Is Gjelina, with its 3 places, a series now? It’s definitely greater than only a eating place. Lett left the Gjelina Team in 2019, promoting his stake again to the founder, Fran Camaj (whose mom is the eating place’s namesake). The corporate now operates a resort, a takeaway, a home-goods retailer, a flower store, and a basis devoted to vocational coaching in hospitality, plus Gjusta, a prepared-foods store, which Camaj advised The New Yorker he’s making plans to convey to New York, too.
Regardless that explicit pieces on Gjelina’s menu have modified over time since Lett’s departure, the kitchens, now below the stewardship of the chief chef Juan Hernandez, nonetheless hew to Lett’s philosophies and formulation. The dishes now not really feel as progressive as they did a decade and a part in the past—just about the whole lot that the eating place serves may just come instantly from Lett’s “Gjelina” cookbook, from 2015, a fantastic quantity stuffed with intimidatingly cross-referenced recipes and sub-recipes. However knocking off issues for Gjelina’s persevered determination to Brussels sprouts and pestos is a bit bit like disregarding “Hamlet” for being stuffed with clichés.
The menu at Gjelina is outlined via market-driven abundance.
The kitchen at Gjelina New York, naturally, is open, located at the back of a eating bar, and is visually punctuated via the orange flames of a wood-burning oven. The meals is simply as placing, and simply as assertive, as it’s in California, with saturated flavors deployed in a calculated stability. A lush lamb tartare is spiced with North African baharat paste as resonant and lingering as a foghorn. A bouquet of long-stemmed broccolini is charred and frizzy across the edges and wearing a French dressing simply moderately softened via the tangy sweetness of black garlic. A twirl of saffron-infused spaghetti is tossed in a sauce of confited tomatoes and bottarga that burns with a red-chile warmth. You order the roasted fennel since you love fennel; you shut your eyes in rapture as a result of the onion agrodolce on most sensible, which seems to be what fennel has at all times wanted, at the side of a sprinkle of togarashi, and a couple of highest supremes of orange, for just right measure.
One fresh night time, I counted fifty-two pieces at the dinner menu, no longer together with muffins. The servers weren’t particularly useful at navigating the plenitude. “What sounds just right to you?” appears to be their go-to word, and honest sufficient: when a cafe has been doing its factor this smartly, for this lengthy, there truly isn’t any improper method to pass. “Must we get the fingerling candy potatoes, or the pinto potato?” my good friend inquired on one seek advice from, bearing in mind one of the spud choices (4, together with a pizza crowned with skinny rounds of potato, with taleggio and garlic). We went with the fingerlings—a row of blistered wedges with an fringe of smoke and caramel, served in a pool of highly spiced yogurt below a bath of finely slivered scallions. What sounded just right was once certainly just right; one of the crucial guarantees of Gjelina is that what sounds just right at all times shall be.
What isn’t like the unique, noticeably and considerably, is, partially, the bodily area. L.A. sprawls; New York soars. This Gjelina is narrower, extra vertical, a stack of boxy parlors with a scattering of street-facing home windows and no recent air to talk of. Sunny café vibes in a living room—faded wooden, minimalist shapes—give method to moodier areas inside of: a big upstairs eating room, with the heavy wood bar operating alongside one wall; a quieter, upholstered eating house past that. At dinnertime, the eating place is busy, however no longer slammed; the group appears to be in large part made up of other people with gorgeous hair and compellingly hideous footwear. In comparison with the L.A. Gjelina, the New York outpost, in all probability inevitably, has little sense of position.
