* Monkey Town
Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
Eclectic
58 North Third Street
(Bedford Stop on L train)
PHONE: 718.384.1369
CARDS: All Major
AVERAGE ENTREE: Starters, $6 to $8; main courses, $10 to $19; sides, $4; desserts, $6 to $7
HOURS: Seven Days a Week, 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.
BOOZE: Full bar
MAP: Click Here
MENU: Click Here
WEB: Click Here
THEY SAY: Our new location at 58 N 3rd St, adds a front, non-performance dining room and bar, while our back dining room maintains our original configuration: 4 screens, communal setting, 6.1 surround sound, intimate capacity: 32
We have created a permanent space that privileges video art, short films, feature-length films and documentaries, outside traditional galleries, movie theaters, museums, or clubs. We will also host live music, dance and other original performance. We will commission surround sound installations and continue our 'Bathroom Sound Series'. We plan to establish an artist residency. We serve experimental cuisine and classic dishes from a country that doesn’t exist. Every cuisine and every ingredient are in play. The laboratory is open.
FROM NYTIMES: THIS weekend, at the culmination of Monkey Town's "porn week," there will be a double feature to go with dinner in the restaurant's back room. It is a rare opportunity for diners to assess the comparative virtues of homemade movies featuring Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton on gigantic projection screens while dining and reclining on bedlike couches.Part video parlor but all restaurant, Monkey Town is nothing if not unique. Montgomery Knott came up with the formula in 2003 when he rented a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to house a video installation of his own. He persuaded some good friends of his to cook and serve food. Among them was Coleman Lee Foster, who was cooking at Chanterelle at the time.
Events there featured video art or live music or, on one occasion, the combination of "America's Funniest Pet Videos" (played at one-third speed), dinner and hot stone massages. They proved popular enough that Mr. Knott and his partners decided to invest in a permanent home.
That home is a converted garage on the East River end of North Third Street in Williamsburg. The back room, lined with daybeds and four projection screens, is a more professional, permanent version of the original, which was on Leonard Street. (A schedule with movie times and program descriptions is at monkeytownhq.com.) The front room, with a huge jungle mural on one wall, a series of God's eyes ornaments on another and an oversize chandelier, is free of performance: it's a dining room. (On some nights diners can shave a few dollars off the bill by weaving God's eyes for the wall during their meal.)
It was a daring step for the group to take. It is one thing to cook food that pleases when most of a diner's attention is absorbed in a sensory-saturating environment; it is quite another to make it work when the food is the star attraction. To his credit, a good deal of Mr. Foster's cooking is worth the attention.
He has billed the inventive, quirky menu at Monkey Town as "classic dishes from a country that doesn't exist." His meatballs earn my nomination for the national dish. A set of three arrives on shiso leaves ($7), which your jumpsuit-clad waiter will instruct you to eat along with the meatballs. The tidy little panko-coated and deep-fried meatballs, which are dotted through with cashews and dried apricots and spiked with a hint of kaffir lime, teeter on the edge of excess but don't go overboard.
An appetizer of fried fish batons ($7) is served with two dipping sauces that rope in almost as many ingredients as the meatballs to a similarly direct and controlled effect. One is a rosewater yogurt tartar sauce, the other a yuzu aioli.
Not all the international ingredient wrangling works.
The promise of a hybrid posole-miso soup ($6) sounds too good, too rich, to be true, and it is. The result is soupy in a way that neither posole nor miso soup regularly is: watery and unfocused. It is the taste of an unrealized idea.
But for every misfire there are plenty of dishes that hit their mark: unctuously tender and deeply flavored braised short ribs ($14) over fried oatmeal cakes; Mediterranean-leaning braised squid in couscous ($12) with pine nuts, raisins and bonito flakes.
Grilled striped bass ($19) is firm and moist, and complemented, not dominated, by a pistachio-herb crust. It is served with gingered red cabbage and perfectly roasted cubes of sweet potato that are at once salty and sweet, crispy outside and tender within. The dish has a little too much going on, but too much of a good thing can be hard to argue with.
The two desserts on the menu at the moment have a little too much of one thing going on: Indian spices. The milk chocolate curry mousse ($6) has a dusty turmeric aftertaste, though the chickpea brittle it comes with is not without charm; the cardamom in the crust of a rose and pomegranate cheesecake ($7) overwhelms the rest of the ingredients.
As much of Williamsburg steadily marches on toward its fate of high-rises and higher rents, it is heartening to see a good-humored arty project like Monkey Town put down roots, even more so on account of its adventurous and often rewarding cooking.
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