Broadway East

Photograph: David Rosenzweig

With a former Hollywood chef in the kitchen—Lee Gross used to keep Gwyneth Paltrow in sprouts and millet (and red-carpet dresses)—a menu glossary that defines “seitan” and “tofu” and waitresses in uniforms sewn from recycled khaki, Broadway East cries out for ribbing. But alas, that’s all the ammunition you’ll get. Gross is not your typical mock-meat evangelist. And first impressions aside, Broadway East is not your yoga instructor’s vegetarian restaurant (though maybe it should be).

The chef brings a new level of ambition and polish to a genre too often bogged down by rhetoric. Unlike Pure Food and Wine, one of the city’s other high-end veggie haunts, there’s no raw-food credo to swallow along with your algae dust and uncooked “lasagna.” Gross’s flexitarian menu takes care of vegans, vegetarians and I-only-eat-chicken-and-fish dabblers, in a gorgeous space—the owners are architects—featuring a wall of live foliage and dangling orb lights. The result is the first serious (mostly) meatless spot in New York that the diet-restricted won’t feel embarrassed to bring their meat-eating friends to.

As devoted as I am to fat, pork and grease, I still felt comfortable sipping a Finger Lakes riesling in one of the restaurant’s crimson banquettes (the locavore wine list features bottles from New York and New Jersey only). Before discovering the wonders of “snow-dried tofu,” Gross slung gut-busting fare at Rhode Island’s Al Forno. Thankfully, for the indulgent among us, he hasn’t entirely abandoned his rib-sticking roots.

The chef recognizes that anyone who would avoid veggies at a vegetarian restaurant is probably a glutton. How else to explain the only available carnivorous starter the first time I dined there: an indulgent oyster gratin featuring briny bivalves drenched in butter, cheese and smoked onion cream and topped with crisp pimentón bread crumbs? Or his nearly as-rich nod to the neighborhood, succulent kasha-stuffed chicken in a dill-scented jus with butter-laden baby carrots (kasha varnishkes meets bubbe’s chicken soup)?

The vegetarian dishes on the ever-evolving menu exhibit similar sophistication. A grayish-brown porcini-cremini pâté compensated for its visual shortcomings with a rich, meaty taste and foie gras–like texture. An open-faced “lasagnette” featured matchstick asparagus spears, asparagus cream, a runny egg and—bikini be damned—more butter. The chef’s vegan riff on a Moroccan b’steeya was as beautiful as it was flavorful—the phyllo crust atop a stuffing of sweet squash, chickpeas, and dried currants and apricots was sprinkled half with powdered sugar and half with cinnamon, like a black-and-white cookie.

Of course, if you’re after clichéd Birkenstock fare, take comfort in the fact that tempeh, seitan and tofu are still the big draw for the restaurant’s core clientele. I took the waitress’s earnest recommendation and, with trepidation, ordered the crispy coconut tempeh. The chef, she assured me, spent a full year perfecting this mess of a dish, a heap of spicy lentils, whipped sweet potatoes and coconut curry, with triangles of dense tempeh and a shredded coconut crust balanced on top. Though the flavors were certainly big, it may just not be possible to make this sort of food very appealing.

As I went back down the sinful path for dessert, eschewing vegan pear crostata and cider sorbet in favor of decadent carrot cake profiteroles filled with cream cheese mousse and drizzled with caramel, I began to realize that Broadway East is two restaurants in one. There’s plenty for the dinner-as-detox believers, weary of yet another Zen Palate meal. For the rest of us there’s familiar food with real flavor and, yes, even calories and fat.