the folly of falai

yes, the new darling(s) of clinton street on the lower east side have problems yet, despite the pedigree of Iacopo Falai, former pastry chef at Le Cirque 2000. Falai the restaurant proper sits catty-corner to the more casual Falai Panetteria and getting 8:15 reservations on a thursday night at falai proper meant we were gonna be dining in high-style, as opposed to the BYOB cafe feel of the panetteria. I won't get into how much I enjoyed our meal of perfectly cooked gnudi, truffled pasta with spring vegetables, a vegetable plate unlike any I've ever had, the best grilled octopus I have ever had, potato-crusted sea bass, some deliciously oozy appetizers, and a great set of desserts, but instead, focus on only on their horrible bread.

each table came with a cute lil' bread menu (kinko's copied and trimmed) with a description of the breads that we'd be having during our meal. not content with a simple bread basket assortment on each table, the servers instead came around periodically with large trays of mini-breads, and we would have one or two at a time, our choice. if a fresh pan was coming out of the oven then I guess everyone in the restaurant would get one, e.g., a full tray of foccacine. this never happened, because we didn't have any fresh bread, and it makes me wonder where exactly do they bake these stale, room-temp balls of dough? it couldn't be from right there in the oven because they all tasted like day-old bread, the kind that sells in big bags at the end of the day for half-price, if this was a chinese bakery.

+ foccacine (mini foccacia, greasy and hard, no crunch, nothing good)
+ plain baguette (none of us had it, looked bad)
+ black cabbage bread (hard roll filled with cooked cabbage, reminds me of a spinach roll at a typical pizzeria)
+ rosemary and raisin bread (tasted like jamaican hard-dough bread but dark, with a couple raisins)
+ onion loaf with fennel (a hard little twist, au bon pain could do better)

so how does a restaurant that prides itself on the baking pedigree of its chef/owner send out tray after tray of these inedibles, night after night? we stepped across to the panetteria afterwards to check out the goods there, and although it all looked better (decadent croissants, pastries and donuts) all the product was stacked on top of one another in the glass cases, as if it they were bins of bagels, instead of arrayed across trays. the grease marked all over the glass, and either heat lamps or just very hot lights made the pastries look congealed and greasy. we did split a custard-filled donut on the street, and it was pretty bananas, but, not so great.

anyway, work on your bread man! it sucked! it takes away from the rest of the meal!