This is Melissa Clark’s first review as an interim restaurant critic, along with Priya Krishna, for The New York Times.
My first thought as the waiter slid a plate of stir-fried noodles in front of me at Lola’s was, I can make this at home. Noodles seared hot and fast with vegetables, a dash of soy sauce and a cube of Japanese curry? For even a moderately motivated home cook, that’s just Tuesday.
It took a single bite to prove me wrong.
The handmade noodles, golden from fresh yolks and earthy from einkorn flour, were wide and springy, with a nutty chew I’d hardly ever experienced, let alone achieved. The curry sauce buzzed with turmeric and freshly ground spices. And the whole thing was topped with ginger-marinated pole beans, silky bok choy and crispy browned morsels that turned out to be fried Yukon Gold potatoes — a nod to the soft tubers typically found in a Japanese curry, but taken to a crunchier extreme.
Each bite built on the previous one, by turns savory, tangy and succulent, creating a quietly mesmerizing crescendo. It was the kind of dish any home cook could relate to, with its homey noodles and farmers’ market vegetables. It’s just that most of us could never reach this high.
Nearly the whole menu at Lola’s is like that. Comforting and familiar, it’s based on the kind of local, seasonal produce I always cook with — yet energized by acrobatic twists and tweaks that pivot gracefully from a solid technical grounding. There’s a BLT, topped with the ripest, juiciest summer tomatoes imaginable, then bolstered by sweet and tangy bacon jam. Roasted carrots spiced with garam masala are spooned over a rich yogurt, and accompanied by warm, fluffy naan. Wilted vinegared cabbage, as soft and ruffled as a lady’s handkerchief, is draped gently over coconut okonomiyaki.
This menu is also a well-timed reminder that a superb restaurant meal doesn’t need the likes of dried shrimp floss or fermented local pineapple weed to wow you. Lola’s dazzles with a cabbage leaf and a noodle.
She opened Lola’s (along with the general manager, Nick Salinger) on West 28th Street in April. The narrow dining room, whose noise-boosting concrete floors lead to an open kitchen further amplified by shiny green tile, can feel like a cocktail party in a subway corridor. It’s one of those lean-in, cup-your-ears kinds of places, but in a convivial way.
“Lola” is a Tagalog word meaning grandmother. But Ms. Cupps isn’t telling the archetypal back story in which a chef learns to cook at a grandmother’s knee. Instead, she wanted to honor the bravery of her grandmother Annunciasion Rocamora Paraiso, during World War II, when she fled the Philippines with her three young children.
Ms. Cupps’s education in a variety of Asian cuisines dates from her time working in professional kitchens alongside Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Taiwanese chefs. These influences are all over the vegetable-driven menu, along with nods to the South, where she grew up.
They’re there in her stunning Carolina Gold rice bowl, composed like a Japanese chirashi: Delicate petals of lemongrass-cured Montauk fluke are dabbed with yuzu-kosho-marinated purple daikon and glowing orange beads of trout roe that pop in the mouth. And you taste those threads in the classic Korean pairing of gochujang and beef that inflects Ms. Cupps’s nubby beef tartare, softened with sticky grains of black barley and suffused with the gentle, sweet heat of the chile paste.
Ms. Cupps’s childhood in South Carolina figures into dishes like a pimento cheese ball thickly coated in chopped, toasted pecans. It’s very pleasant to nibble with cocktails, though the housemade crackers on the side lack the compelling sweetness of Wheat Thins, the preferred sidekick of the American cheese ball.
The chef’s expert melding of influences is better displayed in the Paraiso salad, a delightful riff on the iceberg original that Ms. Cupps’s mother used to serve, but fancified with ranch dressing, a fluffy mound of Little Gem lettuces and crumbled Martin’s pretzels, all from the nearby Union Square Greenmarket, where Ms. Cupps says she gets 90 percent of her produce in summer.
During her days at Untitled, she earned a reputation for fruit and vegetable wizardry, which is on vivid display in the Union Square Bento Box, an ever-changing combination of small dishes that flaunts the best and ripest local produce. That’s where that extraordinary cabbage appeared, alongside a bowl of summer squash cooked just enough to remain snappy but tender, and swirled with chile crisp, as well as a corn-and-potato hash that was both creamy and crispy.
All the fish is local, too, and as I recently reported, fresh, local fish is exceedingly hard to find even in New York City. At Lola’s, you can be sure that the fluke in the rice bowl was caught off Long Island right before meeting its marinade.
Ditto the tilefish. The species may be less familiar to home cooks, but the white, firm fillets are as mild and succulent as halibut. Ms. Cupps dredges them in a mix of rice flour and cornstarch before frying, which gives them crunch without any gluten. (All of the fried foods are coated that way to keep the fryer gluten-free.) The chunks of fried fish are then slicked with jalapeño tartar sauce, giving distinct fish-taco vibes but with lettuce instead of tortillas.
The three meatier, heavier dishes on Lola’s menu are less exceptional. The fried chicken with coconut vinegar, the Southern chopped pork with peaches, and the wan disc of boneless short ribs with hakurei turnips and a punchless salsa verde all felt as if they’d sneaked in from another restaurant. Although technically correct, they lacked the wild spark of the fish and vegetable dishes.
The whimsy and brilliance return with the desserts. There’s an oversize buckwheat chocolate chip cookie with a salty edge, served warm with shots of sweetened, oolong-infused milk. Consider ordering an extra one to bring home. There’s also a rich, bittersweet black sesame cake that lights up the same part of the brain as chocolate peanut butter cups but with a grown-up, smoky edge. And the stone-fruit cobbler with blue cornmeal was so homey and comforting that my friend said it seemed like the sort of thing I’d bake at home.
“But it’s better, of course,” she added, taking the last bite.
