RAVES FOR MIRIAM ON FIFTH

Remember the Surreal Cafe. It was on the corner of Prospect Place and Fifth Avenue. Well, now it's Miriam, the brand new Israeli restaurant that people are talking about. New York Magazine seemed to like it. Actually the review here is quite the rave:

Miriam's is neither a hut nor a shack. It’s a full-fledged Israeli restaurant, unfussily but comfortably accoutred with linen napkins, capacious wineglasses, and a jazzy soundtrack. And it does not shove its chicken into pita pockets but rather arranges it just-so atop the flatbread in the manner of a delicately composed salad. To drive home the point that the kitchen specializes in what the menu describes as “modern Israeli” cuisine, the chef layers the marinated and grilled strips of chicken over fresh spinach, surrounds it with a piquant moat of mango chutney (amba, to shawarma cognoscenti), and tops it with an oven-roasted tomato. It’s a deconstructed fancy-pants chicken shawarma that you eat with a knife and fork, one that, deliciousness aside, could cause a shawarma purist to throw a fit.

And so begins your introduction to Contemporary Israeli Cuisine, courtesy of Miriam’s owners, who have handily provided a definition on their Website. Identified more by what they call its “lack of identity” than by any firm one, modern Jewish food (and Miriam’s menu) is diverse and refined enough to include not only egg-noodle lokshen and kasha but lobster demi-glace and coriander-orange gastrique. Israeli chef Ido Ben-Shmuel, who trained in Paris, might hate the term—most chefs do—but what Miriam purveys is a form of fusion: familiar Middle Eastern ingredients and flavors reinterpreted for the sophisticated Park Slope palate...

...Despite its ambitious food, Miriam clearly aspires to be an unpretentious neighborhood spot. The service is friendly and unfrazzled, and thanks to what must be the most efficient busboy-runners in all of Brooklyn, astonishingly quick. But you’re still welcome to linger—over a silky halvah mousse, with pistachio halvah crumbled on top, or a bottle of Israeli wine, which Miriam pointedly lists under the “South Europe” designation, alongside affordably priced selections from France, Spain, and Italy. With that sort of globally informed, culinarily sophisticated outlook—proud of its heritage but not enslaved by it—Miriam isn’t only elevating Israeli cuisine. It’s reinventing it.

                 

MIRIAM
Address: 79 Fifth Ave., at Prospect Pl., Park Slope, Brooklyn 718-622-2250
Hours: Dinner, Sunday to Thursday, 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday until midnight. Brunch, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Prices: Appetizers: $5.50 to $8. Entrées: $13.50 to $20.
Ideal Meal: Hummus, grouper, and halvah mousse.
Note: Try the shakshuka at brunch.