Judy Wicks' White Dog Cafe does it with old, mismatched tables. Stephen Starr's Jones does it with blatant comfort food, "Thanksgiving dinner" served daily. Westin hotel's City Grange (see review above) evokes it with vocabulary: " 'Comfort in a bowl' chicken soup."
Across from Whole Foods Market on South Street, they're doing it, well, with the name of the place itself, Supper. "It goes back to the anti-pretension thing," says chef-owner Mitch Prensky, an emigre (in the mid-'90s) from New York's Mesa Grill who, with wife Jennifer, has run the Global Dish caterers here for 10 years: "It's just a great American name; like saying 'puppies'."
Supper is an appealingly great American space - floating hatbox chandeliers, comfy bolsters splashed with color, an inviting bar (though without the capability during my visits to make a decent Manhattan), big-paned windows on the street, rustic rafters, a wide-open kitchen, and, yes, sturdy tables.
The flavors, too, are artfully, and often deliciously, rendered; the dishes nicely presented. But there's a bait-and-switch quality to that name. Any resemblance to supper, real or imagined, is purely coincidental: With hors d'oeuvres of deboned Moroccan chicken wings, wine-poached mission figs stuffed with mascarpone, and finger sandwiches of smoked duck and quince-paste membrillo, "Global Dish" would be a better fit.
The most un-suppery part of Supper, though, is a deliberately obscure menu that invites you to choose three dishes from an undifferentiated list of 17 plates "slightly larger than an appetizer and smaller than a main course." With a huge plate, Prensky says, your taste buds shut down and you're just shoveling it in.
