Restaurant Review: Crevette Makes Great Seafood Look Easy

Not everything at Crevette is effortless perfection. The Dover sole, a pricey fish that seems to be experiencing a renaissance in New York’s more high-end dining rooms, arrives traditionally dressed in capers and béarnaise, the body de-finned and de-tailed, but otherwise intact. A server gave a brief set of verbal instructions for D.I.Y. filleting, and then disappeared, leaving us to it. Dover sole is one of the easier fish to take apart, but the task nevertheless requires both skill and confidence, of which I have only the latter; luckily, I was dining with a friend in possession of both, but his dexterous manipulations somewhat anticlimactically revealed an underdone interior. I wonder if the restaurant might be better served doing the knife work themselves, offstage; then again, the pared-down presentation would feel at odds with the restaurant’s whole vibe of gentleman-fisherman exuberance. But that’s a minor quibble about a kitchen that otherwise exudes competence. The seafood-averse would be remiss to overlook the chicken, a handsome presentation of a deboned half bird rubbed with spices that give the skin a dark, burnished oxblood hue. Each slice is topped with a dollop of bright green persillade, vibrant with parsley; the meat rests atop a pool of jus so deep and sticky it flirts with demiglace. It arrives with a side plate of ultra-skinny frites that were thrown into the fryer along with a handful of green herbs, a crunchy tangle purpose-made for mopping up the sauce. It’s one of the better birds in town, hiding in plain sight at a seafood restaurant.

In its playful sophistication and unapologetic refinement, Crevette speaks to yet another trend in New York dining: it is a restaurant for grownups—prioritizing subtlety over flash, thoughtfulness over grandstanding. There’s no TikTok-bait visual spectacle, no straining for virality—just focussed, attractive expertise. And, as the weather warms, I suspect Crevette will only grow more appealing. Soon enough, your Instagram feed will begin its annual transformation into a carrousel of other people’s European vacations—friends you haven’t spoken to since college suddenly posting sun-drenched photos from terrace restaurants in Positano, colleagues somehow enjoying three-hour lunches in Provence despite ostensibly having the same amount of P.T.O. as you. At some point between Memorial Day and Labor Day, you’ll find yourself hunched over your phone in your un-air-conditioned apartment, scrolling through yet another story of someone’s “little boat day in Sicily,” and that’s when Crevette’s particular charms will feel most urgent. A sidewalk table, an afternoon spent lingering over a glass of pastis or a strikingly lovely (and non-alcoholic) saffron-white Negroni—it’ll almost be enough to make you forget that you’re stuck in boring old New York.

Perhaps the most illuminating item on Crevette’s menu is the Sicilian sashimi: a plate of expertly sliced raw fish (on my visits, the lineup was yellowfin tuna, scallop, ocean trout, and hamachi) dressed with good olive oil, flaky sea salt, capers, and finely minced red onion and chives, and served with a wedge of lemon—a crucial final ingredient. It’s the sort of dish that’s almost embarrassingly simple, something you could absolutely make yourself at home, with access to a good fishmonger and a decent knife. And yet. That same assembly consumed at your kitchen counter, with your browning bananas in the fruit bowl and your laptop open on the couch, simply cannot compete. The preparation is transformed not by some arcane technique or secret ingredient but by the wizardry of context—the way it arrives after those chilled mussels with their punchy salsa brava, in a room of airy ceilings and candlelight and the starfield of street lamps and brake lights filtering through those massive windows, served on a perfectly chilled plate by—and this is the most important part—someone who isn’t you. As with all the best restaurant meals, you’re not paying for the recipe; you’re paying for the spell it casts when consumed in this particular space, at this particular remove from home. Is that worth the markup? In the cold light of your apartment, perhaps not. But within Crevette’s carefully crafted universe, absolutely. ♦