Suba--Manhattan

212.982.5714

So here is my problem with ultra chic, sparkling new, saccharine restaurants: they intimidate me. It’s not their polished sterility, nor their eclectic cuisine, or well thought out décor, I actually think that it’s the staff. They hold themselves with the air that they some how out interviewed thousands of other village-voice applicants on some Wednesday morning, and earned the right to be snooty. Now Suba, a new ultra-chic, sparkling new, restaurant on the Lower East Side, did not have particularly snooty staff, but it didn’t matter, it wanted to be place like those other places so that’s good enough for me.

In all honesty I wasn’t intimidated as usual because this restaurant’s image hinged on a gimmick, somehow making the vibe more palatable, in that you now pity the staff the same way you pity the teenage kid operating the kiddy rides at Six Flags. You know he wants to run the roller coasters that have a steady stream of cute high-school chics with their vato boyfriends, but alas he’s sequestered to the bird cage and swinging toddlers around at the pace of a brisk walk. The gimmick behind Suba, which I’m sure means something in some other language –you look it up—is that the main dining room sits on a pool. If it didn’t have that, I don’t know why they would charge such high prices. And as far as gimmicks go it isn’t bad, I mean, the lighting on the waves gives the restaurant a cool glowy effect. But like most gimmicks though, this one wasn’t thought all the way through as the first thing our host, waiter, and busboy said to us was watch your stuff. Cool gimmick, where the fuck are the hooks?

The staff was relatively knowledgeable, though the manager thought my tie didn’t look nice so how knowledgeable could he really be? The wine list was long and impressive, and our waiter was all over it, which is a big plus (refer to paragraph one). The tapas cuisine, however, was completely hit or miss. I could go into detail here, but it’s tapas. Tapas to me is like sushi. You’re going to order the same thing at every tapas place, so why go into detail about what I ordered, since my staple tapas order consists of dates and bacon, meatballs, and sautéed shrimp? If the food is good for my standby tapas order, then it is safe to presume it will be for yours. My meatballs were overcooked. I don’t think I had dates or shrimp. Another thing I don’t understand about tapas is the food intentionally delayed or is the chef just an asshole? I mean, is there ever a possibility that a tapas chef might actually get everything to the table at the exact same time? Or is it some sort of chef intuition, that she plans certain things to go with other certain things, and each particular order creates a different algorithm of timing? Or, is the chef a chef, in that she does whatever she pleases because she thinks her job is harder than anyone else’s? It doesn’t really matter, because aside from the scientific oddity of choice number two no answer is a good one. And that’s why the Spanish empire tumbled; they never knew what they were getting next.

So, I digress. Suba is an interesting place. It’s one of those bespectacled places in NYC that you’d take your easily impressed out of town friends to show off how cool a restaurant could look. And because your friends are so impressionable, they’d understand why things were overcooked, or the staff was snooty, or your hand bag fell into an over chlorinated Petri dish.