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"FacebookPinterest\n\nI was standing outside Contra, jotting down notes, although not many, I admit. The exterior of this new Orchard Street restaurant consists of a bare, black fa\u00E7ade plus a tiny, orange, neon sign that spells out the name from high above. A fellow wearing a yarmulke was closing up the shop next door and asked me what I was doing.\n\nI explained that I was a food writer hoping to dine there for the first time and asked him if he had tried it. \"I'm kosher,\" he said, which meant he never could. He was curious, though, so I told him everything I knew.\n\nI said a couple of guys\u2014one 23, the other 28\u2014were in the business of serving tasting menus. He'd never heard of anything like that. I asked him where he was eating that night, and he said his wife was making dinner. I explained that he was getting a tasting menu, too, since he'd eat whatever the person in charge wanted him to eat.\n\n\"There's democracy in my house,\" he said. \"My wife isn't a dictator.\"\n\nI replied, impressed, \"So sometimes you tell her you don't want to eat what she's cooking?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I have to live with my wife.\"\n\n\"Same with us,\" I said. \"We have to live with our chefs.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nI hear a lot of restaurant customers have issues with tasting menus. They're too long, too restrictive, too presumptuous, too expensive. I enjoy them most of the time, endure them the rest. I figure the chef is giving you the best he or she's got, which is good. But I also think they\u2018re less fun than conventional menus, where picking, choosing, and sharing is part of the experience. There's another drawback: I'm waiting for the accountants at GQ to order me to eat alone whenever a restaurant serves only tasting menus, cease spending money on food for others that's exactly the same as what I have on my plate.\n\nI didn't get in that first time. Nobody was answering the phone, no matter how many times I called, so I went down there, figuring it would be empty and I could walk right in. There was room, all right, but I was turned away, same as everyone else: plumbing problems. You want old buildings with plumbing\u00A0 problems, look no farther than the Lower East Side.\n\nThe second time I went, this time with a reservation, I was immediately recognized by the sommelier, Linda Milagros Violago, who used to work at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago. I said to her, wise-guy fashion, \"Hmmm, what shall I have for dinner?\" She replied, with equal sarcasm, \"You're having the menu whether you like it or not.\"\n\nI ate three such menus. Never was I able to learn in advance what the food would be\u2014nothing was posted online. Twice I was served a dessert called \"apple oat caramel\"\u2014semi-oxidized apple granita, toasted oats, and caramelized bits of chewy apple. I rather liked it, particularly the funky granita, but a guest with me called the dish \"a horse's breakfast.\" (Note to GQ accountants: Cut back on guests and I can no longer promise insights like that.) I wasn't thrilled to have that dessert twice.\n\nTwice the menu included monkfish, although the accompaniments differed slightly. Jeremiah Stone, 28, and Fabian von Hauske, 23, the co-chefs, are masters of this profoundly ugly fish.\u00A0 Their versions were the best I've tasted since the opening days of Le Bernardin, about a quarter-century ago, when chef Gilbert Le Coze turned it into a prized menu item. The fish itself appeared to be cooked the same way each time, coming out plump, sweet, gauzy with olive oil and entangled in vegetables, as though the fish hadn't been caught with a hook but ensnared by menacing greens. Those included leafy Piracicaba broccoli, mustard greens, and some other farmer's market plant that seemed to have been nibbled on by grateful beetles in another life. Both presentations were sensational versions of avant garde French, maybe more French than avant garde, because of the softness and the near-transparency of the fish.\n\nI got squab once. If allowed, I would have ordered it on every occasion. It was available one evening as an extra course for $15, or as a replacement for another course for an additional but unspecified sum. (The pricing policy is a little nutty, but that's what happens when chefs rise to absolute power.) The portion consisted of a breast (juicy, succulent) and a leg (crunchy, tender) with one foot attached (odd, captivating). This was a bird beyond belief, a squab in metaphorical flight.\u00A0 It came in a luminously light cherry-squab jus. It was gone too soon.\n\nA friend ordered it in place of the uncommonly moist chicken breast that was part of the menu of the day, chicken accompanied by sweet and lovely onion petals. My squab-eating friend left nothing on her plate but that bare foot. It was predatory eating. She devoured the dish in the style of an army ant.\n\nIf you think a squab foot on a plate is a little scary, greater terror lies ahead.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe tasting menus at Contra generally consist of five courses for $55, although during Thanksgiving week it was upped to six, with a main course of turkey and a price of $60. The meals developed a rhythm, too: One simple starter, two sturdy and generous proteins, two desserts. Within that format, I noticed improvements in the starters as the weeks went on, absolute and well-deserved confidence in those brilliant and blissful main courses, and desserts as the weak spot. They tasted improvisational, not sophisticated at all.\n\nMy problem with this particular tasting-menu format is that 40 percent of the dishes you'll eat are desserts, and Contra's aren't especially interesting. They include plenty of ice cream and sorbets, if you admire those. One such dessert per meal is plenty.\n\nThe evolution of the starters over the course of several weeks was compelling and promising. The first starter at the first meal consisted of silver-dollar-sized rings of raw squash, a few bits of excellent guanciale (not enough to amount to much), toasted rye crumbs, a mild housemade cheese reminiscent of queso fresco, and a cute leaf that was probably chysanthemum.\u00A0 I had no idea what to do with this collection of seemingly incompatible foodstuffs until a friend exclaimed, \"Tacos!\" That's what we did, made mini-tacos using the squash rings as tortillas and stuffing them with everything else. The result: Pretty darned good.\n\nAt the next meal those squash rings were sliced thinner and came with cashew bits, a cashew-milk dressing, soft cheese, plus more of those little leaves, all adding up to a juicy, maverick salad. The last starter, really quite smart, offered marrow for spreading on maple-glazed Japanese sweet potato slices that came sprinkled with toasted-rice powder. More onion petals, always welcome, decorated the plate.\n\nIt was at this third meal that a dish, probably not French and certainly never served at Versailles, made an appearance: half a goat's head, bisected, a skull out of Alien. It was another of those supplements, and again I have no idea of the cost. It was worth its weight in creepiness.\n\nThe idea, we decided, was to eat the brain\u2014creamy and soft and just the way brain should be. There were other interesting parts: teeth, tongue, eyeballs, cheek. One of my guests had been to medical school, and he carved with pleasure. We tried a little tongue (tough), a little eyeball (you might want to pass), a little cheek (so-so). The brain was the best part. Needed a little salt.\n\nThe wine list at Contra is small, simple, reasonably priced, ever-changing, and more interesting than you might think at first glance. Your best bet is to ask Violago for suggestions. She's good. The restaurant does not have a cocktail program. One was promised for December, but when I went back in December, Violago told me, \"We're going to say January.\"\u00A0\n\nThe room, which seats about 40, is fundamentally simple, a shotgun-style space with a small bar up front and a semi-open kitchen to the rear. You can see into the kitchen easily enough, watch a surprisingly large cadre of youthful cooks in baseball caps working industriously. Nobody is taking it easy back there. There's one fabulous table large enough for four that's made from a huge slab of varnished wood. It comes with a perfect view of the entire room: the front bar, the single restroom (so you can time your dash for when it's unoccupied), and the kitchen.\u00A0\u00A0\n\nThe walls are made of just about everything, the floor is cement, the chairs minimally cushioned. Contra feels like the bare-bones atelier of young artists who occasionally open up their premises so they can welcome appreciative guests.\n\nOne decorative item entranced me, a painting of what I took to be a Prussian general but later learned was probably Maximilian I, ill-fated emperor of Mexico. I was hesitant to make a positive identification because the top third was obliterated, painted over. I liked it because it was the kind of worthless article\u2014my mother would have called it hazarai\u2014that shoppers picked up cheap on Orchard Street back in the days when the neighborhood was filled with men in yarmulkes.\n\nMy parents were born on the Lower East Side and used to take me there, thinking I would learn something about my people. They were right. That's exactly what happened at Contra a couple of weeks ago.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nPhotograph by Evan Sung.\n\nRating: Two stars.\n\n  Don't Miss This... Aperitif White: 2012 Peter Lauer Ayler Kupp Fass 6 Senior Riesling, $52\n\n Dry White Wine: 2010 Philippe Tessier \"Dede\" Cheverny, $56\n\n Red Wine: 2011 Guigier \"La Bonne Pioche\" Beaujolais-Village, $56"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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