At Casa Dani, Masterly Spanish Cooking in Globe-Trotting Garb

The Andalusian chef Dani García has come again to determine a Manhattan beachhead 9 years after his first try, Manzanilla. That was in 2013. A member of the scientific-technical college of Spanish cooking, Mr. García was finest recognized on the time for introducing liquid nitrogen to the kitchen in edible fabrications just like the Tomato Backyard, three squat orbs that seemed like miniature tomatoes however weren’t. One was normal from beets.

Spherification, the method developed at El Bulli for encasing drops of olive juice or different liquids in a fragile little sac that breaks open within the mouth, ostensibly to the delight of the mouth’s proprietor, was used liberally at Manzanilla. Desserts confirmed off pleasant results of temperature and weightlessness that may be arduous to attain with out gels, powders and canisters stuffed with gasoline. The menu was novel sufficient to fill Manzanilla with curious diners for a number of months. A yr later, with enterprise lagging, the restaurant closed.

Mr. García’s new place, Casa Dani, is in Manhattan West, that eerily citylike growth between Hudson Yards and the James A. Farley Put up Workplace. Consuming there now, you’d by no means know that encasing liquid in fragile little sacs was once a factor, or that Mr. García had ever participated in it. Conventional cooking from Spain, significantly Andalusian seafood, is wall to wall. Any improvements are delicate.

One result’s a menu that’s a lot, a lot simpler to belief. At Manzanilla, roughly each different dish was price making an attempt. At Casa Dani, nearly all the pieces is.

There are salt-cod fritters, trying and tasting as if they’d simply come out of the fryer in some beachside bar in Málaga. Battered and fried noodlefish, these lengthy, white creatures identifiable as fish primarily by the 2 black dots of their eyes, are served right here, too, tossed by a server at tableside with two fried eggs and red-pepper pilpil to make an entire, irresistible mess.

Octopus piled over Andalusian potato salad, that tapas-bar mainstay, seems right here, too, shiny with sherry vinegar and almost pink with smoky pimentón oil.

Golden croquetas topped with a slice of jamón Ibérico might seem like dainty finger meals apt to be handed at well mannered cocktail events. One chew they usually gush with scorching, scrumptious béchamel.

In order for you a safer approach to eat jamón Ibérico, then take into account the appetizer of flippantly seared artichoke hearts in a creamy ham emulsion that will get increasingly flavorful because it mingles with the ribbons of ham within the heart of the plate.

The unique candidate for spherification, and possibly the most typical one within the heyday of scientific Spanish delicacies, was olive juice. Ten years in the past, Mr. García may need given us olive spheres with Casa Dani’s distinctive anchovies — each the darkish, purplish ones cured in oil and the white, vinegar-marinated type. Now he serves the olive juice as olive juice, a briny inexperienced bathtub for the fish.

When you spend sufficient time among the many appetizers at Casa Dani, eventually you’re going to encounter contemporary Andalusian tuna: a glistening sheet of pinkish stomach mendacity over the thinnest, crispest pan con tomate in New York; lean loin and fatty stomach chopped and molded aspect by aspect into a calming, two-toned ring; the fleshy meat from just under the pinnacle, liberated on the desk from the salt crust by which it was baked. (The menu interprets morrillo de atún, the Spanish title for this drippingly wealthy morsel, as “tuna reduce from the brow.”) Guests to Madrid have seen at the very least one location of a ham-focused chain referred to as Museo del Jamón. Casa Dani might simply rebrand itself Museo del Atún.

At first, Casa Dani appears to be in competitors with Mercado Little Spain, José Andrés’s meals corridor in Hudson Yards, which additionally leans towards conventional delicacies. However Mercado Little Spain doesn’t have something just like the regional depth mirrored in these Andalusian tuna recipes. And the place is a little bit of a scavenger hunt, the place one of the best issues to eat are scattered throughout a maze of kiosks, counters, bars and takeout instances. Mr. García’s restaurant can be extra rewarding, dish for dish, than any a part of Mercado Little Spain, together with its two extra formal eating rooms, Leña and Mar.

In a paella cook-off, Leña’s wooden grill in all probability provides it an edge over Casa Dani’s gasoline burners. However Mr. García’s rice dishes are wonderful, as they have been at Manzanilla. The grains are swirled and toasted in a large, shallow pan. Then they’re persuaded to absorb solely sufficient liquid to make them chewy. Toppings — aioli and octopus within the case of the black rice — are there primarily for the distinction they supply. As with all good paella, the purpose is the rice.

One pan is sufficient to make a foremost course for 4 individuals. Alternatively, these 4 individuals would possibly take into account the potential for a complete fish, a whole Spanish turbot, say, run by with a wood skewer and grilled.

Desserts are, after all, those you see in tavernas and cafes throughout Spain: flan, rice pudding, torrijas with berries. Most are comforting pillows of sugar and milk. The exception is the cheesecake, nearly as salty as it’s candy, even earlier than a wedge of Zamorano or one other aged Spanish cheese is grated over the plate. These of us who’ve hassle deciding between dessert and a cheese course can now have each on the similar time.

Since closing Manzanilla, Mr. García appears to have found out learn how to management a kitchen trans-Atlantically. The service is one other story. Dinner would possibly run easily one night time and develop into disjointed on one other, when nothing and no one exhibits up on the desk wherever close to on cue.

The service issues appear symptomatic of a bigger confusion. It’s unclear whether or not Casa Dani, owned by Mr. García’s firm along with Disruptive Restaurant Group, which owns golf equipment, eating places and caviar bars in Doha, Dubai, Seoul and Cancún, needs to be a vacation spot for grown-ups. The costs positively say sure. However you enter not from the road and even Manhattan West Plaza, however by a meals courtroom that has the impersonal, shiny, unreal feeling of a film set within the close to future. The kiosks, which share a single kitchen, are referred to as issues like Krispy Rice and Sam’s Crispy Hen, and the entire enterprise has a reputation, Residents, out of “1984.”

Previous the doorway to Casa Dani (“Spanish-Mediterranean-Contemporary”), the colour palette modifications from blacks and grays to browns and reds, nevertheless it doesn’t really feel any extra actual, particularly as soon as the music begins pounding. It seems that some remixes of “Ray of Mild” final for a extremely very long time — lengthy sufficient that I began to consider all of the eating places that appear to be meant for individuals who fly from continent to continent, consuming solely meals designed by cooks who consider themselves as world manufacturers. You possibly can depart New York on Tuesday night time, and while you present up for dinner in Doha on Wednesday, “Paper Planes” will nonetheless be taking part in within the eating room: “All I wish to do is increase increase increase increase and cha-ching! take your cash.”

What the Stars Imply Due to the pandemic, eating places should not being given star rankings.