Back Forty

Grass-fed burger with assorted sides

Photograph: Jeff Gurwin

It’s late enough in the calendar for sweeping declarations, so let me make the following for New York dining in 2007: It was the Year of the Farm. Locally sourced market menus full of organic zeal and purveyor worship have swamped the city to an unprecedented degree. This includes the latest entrant, Back Forty, a place with an agrarian name (it’s the number of acres traditionally left fallow), a farmhouse look (wooden tables and clean white walls, dotted with antique farm tools) and a formidable chef-owner (Peter Hoffman of the excellent Greenmarket-pioneer Savoy). Back Forty also displays the kind of hit-and-miss results that prove that a barnyard emphasis, good intentions and all, doesn’t automatically spell greatness.

Not since the Dust Bowls of the Great Depression has a farm visit yielded so little food: The portions run small and unaccompanied, making ordering from the salads and vegetarian side dishes, listed in the “from the garden” section of the menu, a necessity. Aside from the price creep—tack on another seven or eight bucks for a salad, and the midteens entrée prices no longer look so reasonable—this isn’t a bad thing, as vegetables are some of the best reasons to visit Back Forty.

A gratin of explosively flavorful baby cauliflower with leeks and aged Gruyère was one favorite, and I’ve rarely tasted better brussels sprouts—the pungent mini cabbages were marinated in shallot butter and dotted with dried cherries. The tempura-fried delicata squash shrouds the thick and firm gourd slices in a batter as luscious as a funnel cake.Yet mistakes abound. Parsnip strips, served like a small plate of matchstick fries in an oily vinaigrette, were uneven—the key source of flavor, white anchovies, sat clustered beneath the heap, rendering the top half dull and the bottom overwhelmed by fish. The ridiculous cheese appetizer should be renamed fruit and nuts, as the wedge of Farmstead Brie is cut slightly larger than a guitar pick. The two more intriguing salads—shaved fennel with pumpkin, and cranberry beans, radicchio and Indian-spiced feta cheese—proved no better than the sum of their good-on-paper ingredients.

None of the entrées, or “core” in Back Forty parlance, particularly impressed me either. Executive chef Hoffman and day-to-day chef Shanna Pacifico, formerly of Town, offer a signature grass-fed hamburger that was lean and dense, with a gamey flavor. But it won’t make any best-burger lists, particularly at $17 once cheese and the too-soggy fries are added. Back Forty’s blue-crab version of a classic lobster roll was doomed by stringy flesh and, combined with a mustard sauce, proved somewhat sour, missing out on the buttery luxury and underlying sweetness of the original. Yet there was too much sweetness in other meat offerings, whether it was the homemade cotechino sausage overpowered by fenugreek or rotisserie chicken dominated by the flavor of maple syrup.

The service here was cheery and efficient—perhaps too efficient. Hoffman is a slow-food pioneer, yet Back Forty throws grub out here at a fast-food pace (even with appetizers and dessert, a meal doesn’t take much more than an hour unless you dawdle). Some extra time could help: The apple pie, with a lovely flaky crust made by Hoffman’s wife, arrived cold—even a few minutes of reheating would have made a dramatic improvement.

The best dessert, by far, was the stout float, though the secret is in the proportions: Twice when I ordered it, the balance between the beer and the Il Laboratorio del Gelato vanilla, leavened by sautéed Bosc pear cubes, was sublime; a third time there was too much beer, making the whole thing bitter (Pacifico uses a coarse stout from a Pennsylvania brewery called Sly Fox, rather than the creamier Guinness). Farm-based restaurants have the same challenges as other eateries: Local, seasonal ingredients can certainly result in good dishes; greatness, however, requires focused execution.