Eric Korsh took over the kitchen of North End Grill last spring. His approach tilts toward France in dishes like loup de mer.”
If you hooked a seismograph to Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, the readout for most of the last two decades would be boringly predictable. Regular spikes would indicate the orderly arrival of restaurants, with just a few aberrant tremors here and there: the closure of Tabla and, very rarely, a change of chef.
But since the summer of 2013, one quake after another has jolted the needle. The chef of the Dining Room and the Bar Room at the Modern stepped down. Then the same thing happened at the two Blue Smoke locations. Then North End Grill. One at a time, replacements were named. Recently came word that when Untitled moves downtown with the Whitney Museum of American Art, it will get a new chef, too.
This cluster of seismic activity could be a coincidence. Or it could mean that pressure was building for a while; suddenly, the tectonic plates moved. What is clear is that a company with a healthy respect for loyalty and stability has taken advantage of the turnover. The new chefs are far from cautious caretakers; they’ve moved decisively to refresh menus that, in some cases, had begun to stagnate.
Today I’ll take on Blue Smoke and North End Grill; the Modern is a complicated case of two restaurants, each holding three stars from The New York Times, and is best saved for another time.
Even fans of Blue Smoke would not have described it, before Jean-Paul Bourgeois took over the kitchen last March, as a beacon of innovation. From its birth in 2002 on East 27th Street through the opening of a Battery Park City location 10 years later, Blue Smoke tried to replicate every major American barbecue style. This guaranteed that its meat would be compared to Texas brisket, Carolina pulled pork and St. Louis ribs, and also guaranteed that the verdict would not favor Blue Smoke.
Mr. Bourgeois has tried to extract himself from that trap by dropping the regional aspirations from the menu, which now offers “seven-pepper rubbed beef brisket” and so on. It’s a start, but today Blue Smoke also faces competition from local pitmasters who produce great barbecue more consistently than it does. At their best, Blue Smoke’s pulled pork can run a close second to the one at Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque, and the brisket isn’t far off the one at Hometown Bar-B-Que, which has gotten better and better. On off days, you may get a pulp of gray, lifeless, smokeless pork or a tough, stringy sparerib. But while Blue Smoke’s barbecue lags, as ever, a few paces behind the front-runners, when it comes to contemporary Southern cooking in New York Mr. Bourgeois’s menu is at the head of the pack.
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OPEN Daily for lunch or brunch and dinner.
RESERVATIONS Accepted.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS The dining room and accessible restrooms are on sidewalk level.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction primarily to food, with ambience, service and price taken into consideration.
Email: petewells@nytimes.com. And follow Pete Wells on Twitter: @pete_wells.
A version of this review appears in print on January 28, 2015, on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Chef as Chief Innovation Officer . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
