BlackSalt Restaurant and Fish Market

The seafood case is the first thing you come upon when you walk into BlackSalt Restaurant and Fish Market, the goods glistening atop slabs of granite—ropy, veiny filets of monkfish; corrugated fans of skate wing; smooth and slimy octopus tentacles. The design scheme transforms the fish market into a set piece of industrial chic, while the menu flaunts its range: five kinds of mussels, three fish stews, a selection of oysters, a half-dozen preparations of the catches of the day. And the kitchen does not renege on the market’s promise—the seafood is uniformly firm, clean, and fresh. The seawatery oyster crusted in masa harina is well worth the three bucks, and the meaty red snapper in the teeming “zarzuela” stew is among the most flavorful in the city. Still, something of a middlebrow caution clings to the place. The more you venture beyond the small plates and the oysters and the mussels, the more you find that an insistent busyness runs through many of the dishes. The kitchen ought to trust more often in the unimpeachable quality of its fish; if it can pull off a braised baby octopus as well as it does—the critters, dressed in garlic, tomato, and red chili, have the purity of sashimi—you’d think it could rein itself in elsewhere. A clam-and-oyster stew is studded with plump goodies, but they’re masked by the heavy-handed use of cream, bacon, and herbs; a tomato-based bean soup, with its hunk of cured tuna and strip of pecorino, is a cacophony of intentions. And the kitchen might want to pay more attention to the handiwork of pastry chef Susan Wallace. Her conventional selections—tiramisu, crème brûlée, bread pudding—are rendered with such skill and delicacy that Wallace injects new life into the familiar.
—Todd Kliman, February 18, 2005