Clothbound

The natty Tweed dresses up local/seasonal cooking in one hell of suit.

by Adam Erace

Mark Stehle KING SALMON: Tweed chef David Cunningham cures and smokes Irish salmon three ways for this luxurious trio.

Take away the menu display at 114 St. 12th St., and "restaurant" isn't what immediately springs to mind. An upper-crusty clothier would be a better guess — there's a department-store revolving door and the name of a fabric calligraphed onto the façade. Tweed indeed is a restaurant, though, one where good looks are good form. Hospitality maestro Edward Bianchini hired URBANSCPACEDEVELOPMENT (Noble, Capogiro) to wash away the bayou muck left by the last occupant, Les Bons Temps, and in June opened this American eatery named for the cloth favored by English professors and librarian watchers everywhere. The space is so luxe — TVs hidden behind mirrors! Sexy sinks in the bathroom! — "Silk" or "Cashmere" seem like much more appropriate monikers. Regardless, it's Bianchini's court, and he moves through the dining room's lush flower arrangements like a panther through grass.

My mom, a florist for 20 years, should see these blooms. Piled into tall vases on the zinc bar and short ones framing the floating staircase (a modernized copy of the building's original), the exotic flora defied my botanical proficiency, leaving me bereft of all classification but "narwhal tusk," "fuzzy purple lollipop" and "fern harvested from the velociraptor compound on Jurassic Park." I've seen arrangements like these before, and by before, I mean at Per Se.

Bianchini minds Tweed's details like a zealous nanny. Clearly, he's invested in this business, and good on this Philly boy for it. The maharajah-funeral's worth of stems must cost him six times the most expensive entrée (a $29 lobster Cobb salad), or at least as much as the summer-smart ivory suit the owner sported during one dinner service. That warm summer evening, Ivy Leaguers lined the gorgeous bar, and willowy women in Labor Day whites floated around the room like specters, just tanner. Smooch, smooch. The boat in Margate. Smooch, smooch. Huntington Valley. A happy birthday song broke out at the host stand, cake and all. Everyone seemed to know everyone in this sleek room, on this slick night.

If Tweed feels like a chic auberge on the French Riviera, it's because Bianchini ran one, the Hotel les Muscadins in Mougins. The inn's since sold, but its clubby esprit de corps lives on in this less glamorous locale, like a temporarily dethroned and making-the-best-of-it royal.

But under this glossy veneer lurks one very unexpected attribute: earnestness. Attired in the stylishly glum blues and grays of an Icelandic winter, Tweed may look like the kind of place rich, bored people would have an orgy, but beneath the surface, there's a real restaurant here. The bread basket featured doubly local focaccia — it's baked in-house, with flour grown and milled in Jersey and herbs from chef David Cunningham's backyard. The water had "a touch of cucumber in it," according to the imperturbable server bearing a silver pitcher like a Roman statue. "Will that be OK?"

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It'll be fine, and so will the dining in Tweed's bilevel boutique. Rest assured, 39-year-old Cunningham, who's been the chef at Bookbinder's and less recently cooked at New York's Le Bernardin and Lespinasse, has the most heartfelt of culinary intentions. He refers to his purveyors as "fellas," as in "the fella who makes the honey up the road from my house" or "the nice fella who raises the pigs for the kieblasa and the pork chop." If you want their names, see the bottom of Cunningham's menu, where they're all honored in an elegant footnote that allows the food descriptions to stay unencumbered.

As for the actual dishes, they can feel the opposite, some as overworked as a farmer during harvest season.

Was it Coco Chanel who advised ladies to get dressed, then take off one accessory before leaving the house? Tweed's food should follow suit. Nix the distracting raw onion in the heirloom tomato salad. Discard the house-baked crostini from the salsa fredo, a vehicle as wrong for this tangy, tomato-topped fluke, bass and salmon ceviche as a Lamborghini for Mother Teresa.

For the grilled porkchop with sautéed rainbow chard, either creamed corn or birch beer barbecue sauce would suffice. Together, they ran into each other, the acid in the sauce causing the cream in the corn to break and clot like a Cement Mixer shot. Which is the lesser evil? The corn, sweet and grassy but thin as lemonade? Or the birch beer confection, just as watery and tasting nothing like its namesake soda? Why debate when the pork was overcooked anyway?

Seared Magret duck breast also went a little long in the pan — hardly the worst of its troubles considering the sliced fowl arrived over a "corn and peach cake," actually a white peach-filled crepe made from a Dogfish Head Festina Peche-spiked cornmeal batter. I'd like it with sausage instead of duck, at 11 a.m. instead of 9 at night.

Cunningham is best when he's cooking clean, letting his soil-encrusted treasures speak for themselves. The jewel-toned tomatoes in the aforementioned salad were so juicy they almost quivered, balsamic and basil oil all the embellishment the they required — though the creamy Valley Shepherd ricotta certainly didn't hurt. Another starter involved kielbasa, crafted in Newtown from pork raised on the same farm. It's a sausage best served simply, and Cunningham obliged; the link was grilled, sliced and kissed with hot mustard. Or consider salmon, an Irish specimen, cured in-house three ways (plain, pepper and dill), lightly smoked and draped across a wooden paddle. The version trimmed with cracked black and white peppercorns was the best, though each rendition was as luxuriously textured as a vicuna suit.

With the salsa fredo, the tomato salad and kielbasa came stacked on a three-tiered tray one early evening visit when the mood was decidedly less Christmas-on-St.-Bart's. Tweed was settling into a sleepy happy hour starring these "Tiers of Taste," a selection of slimmed-down, mix-and-match starters for just $12, and $5 house cocktails. The She So Purdy was a lowball involving Art in the Age's new SNAP liqueur, muddled shiso, lime and soda — sexy as all hell, but as embarrassing to type as it is to say aloud.

There's also an unadulterated, violet-hued Aviation, a Capriroska with basil and pear and a rosemary-infused Sansom Street Smash propelled by enough cachaca to make that imminent; fridges stocked with tri-state-sourced craft beer; and a lighthearted list of whites that reads like a scene from V for Vendetta — Vermentino, Vernaccia, Verdejo, Viognier. (Reds, too, but it was too hot to go there.) Order one with the grass-fed cheesesteak croquettes. Arranged in concentrated tomato compote, they're the size of lotto balls and just as lucky, for he who eats them experiences a rare success in the reinvented-cheesesteak genre.

For dessert, an interesting-sounding ewe's-milk-and-rosewater panna cotta got 86'd at the last second, leaving a vacancy for the pluckier ice cream float. Choose from root beer, birch beer or cream soda, each with their own ice cream flavor. My birch beer fix unsatisfied by the pork chop, I drank it down for dessert, a ball of lovely honey-lavender gelato causing the wintergreen-y pop to fizz and foam like a fire extinguisher.

Then there was the "ice cream club," a playful special (now on the menu) featuring amazing pound cake — the secret is salted butter — bookending vanilla and chocolate ice cream bars, kiwi (pickles), strawberry (tomato) and dark chocolate "bacon." It was as delicious as it was messy, and ice cream drips trailed down my hands like henna tattoos. Thank goodness Tweed's crowd was far too self-involved to notice.

(adam.erace@citypaper.net)