Frank Bruni gave Suba - a Spanish-y type place on Ludlow, deep in the heart of hipster Disneyland - two stars this week. He prefaced his review with a very sad story of culinary triumph over tragedy, namely chef Seamus Mullen's battle with rheumatoid arthritis while still managing to run a downtown hot spot. So that slightly dampens about what I am about to say next: Suba is one of the worst restaurants I have ever been too. Mr. Bruni! They KNOW WHO YOU ARE and of course made you something wonderful and worthy of your overwritten prose. For the rest of us, here's what you can really expect. I have been to Suba on two recent occasions, in early May and again in late July. Both times I sat in the beautiful but under-ventilated subterranean room, not in the splish splash room, where the menu warns you they are not responsible for your shit falling into the open pools of water. The bathrooms - also a telltale of a restaurant's general quality - were smelly and messy.
On our first visit the service was intermittently rude and haughty from the maitre'd and just erratic and bad from the server, who forgot dishes and drinks, got orders wrong, had a badditude, etc...we had much better service on our second visit, when we went as a group and the server deftly dealt with our group of 10.
However, for the price points - $10 to $15 for a small tapas - you need to expect greatness from Suba. And the food quite simply was not good. On our Saturday night group dinner the server informed us they were out of a number of items, including the crispy calamari and lamb meatballs, which were two of the most appealing tapas selections. We ordered a poached farm egg, the crudo - which the server forgot - the cod fish jowls and an entree of arroz negro ($26) to share between two people. Nothing was served at an appropriate temperature or really had any taste. It looked ok - but everything tasted bland. The one stand out was the deliciously fatty cod jowls. The arroz negro was especially disappointing - too sticky and dense and was flavorless, even with a squirt of sea urchin on top (one bite of flavor a full entree does not make.) As our party finished there was a call to jaunt over to the creperie, "To finally get something to eat."
Sorry, Mr. Bruni, you've been had. In comparison to my lovely recent dinner at The Modern Cafe, which is similar in tone, structure and ambiance, Suba is a disaster. Dinner dollars aren't cheap and Suba is hugely disappointing - the clientele also, I should point out, seem to be a hodge podge of cocky young bankers and the anorexics who love them.
Where: 109 Ludlow Street, 212-982-5714
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