From Burgers to Sundaes, the Loyal Plays to the Crowd

Restaurant Review
By PETE WELLS DEC. 26, 2017
Usually, I can take or leave the slice of tomato that comes with almost every burger in America.
The tomato at John Fraser’s latest restaurant, the Loyal, is the first one I’ve ever met that helps
the burger so much that it becomes the whole point.
Mr. Fraser calls it a “22-step tomato.” And thereby hangs a tale, no doubt, but in the interest of
time let’s skip to the finished product: a peeled plum tomato collapsed down to a red cushion that
more or less covers the patty. It’s juicy but not gushy, tart and sweet and complex, so it does
some of the work normally done by ketchup, but it’s more dynamic and delicious.
You could eat it on its own, but it completes the somewhat austere flavor of the beef from a
Piedmontese cattle breed. Even under a melted sheet of Comté, the patty is not as woozily rich as
many contemporary chef-burgers. In all, it’s an ingenious notion from a chef who is on his fourth
current restaurant and seems to be in no imminent danger of running out of ideas.
The Loyal switched on the lights over its red awning on Bleecker Street in September. Unlike the
last two places Mr. Fraser opened, which have themes — Nix is vegetarian and Narcissa’s menu
revolves around the rotisserie — the Loyal is a free-for-all. It has one of those overpopulated
menus that borrows from brasseries, trattorias and mainstream American taverns. Cold seafood
and snack sections run in a skinny column on the left side, across from a long scroll of
appetizers, pastas and main courses. All this may cause eye fatigue long before you get to the
crawl of side dishes at the bottom of the page.
The something-for-everybody menu works, in the sense that by around 6:30 p.m. it starts to
appear as if everybody has decided to eat there at once: bachelorette-party celebrators in plastic
tiaras; people who look like artists and people who look like art collectors; older couples gaping
in amusement at younger couples who have no idea they’re being gaped at.
“What brings all these people here?” somebody at my table asked a server.
She thought about it and shrugged. “Michelin-star chef?”
One of Mr. Fraser’s two stars went to Nix and the other to Dovetail, his first restaurant as chef
and owner, and his most formal. The Loyal is slightly formal itself. Wine bottles rest on polished
steel coasters, and servers sweep crumbs from the white tablecloths after every course. Home
Studios designed the dining room after the style of a 1950s nightclub, with leather booths and
banquettes and one round table up front half-secluded in a cove of mirrors and marble that looks
as if it is reserved for Walter Winchell.

The formality is a peculiarly high-decibel variety. Enhanced by clever but not overly wonky
cocktails, people strain to talk over music that is never soft, even early at night before the room
fills up. At times I wanted to stuff my ears with the Parker House rolls, and at other times, like
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when Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock rolled into “It Takes Two,” I almost thought the noise was
necessary for the interior to make sense.
Starting with chilled seafood fits the retro mood of the Loyal. It’s always smart to scoop up bay
scallops when they are in their short season, especially as they are done at the Loyal, lounging in
their shells in a pool of blood orange-ginger juice that you could drink by the glassful. When
scallop season ends, the lobster tail dressed in smoked tomato sauce would make a fine
consolation prize, as would the sweet, unrubbery shrimp in a cocktail sauce that leans heavily on
Old Bay.
The snacks are all over the map. Some borrow from Japan, like the soft-cooked eggs in the style
of a ramen shop with red lids of jellied chile oil or the beech mushrooms, fried tempura style,
wonderful even if their horseradish-cream sauce wasn’t quite an ideal match. Others come from
nearer to home.
Molding a pâté of chicken liver so it looks like a stick of butter, then serving it on a glass butter
dish, is undeniably a bid for Instagram stardom, but the port wine syrup that surrounded it was so
bright and fruity that I couldn’t be grumpy about it.
Mr. Fraser is very skilled at getting vegetables to do things they’re not normally inclined to do.
Steamed avocado with quinoa sounds like a dish you’d feed your enemies, but while it was on
the menu I loved the way it almost melted into its spicy green chermoula sauce. Chayote, rarely
an extrovert, got the extra spark it needed from an orange scribble of paprika-piquillo sauce.
As partner for a bowl of polenta with truffles, broccoli pesto was unexpectedly sensible. A less
eccentric idea, capellini with artichokes, still pulled off some surprises because Mr. Fraser got
such bright and lively flavor out of the artichokes.
With the main courses, the meal tends to settle down into a routine of standard meats and fish,
enlivened by the occasional firecracker side dish. Lamb chops traveled with a terrific rice pilaf,
pink with harissa. The burger took not just the 22-step tomato but also a little saucer of potato
“tots,” large dice fried in duck fat. The starch for the hanger steak was potato purée with lobster
gravy, which may not be the highest use of lobster but is almost certainly the highest use of
gravy.
Knowing that early in his career Mr. Fraser worked in an ice-cream parlor makes the heavy
presence of sundaes on the dessert menu seem less pandering than it would in another restaurant.
Or so I thought until our server told us, in breathy tones, about the “sundae set and candy shop,”
a pile of Neapolitan ice cream that comes with Pixy Stix, Chupa Chups, Gummi Bears, gold
coins, M&Ms, chocolate pebbles and other sugar bombs.

It would be a big hit with children, preferably somebody else’s. My ageless companions enjoyed
the Sonoma Harvest sundae instead, with brûléed figs and bits of honeycomb around yogurt and
Concord grape sorbets. There’s a very clever baked alaska, too; the toasted meringue is filled
with graham-cracker ice cream sitting on a base of chocolate cake, so it tastes like s’mores.

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The California-based artist Lukas Geronimas has been gradually filling the dining room walls
with small, enigmatic paintings over the past few months. The ones toward the front could be
illustrations from a book for children about friendly relations among humans, vegetables and
farm animals. Toward the restrooms, the relations seem more than friendly. They’d probably be
a hit with somebody else’s children, too.