The Danny Meyer Restaurant You Don’t Know About — But Should
by Tejal Rao, Feb 2, 2016
“It’s easy to forget that a restaurant such as North End Grill — where you can count on the standards being sung gracefully, most often in perfect tune — is rare.”
“This sort of straightforward, generous, user-friendly cooking has become North End Grill’s strong suit. It was amplified last week, when the bar served an abbreviated menu of bistro standards for a French-themed popup while the main dining room closed to build a new private dining room. Eric Korsh’s eloquent American variants on French cooking at North End Grill often feel like luxuries.”…
“Korsh has been streamlining the menu since he joined two years ago. (Since the restaurant opened in 2012, Floyd Cardoz had been chef.) Now you’ll find that the open kitchen and its oak wood-burning grills and mesquite charcoal-fueled ovens are turning out excellent, simple compositions—exquisite whole fish on the bone, thick, juicy pork chops, and sardines split open on toast under a confetti of celery leaves. An appetizer of two fat artichokes, served so you can pull them apart petal by petal and scrape the sweet, smoky meat off with your teeth, seems almost too hands-on for this posh, polished dining room. But this is one of its fundamental pleasures.”