Intrepid Playfulness at Nudibranch

The compact East Village restaurant Nudibranch is named for the soft-bodied gastropods, a category of sea slugs, that Jeff Kim, a chef and co-founder, spied when diving off the coast of Indonesia. To Kim, a former Momofuku busser who met his co-founders at kitchens around New York, nudibranchs—of which there are more than three thousand species—slink along the ocean floor with the same pluck that food establishments must harness when navigating the city’s brackish depths. “Sea slugs are colorful and diverse and beautiful,” Kim said. “That seemed symbolic when we started brainstorming about the kind of food we wanted to create.”

Nudibranchs can also be strange and are sometimes required to adapt in odd situations. When it comes to devising dishes for a post-pandemic(ish) prix-fixe menu in a time when food prices are high and consumer confidence is low, the path can be perilous. That may be why Kim and his partners offer as many as five choices in each of the menu’s three sections. When asked for recommendations, the phrase my waiter favored was “choose your own adventure.” And fortune favors the bold. You might be tempted to go with the hamachi or the scallop—both are plated with enough sculptural verve to evoke the restaurant’s namesake mollusk—but the frog leg is where your voyage should start. I was briefly worried that the legs, battered and fried to a golden crisp, would have the mundanity of a chicken cutlet. Fortunately, the exterior crunch, aided by lemongrass-ginger paste and lime, heightened a journey to tenderness; the morsels of meat were both soft and sublimely springy.

One of the delights of Nudibranch is its intrepid playfulness. Although the dishes tend to be Asian-inflected (Kim and his partners are Asian American), Kim describes the menu’s influences as “crisscrossed New York.” Take the shrimp, which at first tastes like the Cantonese mainstay he tao xia (walnut shrimp). At Nudibranch, walnuts are swapped for jazzy gems of granola that start off faintly sweet before crackling into heat and funk, a counterbalance to the richness of the aioli-coated shrimp. Another winner is Nudibranch’s attempt to create the “most cauliflowery of cauliflower dishes,” preparing the vegetable three ways—roasted, puréed, and pickled. The roasted cauliflower resembles dry-fried cauliflower, a Sichuan classic, typically served in an iron wok over a chafing flame. The genius here is the substitution, for oversalted pork belly in the traditional recipe, of fat-gushing Chinese sausage; augmented by Vietnamese fish sauce, the florets ripple with both tangy sweetness and earthy umami.

One dish that falls flat is the turkey neck, which initially excited me because of my predilection for Chinese chili-oil-slicked duck neck. Alas, the turkey neck, piled high with mole, crema, and sweet potato, was dry, stringy, and gamy. The night I visited with friends, one joked, “Do you think this is what nudibranch tastes like?” Another, who checked Google, found that some of the mollusks may be edible when roasted or boiled, and read aloud nudibranch factoids, including that their memorable colors and unusual forms sometimes help them blend into their surroundings and other times do the exact opposite.

Before this could be discussed further, dessert arrived. Of two choices, neither of which is included with the prix fixe, go for the semifreddo: frozen coconut custard topped with a crumble of cranberry-and-black-pepper cookie. Kim told me that he likes pairing pepper with fruit because it’s a novel way of engineering a savory dessert, which would conventionally use salt. One diner voiced skepticism for the way that pinpricks of pepper riled up his taste buds rather than soothing them, as he expected a dessert to do. His friend agreed; her mouth was beginning to feel like it was dancing on tippy-toes. The verdict might have satisfied a nudibranch: “I’m not sure if I like it, but I know I won’t forget it.” (Prix-fixe dinner $75.) ♦