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| - In the movie version of "American Psycho," the title character was shown dining at some of the more ludicrous yuppie high-concept restaurants of late-1980s New York.
Is the Butcher and the Rye a Patrick Bateman restaurant for the 2010s? It is about as production-designed as any restaurant you'll see, a two-story approximation of some Wild West saloon of the near apocalyptic future. There's a giant wall of brown liquor--probably three hundreds bottles' worth--that stretches so high that ladders are required to reach many of them. That wall is mightily impressive from both a visual and connoisseur's viewpoint. And the dim, low-ceilinged barroom upstairs where we were seated definitely achieves some of the rough-hewn Western atmosphere the owners were shooting for.
The Butcher and the Rye comes from a pretty common template these days: A temple of over-the-top carnivorousness, it's devoted to many varieties of animal flesh prepared in a variety of ways, accompanied by a conspicuous focus on brown liquor and craft cocktails. When we male metrosexual dweebuses are reduced by 21st century society to walking around while tapping on our little mini-keyboards, a place like the Butcher and the Rye apparently is supposed to allow us to reassert our Manly Virtues. Or something.
Anyway, I like to eat meat (within reason), and the Butcher and the Rye seemed like a great place to do it. (Sure, there are non-meat items on the menu, but you come to a place like this to eat meat.) Upon reading the menu, it seemed like an ideal one for shared-plates dining, but (as suggested further below) our server was of little help in steering us toward a coherent line-up of food. We tried to put one together anyway, with mixed results.
The charcuterie board was a good start--a generous variety of both cured meats and pickled veggies, plus plenty of crostini. Some of the meats stood out more than others. "Pig candy" was pork belly with house kimchi and offered a well-balanced if somewhat generic Korean flavor profile; it was good, but not amazingly so. For a meat-centric place, the cauliflower, which came with roasted faro and romanesco, was excellent, and came in a healthy portion. We were the most excited about the "Sunday Gravy"--which came with lamb neck, tomatoes, olive oil, and ricotta, plus more crostini--but while it had deep flavor, texturally it was a bit of a mushy mess.
All in all, the food was good, but not quite at the level suggested by the reviews. I should note that a night earlier we were at the superb Morcilla, which although in roughly the same price range was easily a notch or two better, food-wise. Yes, I recognize that I am comparing apples and oranges, food-wise; they're very different restaurants. But maybe that negatively shaded my impression here.
Biggest problem on this evening, though, was our cold-fish main server. She had the full-sleeve tattoo that is de rigueur for her line of work in 2016--I cast zero judgment on that--but otherwise had the appearance, attitude, and demeanor of a snooty sorority vice-president or junior account executive. From the standpoint of taking our orders and getting them brought to the table, she did a reasonably effective job (and the guy who brought our big charcuterie plate patiently explained everything on it). But from the standpoint of informatively answering just two or three very simple questions about the menu or the very basic courtesy of making us feel welcome, she certainly did not. (As in all such judgments, I recognize that people have bad days, and maybe she was having one.)
Call it a hair short of three-and-a-half.
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