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Did I dream that I was eating fabulous Vietnamese beef satay and Lao-style grilled chicken, not at Indochine or Tao Downtown, but on the achingly sterile third floor of Deutsche Bank Center, aka the former Time Warner Center?
Nope, it was all real — and one of the year’s happiest restaurant-world surprises.
After a mixed-results launch last fall, Twin Tails has hit its stride and is the new culinary star of the Columbus Circle mall. The sprawling Southeast Asian place from the Quality Branded team blows away ghosts of three flops that preceded it on the third floor.
Quality Branded runs venues from tiny Italian trattoria Don Angie to giant steakhouse Smith & Wollensky to Middle Eastern-themed Zou Zou’s. This is the group’s first foray into Asian fare and it’s surprising great.
While the crowd-pleasing, gently cosmopolitanized Southeast Asian fare is reminiscent of clubby downtown spots, Twin Tails stops short of being a party scene. It’s crafted for grown-ups — and for grown-ups’ finances, with small plates priced up to $29, most main courses in the $39-65 range and a few esoteric meat dishes costing up to $130. Yet, not once did waiters annoy us with the standard “all our dishes are made for sharing” upsell pitch, even though — get this! — they all were large enough to be shared.
The antiseptic mall mood vanishes once you step through the brass doors. Twin Tails boasts 300 seats including the bar, a lounge and private rooms, but what most diners will experience is the 140-seat main dining room, which is sectioned by design firm AvroKo into five intimate areas separated by low-rise planters.
It wears its faux-exoticism lightly; there are no temple motifs or jade elephants. Mirrored walls are pink and amber, banquettes are upholstered in deep yellow. Table tops are of burled rosewood, each with its own small shaded lamp that lets you see what you’re eating even if you don’t happen to be seated under custom-made amber glass chandeliers.
The menu is divided into various categories, such as satay, small plates, fish, shellfish, steak, and pork and fowl. There are tons of spices, but no red-hot chilis to blow off the roof of your mouth.
The “Night market” grilled chicken — a reference to the flavorful grilled meats found in the night markets of Thailand — was one of the best poultry dishes I’ve had in recent memory. The leg, thigh and breast are brined in fish sauce and lemongrass; spiced with cumin, garlic and ginger; then grilled and roasted. It’s served in a pan with broth made from the drippings. The white meat was as juicy and tender as the dark. In a city full of dry, boring chicken dishes, it’s a showstopper.
The restaurant can be packed at night, but I had the place nearly all to myself for a recent lunch, where I was bowled over by the pork cha gio rolls. A mineral-rich grind of meat and umami-rich cloud ear mushrooms are encased in super-crisp spring roll wraps. They burst with flavor on their own, but wrapping them in lettuce leaves and dunking them in tangy, fish sauce-based nuoc cham takes them even higher.
I was skeptical of red curry sea bass after several under-performing seafood choices in the restaurant’s early days. But chef/partner Craig Koketsu and executive chef Chad Brown now have the kitchen cracking. The familiar fish is marinated and wrapped in banana leaf, then grilled and roasted with pungent hints of galangal and lime.
Strangely, the only flop was a dish the waiter said was the house pride: crispy garlic shrimp “Lotus of Siam”-style, named for a famous Las Vegas restaurant. Maybe I caught them on a bad night, but the shrimp were almost inedibly chewy and tough when extracted from their shells, and they turned hard and cold after just minutes.
The fun returned with desserts such as multi-color rainbow sherbet cake layered with guava, Makrut line, pineapple chili and graham-cashew crunches. Remarkably, the flavors don’t merge into a sweet blur but stand up for themselves individually.
Twin Tails might not be Saigon or Bangkok, but it’s a shorter trip to Columbus Circle — and exactly what the southeast Asian-deprived junction point of Midtown and the Upper West Side needed.
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