Restaurant review: The best of tasting menu culture meets the worst

I can’t remember the last restaurant in New York that frustrated me so much Noksu.

My frustration will not be widely shared, given that few people can afford to eat there. Dinner costs $225 for approximately 12 courses, before tax, tip or drinks. Drinks can be paired with any course for an additional $175 (with alcohol) or $100 (without).

It would be easier to fire Noksu if it weren’t for the chef, Dae Kim. This is the first kitchen he has run and he is full of talent, a star in the making. But his ideas need to be shaped and shaped, and the setting in which he works is so generic that it distracts from what is distinctive about his cooking.

Most of what’s holding Noksu back are things it shares with, and may have copied from, other expensive tasting menu restaurants. It tries so hard to fit in with Atomix, Kono, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and other places that it forgets to assert its own identity.

Noksu got some early press because of its location, one flight underground in the 34th Street-Herald Square subway station. Apparently the concept of $400 dinners a few feet from the turnstiles and rails seemed novel to many people. I’m not sure why. Another generation would have called it slumming.

A few minutes before each of the two nightly services, a rolling gate clatters up to reveal a locked door with a keypad. To enter, I entered a six-digit code I had received several hours earlier. Behind the door hung a heavy curtain from floor to ceiling. At this point I was willing to see something behind it. A private sex club? Agent Kuiper?

But there was no such thing, just the usual tasting menu layout, a striped marble counter opposite a stainless steel kitchen, where a half-dozen chefs in white coats stood attentively over rows of white porcelain bowls, heads bowed like monks.

They stayed in that position for about ten minutes, making minor adjustments to what was in those bowls. I had time to settle down, ask for a drink and look around. Time to wonder if Noksu’s secret door in a subway station reminded me of the secret door at Brooklyn Fare (in a supermarket near the jams and jellies) or the one at Frevo (behind one of the works of art displayed in a gallery hang on the store) or at Mr. Moto’s office (opened by a code embedded in a number).

And I had time to ask why so many restaurants with tasting menus, no matter how they hide their entrances, look the same inside: the long counter of polished stone, wood or steel; the upholstered stools that are so high and heavy that the waiters have to help you get in and out, as if you were a small child getting into a high chair; the empty, windowless walls.

Nowadays there are restaurants like this in almost every major city, imitation pearls on a string that go around the world. Once the door closes, you can be anywhere or nowhere. How did chefs who value both originality and a sense of place decide that the most appropriate backdrop for their food would be copycat rooms, decorated in a blank, global style?

Noksu’s design does Mr. Kim no favors. That also applies to the playlist, which runs through the most obvious megahits from the ’80s Toto, Don Henley, even Huey Lewis and the news. It’s like you accepted a dinner invitation from Patrick Bateman.

Mr. Kim has a collection of gifts that any young chef would long for: an eye for arranging dishes that invite you in by keeping a few secrets; an affinity for seafood, which is central to almost every course; an impressive technical control that allows him to spherify truffle juice and spin delicate rye tulips into Spirograph lattices.

Time and again, he prepared complex dishes that would be difficult in a kitchen twice the size of Noksu’s. There was a miniature tart not much bigger than a bottle cap, filled with plump raw tailfin, maitake mushrooms glazed with Madeira and crispy leek strands. Marinated rock shrimp were folded into a slice of raw bluefin tuna, scored for tenderness; this all-seafood wrap was surrounded by a dark and quietly spicy liquid that tasted like long-caramelized onions and carrots. (If this were one of those restaurants, it would be great with prime rib, too.)

Plum vinegar-cured sardines were topped with individual potato chips and strings of radicchio in an eerily smooth Caesar dressing. During many courses my eyes opened wide with something like wonder. There were filigree wildflowers, mysterious little tuna-bellied creatures with mustard seed eyes and microgreen antennae, and something that looked like a slice of black truffle but melted like butter.

I have never doubted Mr. Kim’s skill, patience or willingness to put in a tremendous amount of work on dishes that take less than a minute to eat. But I’m not entirely sure what he’s trying to say. He was born and raised in South Korea, and the first word spread by the restaurant suggested that he would interpret Korean cuisine. That doesn’t seem to be his goal. Kimchi and other Korean ingredients appear in small roles, but this is a modern, global cuisine with tasting menus built largely on Japanese and French foundations.

There were dishes so eerily delicious that I suspected Mr. Kim was receiving secret transmissions from another world, like the medium-rare piece of wild coho salmon with a pistachio-celery sauce on one side and a light swoosh of yuzu hollandaise on the other. . . And I wouldn’t have missed the moment when, after the soft, impressionistic brushwork of the seafood dishes, he suddenly becomes Damien Hirst, serving up a delicious and completely unadorned squab, its crispy skin lacquered with red vinegar and malt sugar like a duck in a Chinatown window with his fried head wedged between the curled toes of his foot.

The daring of that group represented tasting menu cuisine at its best. But one evening it was followed by a venison dish served at room temperature; I could only choose.

Lukewarm food is so common in this style of cooking that someone in the movie “The Menu” says to the autocratic chef, “Even your hot dishes are cold.” Some of the dialogue from the film returns almost verbatim to Noksu, such as when a waiter indicated that a dish is ‘so beautiful that I can’t eat it’. Each course was served with precise instructions on how to transport it from plate to mouth. Not that I blame the servers. When diners at these types of restaurants are not given instructions, they become so confused that they ask what “the chef recommends.” When you see a restaurant full of grown adults waiting for permission to eat with a spoon, you really wonder how humans haven’t gone extinct yet.

How can the people behind Noksu not see what was obvious to the creators of “The Menu”: that the conventions of tasting menus have become laughable clichés? There was a time when fine dining restaurants took pride in catering to diners’ preferences. Noksu won’t even change a dish due to a life-threatening allergy: a disclaimer on the website reads: “We cannot accommodate vegan/vegetarian/celiac diets, as well as any allergies or aversions to seafood, shellfish, dairy products or allium. Chef Dae has designed the menu so that it can be eaten in its entirety to maximize the flavor profile.”

I’m allergic to the term flavor profile, but I still wanted to love Noksu. Sometimes I convinced myself I could do it. However, I think its joys and shortcomings are hopelessly intertwined. If there is a secret code that can unravel them, I hope someone will send it to me.

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