BarFry - Review

***CLOSED

Intro
BarFry - Recommended
50 Carmine St, New York 10012
Btwn Bedford & Bleecker St
Phone: 212-929-5050

At first, I was disappointed that 50 Carmine – a great Italian restaurant was closing it’s doors. Fortunately, a fun new restaurant has opened in it’s place – BarFry. The concept is simple – take a wide range of ingredients, apply a tempura batter to it, and provide fun dipping sauces (jalapeno soy, wasabi remoulade, red chili citrus, sweet miso). Surprisingly, it works pretty well. Overall, I give the restaurant an 79/100.

My Menu
1) Pork Cutlet, Kimchee, and Cilantro Po Boy – Recommended
2) Crab Cake Tempura – Highly Recommended
3) Scallop Tempura –Recommended
4) Shitake Mushroom Tempura – Not Recommended
5) Veal Terrine Tonkatsu – Highly Recommended (must have)
6) Oyster Tempura – Highly Recommended (must have)
7) Avocado and Wasabe Tempura – Recommended
8) Concord Grape Sorbet, Yuzu and Pineapple Sorbet, Green Tea Sorbet – Highly Not Recommended

Dish Comments
1) Nice po boy stuffed with a relatively tender pork cutlet, crunchy kimchee, cilantro, and fried tempura bits. Unfortunately, the cilantro was way over powering. Still fun to eat especially dipping in the red chili citrus sauce.
2) A decent crab cake wrapped in a bird’s nest of fried tempura. The fried tempura was amazing – not sure if it was authentic, but it was perfectly crunchy and not greasy at all.
3) I love scallops and this was decent. Not great and should be much better, but again – I love scallops.
4) I have no idea how he did it, but they managed to completely eliminate all the flavor from this mushroom – very bland and no mushroom flavor.
5) This was stupid good. Basically, ridiculously tender veal filled with a whole bunch of good stuff - probably cartilage and other gelatinous type things. Perfectly fried and amazing with any of the sauces.
6) Incredibly rich oyster flavor that was still very juicy and tender even though it was fried. Second favorite dish of the night.
7) Avocado is nice and rich, the wasabi wakes up the flavor a little, and the perfect fried texture is a nice balance.
8) I like making ice creams and sorbets and after visiting Italy - I think I know how it should taste and feel. The sorbets here break every single rule in the book. When I stuck my spoon in the sorbet, I could tell that it was too icey and even worse the texture was also like baby food. Also, the fact that they were fresh fruits made the sorbets very sour. The ice creams fared better, but still was not that great.

Overall Restaurant Experience (79/100)

• Food 8.2/10 – Great crispy texture on the outside and the food was generally very good with lots of tempura options. Dessert was terrible though.
• Service 7.5/10 – Food comes out very quick, but the waiter is very pushy on ordering more food.
• Atmosphere 9.0/10 – Walking into the place, it looks like Pearl Oyster Bar but sounds like Pearl’s angst-ridden stepson. There are classic marble counters and tables, mirrors on the wall, and white table cloths. However, they blast their music loud which I kinda liked – only because they played my type of music (e.g. Rage, Pearl Jam, Wu Tang, Outkast). Place was very empty, but it was around 6:30pm on a Thursday. I definitely like the feel of the place and could see myself sitting at the counter and chowing on some tempura and drinking some beer.
• Price 7/10 – This place looks cheap (around $4-7 per tempura), but it adds up since the orders are 2 ounces small. Example, the avocado was one slice and that was $5. I still had a great time trying the food, but the bill came out to be $40 a person with only one drink. I was OK paying that amount, since we sampled a lot but the money to food quantity/quality ratio didn't seem right.
  

Closing Comments
I definitely liked the place a lot for the fun in sampling all the types of tempura, but the price may prevent me from making more frequent trips. I'm still going to come back with the dudes and sample everything...