http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/dining/restaurant-review-dirty-french-on-the-lower-east-side.html 2014-12-09 19:46:47 Restaurant Review: Dirty French on the Lower East Side Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone treat the food of France with a hugely energizing lack of respect at Dirty French. === A new restaurant from the chefs Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone and their partner Jeff Zalaznick tiptoed onto the Lower East Side in September, demurely announcing its name with two eight-foot-high neon signs in peep-show pink. DIRTY, says one. FRENCH, reads the other. Diners who have reservations for  Ever since  It can also be an immensely enjoyable one. That sounds contradictory, but the same self-confidence that can get on your nerves also allows this crew to mess around with French cuisine with a hugely energizing lack of respect. In unnatural crossbreeding experiments, they force bistro cooking to mate with haute cuisine. To make dinner less stuffy and formal, they bring back stuffy formalities like cut-glass wine carafes and frilly oyster plates. They smudge the pages of Escoffier with strange foreign spices. It may sound like run-of-the-mill fusion, but it is a top-to-bottom remix, and nearly every weird mongrel idea leads in the direction of more flavor or more fun. Chefs more deferential to custom may not have ditched the hallowed basket of levain or baguette à la ancienne in favor of a flatbread inspired by the mahjeb Mr. Torrisi ate, one loaf after another, in a North African neighborhood of Paris. It’s no innovation, this bread, just pita dough griddled in plenty of olive oil, buried under Provençal herbs and sent out with a snowbank of fromage blanc, but people tore it up with greedy, greasy fingers at every table, mine included. Not that the chefs hide their training. (Mr. Torrisi worked for years under Daniel Boulud and takes the lead in this kitchen.) The mille-feuille is a technical showstopper, an accordion of ribbon-thin king trumpet mushroom stems folded over and over. It looks like pastry but pulls apart like buttered noodles, and when you drag them through a pool of green curry, the scene shifts to Thailand. It’s a disorienting dish, and makes your head spin in a wonderful way. The restaurant creates a parallel world where French pastry turns into Thai curry; it’s as if the chefs have imagined an alternative history in which the leading kitchens of France turned left instead of right several decades ago. What if nouvelle cuisine had embraced maximalism instead of minimalism, full-frontal abandon instead of lean precision? And what if, instead of teaching Americans to make puff pastry, the country’s chefs had taken cooking lessons from the rest of the French-speaking world? For one thing, they might have come up with Dirty French’s glorious lamb carpaccio. Brushed with a slow-burning raz al hanout oil, sprinkled with tart sumac powder and fresh herbs, dotted with sheep’s milk yogurt and preserved lemon and wheels of roasted eggplant, the slices of lamb loin are saddled with as much flavor as they can reasonably be asked to carry. Or, though this probably needed a push from the roast-chicken gold rush started at The chefs have an instinct for the right kind of too much, but some dishes trip into the wrong kind. A deeply aromatic and fairly traditional bouillabaisse was thick with octopus, mussels, monkfish and one small, whole, wonderful red mullet. Cuttlefish ink took the broth to the outer edge of intensity, but the medicinal taste of fresh marjoram in some spoonfuls went beyond it. And while duck heart kebabs unloaded at the table added brawn to a frisée and lardons salad, the blast of mustard in the dressing was an excessive use of force. A programmatic rollout of the formula — Something Clearly French Under Heaps of Post-Colonial Exotica — doesn’t guarantee a sprinkling of magical pixie dust on every plate. Baked clams seemed perplexed by their thick jackets of almonds and Ethiopian spices, and so was I. A beautifully cooked trout meunière was speckled with sesame seeds and herbs, a mix that came across as an oddly neutered za’atar. Still, you can eat extraordinarily well by calling your shots and rolling with the loose, genial decadence of the place. The mood is set when a server comes over and says, in as laid-back a tone as anyone can manage while lugging an enormous 19th-century sterling silver punch bowl filled with ice, “I wanted to let you have a look at tonight’s oysters.” Oysters: Why not? It continues when Lelañea Fulton, who assembled a wine list that is all French, and fun for all kinds of budgets, shows up dressed like one of Charlie’s Angels working undercover as a sommelier. Old Châteauneuf-du-Pape? Sure.  It goes on through dessert, under the assured hand of the pastry chef Heather Bertinetti, who gracefully threads her way through the French-exotic conceit with a delicately architectural coconut-passionfruit Napoleon and a very short but very good pineapple tarte Tatin, rum-raisin ice cream on top. Mr. Torrisi, Mr. Carbone and Mr. Zalaznick, cautious and retiring as ever, plan to open three original restaurants next year while continuing to build new Parm locations. The question is whether this will leave them the energy to keep refining their mongrel bistro on Ludlow Street while rolling out its breakfast and lunch menus in the coming months. Dirty French needs time to grow into its ideas, and maybe to grow out of a few of them.