Good-bye to Gotham

Alfred Portale’s second act is a neighborhood spot with more modest ambitions and praiseworthy pasta.

- By Adam Platt

MOST OF YOU reading this column probably don’t think of the stern-faced, spotlessly attired Alfred Portale as one of the wild, bomb-throwing revolutionaries of the culinary set. But in his day, the recently deposed chef and co-owner of that august Union Square dining destination Gotham Bar and Grill was famous for all sorts of radical notions and innovations. He was one of the original pioneers of a certain downtown Greenmarket cuisine that came to be called “farm to table” cooking, of course, and the father, famously, of the imitated stacked-plating method known as “vertical cuisine.” He turned simple preparations like seafood salad into the height of style before gourmet comfort dishes were fashionable, and he let loose the scourge of tuna tartare on an unsuspecting dining public after spying a tuna hand roll in a local Japanese restaurant.