ILIS

[SethG]

So about a month ago, when ILIS held its soft-open press dinner, the experience was something like this, according to a profile in Vogue:

Ilis does not serve a tasting menu. Rather, after guests are greeted by a host, they tour the open kitchen and its four stations (two dedicated to fire and two to ice) and are shown the night’s primary ingredients. They are then seated and offered a field guide that outlines potential outcomes for their forthcoming adventure. “The menu is built from maybe 10 or 12 ingredients each day,” Refslund says. From there, the experience is a la carte (with a minimum commitment of five courses).

It goes on:

Ilis also features a series of roving carts with snacks, bountiful in nature, from seafood towers to vegetable baskets—and once again, guests can select what they want from each.

…which is all I suppose a fancy way of saying “prix fixe with supplements”

There’s also a lot about how there are no waiters, how the chefs would take the orders and deliver the food themselves from the big open kitchen. 

By the time the website went live, it appeared that minimum commitment was gone, and it was normal a la carte / tasting menu choice:

 

i mean, yes, the phrasing is all a bit silly. Apparently it took some effort to… have a regular menu. Are there still the roving carts? Who knew. 

Silliness aside, I like Refslund, I’d been looking forward to his next project. that’s what I’m there for. Of course tables were gobbled up s soon as they went live in mid-October, but I managed to snag us a prime 8:00 PM Friday slot a month out. Cool. 
 

A few days ago I got a call and an email. They’d been having some service issues. Not saying it out loud, but it was fairly easy to read between the lines that they had over-anticipated how many tables they could handle at once. Maybe not having professional waitstaff was slowing things down? Whatever the unspoken reason was, would we be amenable to changing our rez to 9:00? Sure, fine by us. We’re amenable types. 
 

So we arrive. The space is gorgeous, chic. Everything is custom by hip local artisans. It is so Greenpoint. DS & Durga soap in the bathroom with “wild Brooklyn lavender” - oo la la. 
 

We are offered seats at the bar where we can order immediately, or we can wait in the lounge and get a cocktail while we wait for our table to be ready. We choose the latter, of course, and sink into the very modern sofas. The cocktails we have (“Beet” and “Pawpaw Gimlet”) are fantastic. At some point it’s revealed that the dining room is tasting menu only now. Er… okay. I guess we’re all in, then. I ask for a bar menu to peruse, out of curiosity:

 

i can’t possibly imagine what goes into a $110 chicken. And that’s before the truffles. 
 

It dawns on me that at no point has anyone said, or has it been started anywhere, just what this tasting menu we’re in for costs. When I made the reservation, it was a la carte. And on their own website, to this very minute, it is still a la carte. Perhaps when this change happened they should have informed customers? Just a thought.

Well off we went to our table. We were offered one choice, for the main entree: whole trout, wrapped in birch bark and leaves, served with charred cabbage in a dressing with roe from “the very same trout” -  or grilled quail with mushroom jus. The former sounded more interesting to both of us (also I’d spent three nights eating pheasant earlier in the week) so trout it was. 
 

More Brooklyn artisan action - these little flatware holders with everything we’d need for the course of the meal:

Out came the first of those carts, laden with all sorts of raw seafood:

Were these supplements? No, we’re getting them all. Or one of each. Except the scallops, which we each got two of. Clams, sealed shut with beeswax and filled with a clamato to sip. Uni custard with tomato. Moon snails in potato espuma, scallops, two kinds of oysters with different dressings, a whole fluke with one side sliced into sashimi. They are certainly starting the meal strong. It all ranges from very good to excellent. Each item very different and distinct. 
 

 

The fluke was a bit much - there was as much of it as everything else combined. It was nice for a few bites but then it became kind of an obligation to finish. They needed to take the bottom half back to the kitchen to cook for another course. 

The fluke was also sitting atop a bed of ice in a basket made of a loose open-weave of twigs. You can imagine what happened to our table about five minutes in. Okay, mistakes happen.

An eel mousse with caviar and smoked quince paste follows. The texture is somewhere between marshmallow and meringue. It doesn’t especially taste like eel. In fact there’s something nutty about it. Sesame? It’s fascinating and weird and, more importantly, delicious. 

Then things became less interesting. 

Out came a scallop, diced with little citrus bits - pulp and rind - plus bits of pepper and seaweed. A sakura tea was poured over - more to warm than cook it. It was very good. It was also raw scallops and citrus, which we’d had in the first course. This was the better of the two scallop preparations, for sure, but having both on a tasting menu was not well thought out. Despite the differences in the dishes, there a sense of repetition. 
 

Moving away from the sea, a tartare of antelope was schmeared around a plate. One picked it up with thin shavings of daikon, then dragged it through a sweet sauce of which I can’t remember the details. It did involve a dusting of the shaved dried heart that is now de rigueur in all modern-rustic Scandinavian restaurants. Bison in this case, IIRC. Very good. 

The rest of the fluke returned. I guess we’re back to the sea? I mostly stopped taking pictures at this point. It was grilled. It was cooked very well. Every bite seemed to involve pulling tiny bones out of one’s mouth. I’m all for fish on the bone, diving in and getting messy. I’d happily gone to town on a tilefish head earlier in the week at Foxface. But it doesn’t work with a fluke this size so much, with the very small bones.

It was also… just a grilled fish. There was a remoulade on the side. Nothing out of the ordinary. 

A small boar chop with an internal seam of inedible soft gristle came next. A little sauce on the side. It was fine. It was gone quickly. It was a grilled piece of meat with a sauce on the side. Fine. 

Then back to the sea again - who chose the order of these dishes? Some tuna carpaccio laid on kombu and set over the grill briefly. For some reason this was served atop a sculpture of pine cones that looked like a hedgehog. The raw-ish tuna kind of stuck to the kombu and you had to peel it off like fruit roll-ups. It was gone in three or four bites. Aside from the hedgehog, not very memorable. 
 

i wish they had let us know that the menu would be 80% seafood before we’d selected the trout. I was beginning to regret that choice. And it was … a grilled trout. Which tasted like someone had dumped an entire box of Diamonds Crystal Kosher Salt on it. We sent it back. A better trout returned. It was perfect. The birch added nothing. It was the second simply grilled whole pick-out-the-bones fish we’d had. A different fish, but… come on, Mads. For fuck’s sake. You can be more creative than this. The first course proved it. 

Desserts were pleasant. Pears with sake lees ice cream and a rye porridge with chocolate and hazelnuts. 
 

A couple very good bottles of wine with dinner. Some excellent grower champagne and a ten year old natty Rhone Syrah with some forest floor mushroomy truffley funk on the nose.  Markup on the champagne list was very reasonable, under 2X in most cases. 
 

We got the bill and it was a little over $400. Wait a minute… that was maybe the cost of the beverages. Did they just comp us the entire meal for a salty fish and/or some melted ice? I signaled the waiter, a little confused. The check was handwritten. Maybe that 4 was a 9? “No, no that’s a four.” You couldn’t have comped the whole meal just for a salty fish? “Oh no, you pre-paid the meal.”

…

…

uh… I what?

“yeah, hold on” (brings out iPad) “card ending in xxxx…”

yeah, that’s my card. But wait, it was a la carte when I booked.

“Yeah, here it is… here’s the charge, two tasting menus, tax…”

i pull up my bank app, there it is.

So I made a reservation at an a la carte restaurant. Two days before dinner, apparently after switching to an all-tasting format, without informing us of the change (did we even want a tasting menu?) they just went ahead and charged my card via Resy without asking.

I mean, holy shit FUCK THAT.

And on that note, that’s the end of my review of ILIS. 

[Sneakeater]

I'm scared.

[small h]

1. I want to see this:

1 hour ago, SethG said:

a sculpture of pine cones that looked like a hedgehog

2. Although the cost sounds very reasonable, I'd still be having a word both with Resy and my credit card company.

[Steve R.]

I'm pretty sure that the $400 bill that Seth got was just for what they ordered while there (wines, etc) & that he somehow neglected to inform us what they charged on his card for the meal.  Right, Seth?  So... what did they charge your card?

[AaronS]

he doesn't say what the meal costs, and the only price you can see on resy or their website is $395 a head for thanksgiving, which is hopefully more than a friday night. it's also unclear whether the meal he got is one of the three formats mentioned on their website, although I guess it's the longer 4-8 course "we just cook for you" with more choice than that phrase implies.

Edited November 11, 2023 by AaronS

[Orik]

I think their current menu price is $195

[SethG]

4 hours ago, small h said:

1. I want to see this:

2. Although the cost sounds very reasonable, I'd still be having a word both with Resy and my credit card company.

 

3 hours ago, Steve R. said:

I'm pretty sure that the $400 bill that Seth got was just for what they ordered while there (wines, etc) & that he somehow neglected to inform us what they charged on his card for the meal.  Right, Seth?  So... what did they charge your card?

 

3 hours ago, AaronS said:

he doesn't say what the meal costs, and the only price you can see on resy or their website is $395 a head for thanksgiving, which is hopefully more than a friday night. it's also unclear whether the meal he got is one of the three formats mentioned on their website, although I guess it's the longer 4-8 course "we just cook for you" with more choice than that phrase implies.

The bill presented at the table was just for the two bottles of wine and two cocktails. (We splurged on the wine a bit) 

The cost of the tasting itself ($175pp, I think?) actually was reasonable, and we’d have happily paid that to try a new tasting place from a chef we liked. I’m just trying to figure out who in the decision making process thought it would be okay to charge people for something they hadn’t ordered without their knowledge or consent. That strikes me as insane.

If we showed up and said “oh, we don’t want a three hour tasting menu” what was going to happen? 

The meal we got was none of the  formats mentioned on the website. Nothing from the website is actually offered. There is no a la carte, except at the bar. In the main restaurant there is only a 7-8 course tasting menu.

[Wilfrid]

That is all distressing, but I do have to ask whether Sietsema could tell the difference between antelope and beef tartare.

[mongo]

the term "antelope" has no real scientific meaning and so he doesn't have to.

[Wilfrid]

“I don’t know what antelope is and it’s not my job to know.”

 

[MitchW]

Now I really miss that chicken and porridge dish from his first place here.

[Orik]

14 hours ago, Wilfrid said:

That is all distressing, but I do have to ask whether Sietsema could tell the difference between antelope and beef tartare.

pretty easy:

[GerryOlds2TheReturnofGerry]

Restaurant of the Year, apparently (though they smartly included Foxface Natural).

[backyardchef]

On 11/11/2023 at 8:06 PM, Wilfrid said:

That is all distressing, but I do have to ask whether Sietsema could tell the difference between antelope and beef tartare.

I think this should be in the "gee, I like Sietsema" thread..... I mean, "Eater Sucks but I always read it" thread. 

[backyardchef]

On 11/11/2023 at 10:25 AM, SethG said:

So about a month ago, when ILIS held its soft-open press dinner, the experience was something like this, according to a profile in Vogue:

Ilis does not serve a tasting menu. Rather, after guests are greeted by a host, they tour the open kitchen and its four stations (two dedicated to fire and two to ice) and are shown the night’s primary ingredients. They are then seated and offered a field guide that outlines potential outcomes for their forthcoming adventure. “The menu is built from maybe 10 or 12 ingredients each day,” Refslund says. From there, the experience is a la carte (with a minimum commitment of five courses).

It goes on:

Ilis also features a series of roving carts with snacks, bountiful in nature, from seafood towers to vegetable baskets—and once again, guests can select what they want from each.

…which is all I suppose a fancy way of saying “prix fixe with supplements”

There’s also a lot about how there are no waiters, how the chefs would take the orders and deliver the food themselves from the big open kitchen. 

By the time the website went live, it appeared that minimum commitment was gone, and it was normal a la carte / tasting menu choice:

 

i mean, yes, the phrasing is all a bit silly. Apparently it took some effort to… have a regular menu. Are there still the roving carts? Who knew. 

Silliness aside, I like Refslund, I’d been looking forward to his next project. that’s what I’m there for. Of course tables were gobbled up s soon as they went live in mid-October, but I managed to snag us a prime 8:00 PM Friday slot a month out. Cool. 
 

A few days ago I got a call and an email. They’d been having some service issues. Not saying it out loud, but it was fairly easy to read between the lines that they had over-anticipated how many tables they could handle at once. Maybe not having professional waitstaff was slowing things down? Whatever the unspoken reason was, would we be amenable to changing our rez to 9:00? Sure, fine by us. We’re amenable types. 
 

So we arrive. The space is gorgeous, chic. Everything is custom by hip local artisans. It is so Greenpoint. DS & Durga soap in the bathroom with “wild Brooklyn lavender” - oo la la. 
 

We are offered seats at the bar where we can order immediately, or we can wait in the lounge and get a cocktail while we wait for our table to be ready. We choose the latter, of course, and sink into the very modern sofas. The cocktails we have (“Beet” and “Pawpaw Gimlet”) are fantastic. At some point it’s revealed that the dining room is tasting menu only now. Er… okay. I guess we’re all in, then. I ask for a bar menu to peruse, out of curiosity:

 

i can’t possibly imagine what goes into a $110 chicken. And that’s before the truffles. 
 

It dawns on me that at no point has anyone said, or has it been started anywhere, just what this tasting menu we’re in for costs. When I made the reservation, it was a la carte. And on their own website, to this very minute, it is still a la carte. Perhaps when this change happened they should have informed customers? Just a thought.

Well off we went to our table. We were offered one choice, for the main entree: whole trout, wrapped in birch bark and leaves, served with charred cabbage in a dressing with roe from “the very same trout” -  or grilled quail with mushroom jus. The former sounded more interesting to both of us (also I’d spent three nights eating pheasant earlier in the week) so trout it was. 
 

More Brooklyn artisan action - these little flatware holders with everything we’d need for the course of the meal:

Out came the first of those carts, laden with all sorts of raw seafood:

Were these supplements? No, we’re getting them all. Or one of each. Except the scallops, which we each got two of. Clams, sealed shut with beeswax and filled with a clamato to sip. Uni custard with tomato. Moon snails in potato espuma, scallops, two kinds of oysters with different dressings, a whole fluke with one side sliced into sashimi. They are certainly starting the meal strong. It all ranges from very good to excellent. Each item very different and distinct. 
 

 

The fluke was a bit much - there was as much of it as everything else combined. It was nice for a few bites but then it became kind of an obligation to finish. They needed to take the bottom half back to the kitchen to cook for another course. 

The fluke was also sitting atop a bed of ice in a basket made of a loose open-weave of twigs. You can imagine what happened to our table about five minutes in. Okay, mistakes happen.

An eel mousse with caviar and smoked quince paste follows. The texture is somewhere between marshmallow and meringue. It doesn’t especially taste like eel. In fact there’s something nutty about it. Sesame? It’s fascinating and weird and, more importantly, delicious. 

Then things became less interesting. 

Out came a scallop, diced with little citrus bits - pulp and rind - plus bits of pepper and seaweed. A sakura tea was poured over - more to warm than cook it. It was very good. It was also raw scallops and citrus, which we’d had in the first course. This was the better of the two scallop preparations, for sure, but having both on a tasting menu was not well thought out. Despite the differences in the dishes, there a sense of repetition. 
 

Moving away from the sea, a tartare of antelope was schmeared around a plate. One picked it up with thin shavings of daikon, then dragged it through a sweet sauce of which I can’t remember the details. It did involve a dusting of the shaved dried heart that is now de rigueur in all modern-rustic Scandinavian restaurants. Bison in this case, IIRC. Very good. 

The rest of the fluke returned. I guess we’re back to the sea? I mostly stopped taking pictures at this point. It was grilled. It was cooked very well. Every bite seemed to involve pulling tiny bones out of one’s mouth. I’m all for fish on the bone, diving in and getting messy. I’d happily gone to town on a tilefish head earlier in the week at Foxface. But it doesn’t work with a fluke this size so much, with the very small bones.

It was also… just a grilled fish. There was a remoulade on the side. Nothing out of the ordinary. 

A small boar chop with an internal seam of inedible soft gristle came next. A little sauce on the side. It was fine. It was gone quickly. It was a grilled piece of meat with a sauce on the side. Fine. 

Then back to the sea again - who chose the order of these dishes? Some tuna carpaccio laid on kombu and set over the grill briefly. For some reason this was served atop a sculpture of pine cones that looked like a hedgehog. The raw-ish tuna kind of stuck to the kombu and you had to peel it off like fruit roll-ups. It was gone in three or four bites. Aside from the hedgehog, not very memorable. 
 

i wish they had let us know that the menu would be 80% seafood before we’d selected the trout. I was beginning to regret that choice. And it was … a grilled trout. Which tasted like someone had dumped an entire box of Diamonds Crystal Kosher Salt on it. We sent it back. A better trout returned. It was perfect. The birch added nothing. It was the second simply grilled whole pick-out-the-bones fish we’d had. A different fish, but… come on, Mads. For fuck’s sake. You can be more creative than this. The first course proved it. 

Desserts were pleasant. Pears with sake lees ice cream and a rye porridge with chocolate and hazelnuts. 
 

A couple very good bottles of wine with dinner. Some excellent grower champagne and a ten year old natty Rhone Syrah with some forest floor mushroomy truffley funk on the nose.  Markup on the champagne list was very reasonable, under 2X in most cases. 
 

We got the bill and it was a little over $400. Wait a minute… that was maybe the cost of the beverages. Did they just comp us the entire meal for a salty fish and/or some melted ice? I signaled the waiter, a little confused. The check was handwritten. Maybe that 4 was a 9? “No, no that’s a four.” You couldn’t have comped the whole meal just for a salty fish? “Oh no, you pre-paid the meal.”

…

…

uh… I what?

“yeah, hold on” (brings out iPad) “card ending in xxxx…”

yeah, that’s my card. But wait, it was a la carte when I booked.

“Yeah, here it is… here’s the charge, two tasting menus, tax…”

i pull up my bank app, there it is.

So I made a reservation at an a la carte restaurant. Two days before dinner, apparently after switching to an all-tasting format, without informing us of the change (did we even want a tasting menu?) they just went ahead and charged my card via Resy without asking.

I mean, holy shit FUCK THAT.

And on that note, that’s the end of my review of ILIS. 

Thank you. I will never go there. 

 

Not that I was going to, anyway. 

[Orik]

We went and while I can't comment about the food, the menu was still plenty misleading.