Restaurant Review: Bistrot Ha in NYC

If there’s one thing worse than too much of a good thing, it’s too little of it. That was the knock on Ha’s Snack Bar, which opened last year to such instantaneous acclaim that word spread the proprietors were immediately looking for a larger second location. The Snack Bar was great, but with two dozen seats, most of them not especially comfortable at that, it could be a treat on the palate and a pain in the ass. Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns’s dishes — a turbocharged take on Franco-Vietnamese cooking with escargots in tamarind butter and flaky pockets of vermicelli-studded pâté chaud — were among the most delicious things I ate last year, but when I was rounding up the city’s best restaurants this winter, I left Ha’s off the list because it seemed like malpractice to send readers somewhere that’s so hard to get into.

The promised follow-up is here, and the crowds have again descended on Bistrot Ha — with the terminal t, as the French would have it. Less than 300 feet from its predecessor, Bistrot Ha is a more fully fledged restaurant with a proper dining room (45 seats to the Snack Bar’s 24) and a proper kitchen (to the Snack Bar’s induction burner). Ha now has a real oven in which to bake an evening’s worth of beef Wellingtons and a fryer for the frites, which any bistrot worth its t must serve with the steak.

For all that’s changed, the new Ha’s keeps much the same. The name on the shingle notwithstanding, it’s still a joint effort by Ha and Burns, who collaborates on the menu, oversees baking, runs dishes between the kitchen and dining room, and finds time to conceptualize new versions of the ice cream bombes that dot most tables at meal’s end, their meringue domes as flowered and frothy as Esther Williams’s swim cap. The space matches the first Ha’s, moodily dark and dimly brightened by James Cherry’s parchment-skin light fixtures. The bar is bigger, though, the better to toss back the house martini, where the spirit is drinker’s choice but the salt-lick savor of fish sauce and sea salt is not. A whole oyster floats at the bottom of every glass.

While it delighted most of my guests, I could take or leave the oyster — downing it felt akin to the old frat-hazing ritual of chugging a goldfish — but there’s no taking or leaving the fish sauce, and let it be said: If you’d opt to leave it, Ha’s is not for you. Fish sauce is the ichor in Anthony Ha’s veins, and it features in everything from the preprandial martinis to the check. (“There’s fish sauce in everything” is printed at the bottom.) Fish sauce’s force-multiplying powers of funk and salt mean everything at Ha’s can feel amped up to 11. “Move over, Guy Fieri,” gasped a fanboy at my table. “This is the real Flavortown.”

The new space is noticeably larger than the original Ha’s. Dishes include leeks vinaigrette with Maggi and a pork chop with dried shrimp and chile paste. Hugo Yu.

The new space is noticeably larger than the original Ha’s. Dishes include leeks vinaigrette with Maggi and a pork chop with dried shrimp and chile pas… more
The new space is noticeably larger than the original Ha’s. Dishes include leeks vinaigrette with Maggi and a pork chop with dried shrimp and chile paste. Hugo Yu.

This is not subtle eating; it’s seasoning by sledgehammer. I am happy to be bludgeoned. The French-pastry source material may take delicacy as one of its tenets, but this bistrot reveres other texts. Check out the icon by the kitchen: a framed placard advertising Maggi, the Swiss umami-booster sauce that’s sort of like a marriage of soy and Worcestershire and that here dollops vinegared leeks alongside mayo and a couple of pickled mussels.

One senses there’s very little Ha wouldn’t subject to his muscular vision. “We’ve given up a bit on the authenticity pipeline,” Burns told me as she dropped off an omelet stuffed with rice and snails one night. The relevant question, she said, isn’t “Is it genuine?” but rather “Is it delicious?”

If there’s any knock on the new Ha’s, it’s that this kind of relentless curiosity can keep things changing at too fast a clip. Across repeat visits, nearly the entire menu overhauled: old favorites banished, new experiments ushered in. There’s often a vol-au-vent, a kind of filled puff-pastry tart, and a version with curried lobster and monkfish liver curled inside gave way to one with Vietnamese shaking beef (the better option so far). Otherwise, don’t get too attached. One night, the menu leaned on offal: beef heart with peanuts (good but not terribly distinctive) and schnitzel-fried brains. The next, it listed toward Italy with a zippy take on vitello tonnato: thin slices of cold pork loin in a tuna-mayo dressing spiked with chile crisp and frizzled fried capers. I hoovered it and prepared to return for more. The revisionist tonnato, too, has already moved along.

This new Ha’s had its immediate acolytes, just as the last spot did, but also a few early reports from the greasy trenches that the second coming was wobbling a bit. I can’t speak for these trenchermen, but I wonder if the issue was this frantic pace of discovery, an inability to iterate enough on a dish for it to find its final form. Chef’s prerogative, of course, but must the people really be teased with the promise of General Ha’s trotter — high gloss, high impact, a feat of foot — only for it to be snatched away? Time comes for us all, though isn’t the promise of the bistrot, with its codes and its criteria, something that’s reassuringly dependable?