As you all know very well (or should by now), Mike and I are total Top Chef sluts. So when we were in search of a dinner location, we decided to try Top Chef’s Hung Huynh’s (Season 3 winner) new restaurant in Meatpacking. Catch is a 3 floor restaurant, with the top floor dedicated to rooftop drinking. It is owned by Mark Birnbaum (some of you will see this as funny as I do) and Eugene Remm and is the third restaurant in the EMM Group (the other 2 are Abe & Arthur’s and Lexington Brass) but I know them better as the owners of Tenjune (and many other night clubs).
The address is 21 Ninth Ave, but the entrance is actually around the corner on 13th street next to some construction and only identified by a C with an anchor above the door. You feel lucky to have found it, then you get into a completely unidentified elevator bank where you look around for a sign. You try to keep up appearances (after all, you are in the Meatpacking district), but deep down inside you can’t help but wonder why it’s so trendy to not tell people where to get into your business. Lucky for us, someone else came in and immediately hit Floor 2… which opens up to a very modern, very Meatpacking space.
I absolutely loved the weird fish in a suit on the menu cover. Hipster? Sure! But it gave me a chuckle. I immediately read the request for no flash photography, so apologies in advance for these dark iPhone photos!
We started with oysters (I have been on a kick lately) and they were very good. Not Imperial No. 9 good, but good.
We then had The Catch Roll, which is crab, salmon, and miso honey… with just a touch of awesome. The sweetness of the miso honey was absolutely perfect on the roll.
There was nothing not to like about this. The textures, the flavors… it all came together perfectly. I wanted to lick the miso honey off the plate but I refrained…
Next up we tried the Macaroni and Lobster Cream. You know everything about macaroni and cheese that is good in the world? This was all of that with lobster and a slight crunch on top. It was heaven.
We also tried the White Flatbread with clams, parmesan, and garlic. This was good, but not great. If this was all I ate here, I would be disappointed. It just wasn’t clammy enough. The crust was nice and crispy, the garlic and cheese were good, but I was expecting more clam.
For our entree, we split the Scallop & Cauliflower which came with pistacchio and tamarind brown butter. This was one of the most unique scallops dishes I have ever had. I love scallops, so I eat them a lot, but they get pretty basic. They taste so good just simply seared, that they really don’t NEED anything else. This was a very happy addition, however, as it added to the flavor without overpowering it. Awesomely delicious.
The dessert menu looked so scrumptious that we just had to try SOMETHING.
So we opted for the peanut butter cup souffle.
When it came, the souffle was hot and domed (perfectly cooked) and then picked up what I think was ice cream off the plate and dropped it into the center.
I was a bit worried about this, since really a souffle is good because of the texture, but this actually cooled it down so we could eat it and didn’t detract from the flavor. I will say, however, that it is a souffle. A peanut butter souffle. I was hoping for a bit more chocolate in it. It was still good. But only if you like souffles (I like them… but I don’t LOVE them).
What I did love, however, was the peanut butter popsicles (tasted like fantastic peanut butter gelato dipped in a hardened chocolate shell) and the little square chocolate cups filled with ground peanuts and what I think was peanut butter, sugar, and maybe some honey. Scrum-diddly-umptuous.
Overall, the food here was spectacular. Very unique flavor combinations and artfully put together.
The one drawback, however, was our waiter. He was everything that people hate about the Meatpacking district. He was snooty, inattentive, and downright douchey. He looked down his nose at us (I think because I was taking pictures) and made 0 effort to deliver even the most basic service. For instance, he came to take orders from the tables around us on 3 separate occasions, all of whom sat after we did, each time barely spending a moment to put a “1 second” finger up towards us as he didn’t even make eye contact. It took a good 30 minutes before he took our order, we somehow never got bread (pretty sure everyone else did), and when he came to finally take it, he made us feel as though we were entirely inconveniencing him. It was a shame he was so bad since everything else was so good.
But the food was absolutely worth it. It became obvious why Hung won Top Chef… his food tastes as good as it looks.
Total Nom Points: 8.5 out of 10
Tags: catch, clam pizza, fish, hung catch, hung from top chef's new restaurant, hung huynh, hung huynh catch, lobster mac and cheese, meatpacking district, meatpacking seafood, oysters, peanut butter cup souffle, restaurant review, restaurants, scallops, sushi, top chef, top chef catch
