Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
American English is all over the map
Chef Russ Aaron Simon comes home to Hollywood after worldwide stint with Wolfgang Puck.
He worked at Spago in Beverly Hills and traveled from Singapore to Istanbul to open restaurants for celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. Now, Russ Aaron Simon has returned to Hollywood, his hometown, to open a restaurant of his own, American English Kitchen + Bar.
Simon, 38, is like a veteran free-agent pitcher who finally comes home to play. He has family and friends here. You want to root for him. But four months after the restaurant’s June opening, you wonder if Simon is going to find his focus and find the plate. There’s a bit of everything on the menu, some Italian pastas and Asian-influenced seafood, along with American-tinged comfort food such as fried potato beignets stuffed with bacon and white cheddar, and Southern-style biscuits with pork belly. It can make for a tricky ordering and sharing experience, and some jarring combinations.
Wild boar fettuccine to start, with Singapore chili prawns as a main course? That sounds like a match made for Pepto. Spaghetti carbonara as an appetizer, with Florida red snapper for an entree? Now, you’re talking.
But that snapper ($29) was indicative of the state of Simon’s venture. The fish looked good and was prepared well, with crisp skin outside and moist inside. It was served atop a pale-green asparagus puree and hunks of root vegetables, but tasted bland. The next day, I couldn’t remember much about the dish.
All the food was OK during my latest visit on a recent Saturday night, but nothing really popped. The servers were friendly and meant well, but they struggled to keep up as a crowd built inside the dining room. Water and wine glasses sat unfilled. Empty dishes lingered between courses. The atmosphere was sophisticated and pleasant, with a lively bar up front and an open kitchen in the back, but it felt as though something was missing.
And something was missing. What happened to the terrific bone-marrow vinaigrette, an addictive sauce puddled around the sliced New York strip steak on my first visit during the summer? For the latest meal, steaks were accompanied by chimichurri, bearnaise and steak sauce, all house made.
The sauces were good, but not on the same level as that marrow reduction. To draw out the baseball analogy, it was like going to see Clayton Kershaw pitch and watching him throw only changeups and curve balls. At $38 for the strip steak, you want the fastball. You want the A game.
One look at the kitchen, where it was only Simon and one other chef, and I suspected Simon had to simplify things for the sake of efficiency.
“That marrow vinaigrette is a la minute,”
Simon says in a follow-up interview, meaning it’s made to order. It’s a labor-intensive process, and the problem was Simon was shortstaffed. One of his assistants recently left because of family illness. Another had to bolt after Hurricane Matthew when a relative’s home up the coast was damaged.
Welcome to the harried world of restaurant chefownership, especially in transient South Florida. It’s one thing to be part of Puck’s well-trained global crew. Simon is learning what it’s like to be captain of his own ship.
“We still need to find our footing a little bit,” Simon says.
Give the man points for honesty. He knows there’s work to do, and he’s still ironing out menu items. A lamb shank that I’d heard good things about wasn’t offered on my latest visit. Gone, too, was a crisp, fried artichoke salad that never sold well. Simon hopes to have the marrow vinaigrette back soon. And he doesn’t have a pastry chef, and is making two desserts on his own.
One, Cousin Rosalie’s chocolate chip cake ($8), had good flavor but was a bit dry, a function of the family recipe that’s pareve (meaning it’s acceptable for dairy or meat meals in kosher homes), which uses eggs but no milk or cream. The other dessert, an apple crumble ($9), also had good flavor, but the hefty, inelegant chunks of crumble were more like boulders.
Simon says his goal is to have an upscale, neighborhood restaurant with fine food and a relaxed atmosphere. It’s in a good corner location near Young Circle that once housed Fulvio’s 1900 Italian restaurant. Simon needs to liven the place up, give it some personality aside from rock music that’s piped in and gold-fabric, semicircular banquettes along a mirrored wall.
Simon, the oldest of four children, began cooking for his family at a young age, and he went to culinary school after his business studies at the University of Central Florida left him unfulfilled. His cooking career began at the Wolfgang Puck Grand Cafe at Disney World, then led to Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, London, Istanbul and Singapore, where he worked at Puck’s Cut steakhouse for two years.
After working for Puck for 15 years, Simon is setting a high bar for himself. He’s also charging some high prices, including $120 for an 80-ounce Tomahawk bonein rib-eye steak that can feed a family. If he expects patrons to become regulars, there has to be some value. I don’t know if $30 for an iron steak with frites fits the bill, although the thick and crispy hand-cut fries were very good.
The Singapore chili prawns ($29) were large and plentiful, heaped atop jasmine rice with vibrant cilantro, but the sauce was a bit thick and cloyingly sweet, something you’d find in dozens of Asian fusion places around South Florida. The grilled octopus appetizer ($12) featured bite-size slices in lettuce cups, with an Asian fish sauce that was subtle and tasty. The housemade pastas were a high point, with the wild boar ragu fettuccine ($18) rich and hearty.
Simon says he wants to expand hours to serve weekend brunches and Sunday suppers (the restaurant is now closed on Sundays and Mondays), but he’d like to smooth out rough edges first. I’m hoping the hometown kid can find his stride. The potential is there. Now, it’s time for execution.