The cozy 13-table room exudes a chic contemporary sensuality, with a stacked stone wall, amber glass partitions, and booths that are intimate in the flickering candlelight. Diners sipping local craft beers and honeyed mojitos are encouraged by a perky service staff, led by Amy, to share food that arrives on geometric glass tiles streaked with colored sauce and exotic spices.
Joe McAtee's fusion-fueled kitchen ranges so freely around the globe it would make Billy Penn's hat spin, from lamb samosas to duck tamales to scallops with Chinese black rice. And much of it, of course, is themed with honey.
Honey softens the spicy wasabi vinaigrette striped alongside those huge sea scallops. It tempers the salt and sour of salmon-apple tartare crisps. It sweetens the brine that tenderized the marvelous breast that came with the Chicken and the Egg entree, meat fanned beside a pillar of potato-chanterelle salad crowned by a poached egg. (Runny yolk as sauce is the "it" flourish of 2007.)
There are moments when McAtee might ease up on the honey motif. It clashed with the calamari, which were already troubled by a soggy hominy crust. Sweetness killed the lady apple salad, too. The mini-apple rings were so shriveled from a steep in honeyed cider that they seemed an afterthought to the greens, which were limp beneath a vanilla-cinnamon vinaigrette that tasted like Cinnabon icing.
