Restaurant Evaluate: Cactus Wren Is Doing Its Personal Factor

The house is brilliant and open, with excessive ceilings and enormous home windows that spotlight the eternally terrific people-watching of the Decrease East Aspect. The mint nook location is the previous dwelling of an outpost of Serafina, a sequence recognized for its wood-fired pizzas, which explains the large domed oven taking over 1 / 4 of the eating room. The oven, with its colourful tiles is considerably visually cacophonous, given the understated rusticity of the remainder of the room. Glowy porcelain lighting fixtures, translucent white streaked with rivers of darkness, give the impression of the nacreous interiors of oyster shells, or molded slices of Gorgonzola. They’re the work of the artist Nicole Pilar, who additionally made the curiously multi-textured, organic-shaped platters on which lots of the programs at 63 Clinton are served. At Cactus Wren, these platters present up beneath the appetizer of fruits de mer, a dish appealingly sized for one, that includes a rotating number of composed bites that on my visits included dressed uncooked oysters and clams, Jonah-crab claws, and a Gilda skewer of uncooked tuna and shiso leaf. Certainly, the restaurant strikes me as an ideal selection for solo eating: stomach as much as the bar for a glass from the robust wine listing, which foregrounds small producers, and order one thing to nibble on, or dive into, or indulge in. On one among my visits, I discovered myself seated subsequent to a lady indulging, with beautiful poise, in a glass of wine, a e-book, and what appeared to be each single caviar dish on the menu. There’s a lesson there for us all: it’s essential, typically, to do precisely what you wish to do, and to let your self take pleasure in it. ♦