Terroir

The original Terroir was conceived as a clubby annex to chef Marco Canora and co-owner Paul Grieco’s restaurant Hearth. But Terroir Tribeca is a larger, stand-alone operation, with 65 seats (all at various bars and dining counters), an expanded menu, and a darkly polished, bottle-lined interior that gives the room a subterranean Bat Cave feeling even on the brightest summer evenings. Canora, who ran the kitchen for Tom Colicchio at Craft, is one of the city’s masters of Italian cooking. But like lots of master chefs, he’s been cultivating a more populist small-plates repertoire lately, one designed to facilitate the consumption of beer, profitable cocktails, and, of course, wine. There are fourteen types of cheese available at the new Terroir outlet (compared with eight at the original); a profusion of sandwiches, salads, and assorted finger foods (try the fried risotto balls with oxtail); and even a steak entrée, cut from dry-aged Creekstone beef. Like the original Terroir, the menu at Terroir Tribeca is an antic document filled with numerous sections and subsections (there are eight), along with a tasting option of unspecified price and content called “Just Put Your Ass in the Seat and Let Us Feed You.” This food isn’t designed to be transcendent, but if you choose wisely, it’s possible to put together a decent meal. The tasters at my table enjoyed the frisée salad (interspersed with shreds of crispy duck confit and shallots) and the lamb sausage (under Fried Stuff), which the kitchen wraps in little packets of frizzled sage. The bruschetta selection includes elegant, tea-sandwich-size wheels of toast topped with whipped lardo or rich nodules of bone marrow and garlic chives. The excellent sandwich list has been expanded to include a toasty, upmarket Reuben ($11). And if you’re in the mood for a more substantial feast, I suggest the veal meatballs (softened with ricotta) or the steak, which is a relative bargain at $20. Canora isn’t in the kitchen at Terroir Tribeca on a daily basis, of course. That responsibility falls to chef John Lomanto, who does an admirable job working in a space only slightly larger than a mop closet. But the wine is procured (and sometimes poured) by Grieco himself, whose list is a testament to the inherently subjective (yes, quirky) side of the sommelier’s trade. You can get the latest in box wines at Terroir Tribeca, a well-chosen but not inexpensive selection of sparkling whites (only eight cost under $100), and a bottle of what Grieco considers to be the greatest Italian wine ever made (Sassicaia Tenuta San Guido ’85) for $1,900. But his real mania lately has been for Rieslings. The wine takes up fourteen pages of the list (including one devoted to why “Obama Needs a Glass of Riesling”), and until September 22, it’s the only white wine the restaurant is serving. If you happen to enjoy Rieslings (I do), this quixotic policy is not such a bad thing. If you don’t, pay your bill and leave as quietly as you can.

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