Kurve
We love great design in restaurants, but we also like great food. Unfortunately, Kurve, the new Thai restaurant in New York’s East Village offers quirky, over-the-top design, but unremarkable food.
The restaurant has been ridiculed for months in food blogs for delaying its opening a few times, opening, closing, opening again, and then 86ing half the menu. On the night of our experience, the Dim Sum menu was completely unavailable, and they were out of two of the items we ordered from the rest of the menu. Not the most auspicious opening for a restaurant, especially one whose prices and attitude seems to hint towards upscale.
The space’s design has also attracted its fair share of critics. Karim Rashid’s pink and white bubble-gum aesthetic is interesting to say the least. The prominent colors here are pink and white, with curvy walls, giant glass windows overlooking 2nd Avenue, and TV screens streaming psychedelic images. We can’t say we felt comfortable sitting here; the plastic chairs are certainly not of the “upscale” quality and the overall decor feels cold and unwelcoming, especially when the room is empty (sadly, most of the night, and most of the times we pass by). However, we do give mad props to Rashid’s daring inventiveness, and wish more restauranteurs would be adventurous with their spaces. This is a unique space, and even though it feels like we’ve seen this before (probably in the late 90s), it’s still a place where unusual design disrupts diners’ expectations.
The food is another matter altogether. We feel bad doing negative reviews, but we also love food too much to not mention how underwhelming each item was. The edamame felt like it was reheated in the microwave and quickly tossed in a pan with way too much oil, the Thai “nachos” was a silly, unsuccessful concept: a platefull of prawn crackers with a brown dipping sauce aptly described as “shrimp and some onions.” The salmon-wrapped larb duck must be one of the worse platings we’ve seen recently: a pile of minced duck meat surrounded by salmon sashimi sitting atop a sad leaf of lettuce with a hard-boiled egg on the side; and this for $14. The main courses were not much better: the red chili curry was a bunch of fried red snapper in a light red curry sauce with no vegetables, nestled inside the deep-fried carcuss of the fish, head and all! If that’s not unappetizing, we don’t know what is.
Though we were royally disappointed by the food, we found desserts to be a pleasant surprise, with a delcious Thai take on carrot cake, and a magnificent Thai Iced Tea-flavored ice cream. We would return just for that. And drinks were special as well, with another Thai Iced Tea concoction (this one of the alcoholic variety) winning us over.
We wonder whether the fact that desserts and drinks were created by outside consultants (desserts by a P*ong veteran, drinks by Sasha Petraske) has anything to do with their success. Perhaps what Kurve needs is some outside consultants for its food.
Social currency: Inventive design is gaining ground even in the conservative New York restaurant scene, but we’d love to have it be combined with great food.
Tags: Restaurant
This article was posted by Stephan Paschalides on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Dining & Nightlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
