The Otter and The Brass are charming hotel restaurants in The Manner and Evelyn Hotels, run by moonlighting chefs. Their menus focus on freshly prepared seafood and culinary classics with a twist. Like an otter’s habitat, the restaurants are invisible from the outside and have no windows, giving them a distinctive atmosphere, though the Brass has a skylight.
Menu
The Otter, much like its namesake, prefers fish on its menu. Though hotel restaurants generally specialize in steaks and burgers, The Otter opened after a year of seafood and designer raw bars with Alex Stupak of Empellón restaurants at the helm. Hotel cooking is fraught with challenges that the talented chef navigates creatively. Stupak finds ways to tweak the expected and offers Parker House rolls with three different kinds of butter, including one that tastes like bouillabaisse.
Scallop crudos are served in two chile sauces: grassy, vegetal serrano, and a sweeter red Fresno-Christmas style. His fish and chips rival any from England, with a delectable crunch and beautiful browning that showcases the Spanish mackerel underneath.
The Dining Room
The dining room makes up for its lack of natural lighting with candlelight, wood paneling, and Art Deco murals in the Diego Rivera style. Though it is not easily seen from the outside, it has a built-in audience with hotel guests, who pay an average of $800 per night for their rooms, adding a dignified air to The Otter’s dining room. However, the bar is livelier than the tables and includes a separate lounge, Sloane’s, upstairs.
Sloane offers a seafood-inspired bar menu specializing in shrimp cocktails, crab cakes, and cottage fries with caviar to match its martini with a single oyster sidecar.
The Brass
Further uptown, The Brass is another insulated hotel restaurant from a moonlighting chef. Set in The Evelyn Hotel, it operates beside The Tusk Bar and, like The Otter, is fully enclosed, though it offers a skylight. The dining room spruces up its locale with Art Nouveau chandeliers, mirrors hung with faux Corbusier nudes, and a baby grand piano in the center.
Brass, set to open in the Fall, is short for brasserie, and its menu is distinctively French. Like the Otter, guests start with fruits de mer, fromage, or charcuterie before the entree. It is operated by chef-partners Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske, who had success with Contra-Wildair with their aggressively creative small plates and natural wine. Brass has imported these offerings as one sommelier quips, “One is Leonard Cohen, and one is Iggy Pop.”
The Brass’s Menu
The Brass serves moules-frites, which are marinated mussels served atop small batons of chickpea flour Panisse, and its gougères are dusted with caraway and poppy, similar to everything bagel seasoning. The chefs have even incorporated potatoes into the green salad. The menu specializes in adaptations over classics such as the tarte flambée with canonical fixings and the $135 roulade of chicken, deboned, buffed, and delivered in a copper gratin dish atop a puree of potato and celery root.
The Brass is a quiet affair, though it tends to stay busy with the upstairs hotel guests enjoying its elegant dishes and desserts.
