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.
