil into a velvety sauce that bathes four coaster-size sea scallops, their edges seared to a golden crisp. It’s a heart-thumping, conversation stopper of a dish.

The fish salad looks like the vertical food constructions that were popular some time ago, but it’s really a down-home picnic on a plate. Crisp, fried red snapper perches like a baseball cap on a cylinder of potato salad mixed with tart squares of apple. It’s a fun dish to eat - all the textures running bases in the mouth - but the potato salad needed salt.

Grant occasionally sends out an amuse-bouche (a small appetizer) to lucky diners. I got lucky. This two-bite dynamo consisted of a brittle little tuile, a thin crisp cookie, in this case made from Parmesan. Goat cheese whipped to the consistency of meringue and flavored with wasabi filled the cup. Crunchy beads of caviar, no larger than pen dots, crowned the tuile. It was rich, undeniably delicious with the clean, sea taste of the caviar playing havoc with the salty Parmesan.

Seafood lovers will be pleased with Grant’s fish-heavy selection of entrees. He pairs bronzini (sea bass) with an unctuous rice that has absorbed the coconut milk in which it is cooked, then adds baby bok choy to the plate. It’s a quietly flavored and pleasing trio of tastes.

The striped bass, served over a crisp corn cake with dollops of pungent ginger-lime sauce can’t be faulted, yet neither of the fish dishes was as thrilling as the baby lamb chops.

Four organic chops, crusty outside and rare at the center, sat atop a silken puree of gingered sweet potatoes. Chopped red cabbage, slow-cooked in Pinot Noir and red wine vinegar, completed the dish.

Before dessert we enjoyed a glass of the Jaboulet Muscat Beaumes de Venise, 2000, a clean, light, not too sweet dessert wine that added sparkle to the end of the meal.

If requested, Grant will serve a sampling of a few of his desserts. Slices of cheesecake, chocolate cake and a frilly mixed berry tart were presented in a Japanese bento box that made each pastry look like a jewel. The best of the three was the chocolate ganache cake, which tasted intensely of bittersweet chocolate and had the texture of a steamed pudding.

Grant also offers creamy housemade ice creams in flavors like vanilla Swiss almond and chocolate orange, and sorbets that trumpet the pure, intense flavor of the fruit.

The man at the next table smiled as he watched us rave about course after course. Before he left, he leaned over and handed me his card. "CURVES," it read, "the 30-minute exercise salon." I’m planning on joining right after my next meal, or two, at Restaurant Gia.

Restaurant Gia (68 Lafayette Ave. between South Portland Avenue and South Elliott Place) accepts MasterCard, Visa and American Express. Entrees: $20-$25. Restaurant Gia is closed Mondays. For reservations, call (718) 246-1755.

©2003 Community Newspaper Group