Fat Radish Visited 8/6/2011 3 Forks

Fat Radish 17 Orchard St., (between Canal St & Hester St), New York, NY 10002

I'm a bit torn about the rating that I gave Fat Radish.  Even though this blog is a reflection of my opinion I do value the opinions of my dinner guests, who are usually very good friends of mine.  For my meal at Fat Radish, I actually really liked my dish but my friend Lav didn't like hers at all and so to give the overall meal and restaurant a more comprehensive review, I took her thoughts and opinions into consideration.

I did really like the space and decor of the restaurant, it was very airy and I loved the exposed brick.  Similar to Public, it had this edgy industrial feel to it.  The focus of the food here is more vegetable focused but it did have several fish dishes and the burger is apparently also pretty famous there.  Lav and I split the grilled cheese appetizer ($6), she got the heirloom bean salad ($12) and the sweet pea summer pie ($14) while I got the green curried monkfish ($21).  The grilled cheese looked like one long sourdough bread cut into 4 narrow pieces.  It was pretty good, perfectly crispy bread and the cheese (wasn't sure what kind of cheese it was, but it was white and sharp) wasn't very gooey...it definitely was a more "upscale" grilled cheese, not the kind you made in college with white bread and american cheese (although sometimes those totally hit the spot).  I also took a bite of Lav's bean salad and it was very fresh tasting. They used beautifully colored beans and they were crisp and not over done.

Then we waited a while for our main entrees to show up.  When they finally came, I was actually impressed with the size of the dishes.  My monkfish came on a huge plate of wild rice and green curry sauce with a yogurt raita on the side.  I immediately poured the entire raita on top of the curry...not sure why they offer it on the side since it is almost an essential part of the dish.  I actually really enjoyed the monkfish.  There were several pieces of nice thick cuts of the fish and it just paired really well with the medium spicy curry and wild rice (which was almost al dente but not too undercooked). It was super filling and I was genuinely surprised at how much I liked it.  Unfortunately, Lav's dish did not fair as well.  She got the pea pot pie which had a huge puffy pastry topping.  Inside were peas, creme fraiche and mint so it had a lot of potential, but Lav said it just had no flavor or taste at all.  Bummer.  Meanwhile, our waiter during that time period went completely MIA.  We sat with empty plates for quite a while and since we were trying to get to a movie, we really need the service to be on point.  We finally had to flag him down to order dessert and since we were worried he would go missing again, we asked for the check at the same time.

For dessert we got the cookie plate ($9) which was just meh.  I generally am not a huge cookie person and usually find cookie plates in restaurants to be lacking, but since they only had 2 dessert choices (the other was a panna cotta) we opted to give it a try.  There were 3 kinds of cookies: oatmeal whoopie pie, a shredded coconut cookie and a lemon shortbread.  None of them were amazing, although if I had to pick one I liked the oatmeal whoopie pie on the best since it had fresh cream in the middle.

If I had to rate this just on my monkfish dish, I would say 4 forks.  But coupled with lacking service, bad dessert and flavorless pot pie, I have to say 3 forks instead.  I would still tell people to give it a try but to order carefully.  Total bill $70 for two (without tip).