Rocking the Boat

In tight quarters, the seafood-focused Smithereens has found its groove.

- BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER

SUMMER ON THE Cape this is not. Dinner at Smithereens, which occupies a dark, subterranean space on East 9th Street, is closer to dining belowdecks on the Pequod. I once described the restaurant as a “galley-shaped warren with seawater-colored walls,” but almost a year into its passage, Smithereens, a cheffed-up homage to the foodways of New England (right down to the bottles of Moxie, older than Coca-Cola and the official soft drink of Maine), is worth a little claustrophobia.

When the restaurant opened last year, I found it inconsistent. On his seafood-heavy menu, Nick Tamburo, a former chef at Momofuku Ko (where he met Nikita Malhotra, his partner in the business and its wine director), was cooking with verve and creativity, but he seemed to have a chef's, rather than a diner’s, abiding interest in the weird. For every delicious hit—a special of amberjack belly, say, crisped over binchotan and served with sea-lettuce vinaigrette—there was one that felt like an ambitious miss. A kind of bean stew thickened with uni. A lobster roll—flying a miniature Massachusetts state flag, no less—dialed up with lobster butter and lobster aïoli, served for some reason on an overcharred bun. I ended up recommending that diners treat Smithereens like an Eastern Seaboard sushi joint, going for the raw dishes and tactfully ignoring the fizzled fireworks.