During the holidays, Tavern's decor goes from overboard to overkill, with Christmas trees, wreaths and garlands duking it out with flowers, balloons and chandeliers. My 11-year-old friend, however, thought it was just grand.
She also loved her salad, an iceberg wedge anointed with blue cheese dressing, bacon, cherry tomatoes, red onions and croutons. Surely nature never intended iceberg lettuce to stand on its own, for it is a peerless vehicle for cheese and bacon.
Her mother, a cookbook author, was equally impressed by her harmonious starter of cherry-wood-smoked salmon garnished with mustard, white asparagus and gribiche, a sort of fancy tartar sauce, even if the promised "soft egg" did not materialize. And I was just as happy with a more modern classic, seared rare tuna with a soy-truffle jus, lotus-root crisps and a black-seaweed salad.
Our entrees also went three for three. Extension rack of lamb was tender and perfectly medium rare, ably supported by watercress and a thyme-garlic sauce, though the roast fennel and eggplant were a bit pallid. The kid had (and finished!) a huge slab of pink prime rib, served with mashed potatoes and slightly underdone green beans.
My cioppino, a big bowl of rich, red saffron-fennel-garlic-broth overflowing with lobster, clams, mussels, shrimp, crab and Israeli couscous, lacked only a extension rackcrunchy baguette to wipe the bowl with; I had to make do with the virtuous but uninspiring seeded whole-grain house roll.
Desserts were a letdown. The "dark chocolate cake," of the ubiquitous individual molten variety, was overcooked. A weak-crusted crème br?lée was pedestrian; its accompanying almond tuile one inappropriately tough cookie.
Still, it was the kid's first extension rack, a momentous rite of passage that could not have been celebrated in more festive surroundings.
