http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/dining/restaurant-review-bar-bolonat-in-the-west-village.html 2014-11-25 18:16:31 Restaurant Review: Bar Bolonat in the West Village The chef Einat Admony and the flavors of multiethnic Israel shine after the restaurant’s rough start. === Some restaurants hit the ground at full tilt. This review concerns one of the others, a place that stumbled at the start, as ungainly as a day-old giraffe, and only recently found its footing. Bar Bolonat Even with reduced capacity, Bar Bolonat was afflicted by suboptimal acoustics. When I ate there early in the summer, the screeching in the dining room could have crushed scrap metal. It nearly crushed my desire to come back, too, but I held on because Ms. Admony was up to something original in the kitchen. The Now, with sound-absorbing tiles up above, Bar Bolonat is a quieter restaurant, though it’s not entirely library-like. (One small section of ceiling, without tiles, is angled like the soundboard of a grand piano, with a similar effect.) It’s also bigger. In September, Ms. Admony finally appeased the bureaucrats and returned all her seats to active duty. While fixing up the space, she made other changes, replacing executive chefs until she found Molly Breidenthal. When I ate there this month, the cooking was more assured than it had been, the spices applied more fearlessly. The giraffe is on the move. Energetic seasoning drives Ms. Admony’s cuisine at Bar Bolonat, as it does at her exemplary falafel shops, A swipe of corn purée takes its seductive, toasty flavor from turmeric, cardamom and ground cloves, Ms. Admony’s version of a warming spice blend called hawaij that Yemenis stir into soups. Together with the creeping heat and sweetness of a red pepper sauce, the spiced corn makes something exciting out of a grilled octopus leg. Nearly everybody orders the Jerusalem-style sesame bagel, so light and fluffy it’s almost an anti-bagel. Nearly everybody is right about this. What makes this racetrack-shaped bread so hard to pass up is the spoonful of really fragrant and complex za’atar that you dunk each piece into after giving it a preliminary bath in peppery olive oil. When dishes were underwhelming, as several were one August night, timid seasoning could be to blame. “Za’atar ravioli,” stuffed with smoky eggplant, might have been interesting had it included some actual za’atar. On the other hand, Bar Bolonat’s zabzi, an Iranian fresh-herb stew served with soft specks of fresh couscous, was fantastically vivid, and it could have become one of my favorites if the short rib in the stew had not been tough and dry. The dishes at Bar Bolonat are meant to be shared — everybody sing along — and come out of the kitchen as they’re ready. Or so the servers say. The menu is split into small, medium and large plates. As common sense would tell you if the servers weren’t telling you otherwise, the bigger ones, like the lamb neck braised with dates and chestnuts until it is pull-apart tender, are a lot easier to split than the few mouthfuls of fluke ceviche with dried pomegranate seeds and juice. The kitchen could do more to help by, say, carving the pomegranate-glazed poussin instead of sending it out whole with a serrated knife. The bit about the dishes’ showing up at random times is misleading, too, but in a good way. My table was never laden down with more plates than it could hold. This ought to go without saying, but in restaurants these days nothing does. Apart from one or two unscheduled leaves of absence one night, the service was generally excellent, with a professional bearing that signals Ms. Admony’s intent to have Israeli cuisine taken seriously. The white napkins, polished stemware, sheer curtains and understated modern furniture are all a determined bid for the kinds of diners who would steer clear of anything resembling a hummus hut. For dessert, Ms. Admony makes a homey, from-scratch version of Milky, a chocolate pudding brand so central to Israeli life that it became the symbol of