From the Latin

Matthew Levin executes ambitious lesson plans at Adsum.

by Adam Erace

Neal Santos BIG FISH: Though there are plenty of creative flourishes on Matthew Levin's menu, some of Adsum's best dishes are straightforward: Take the tuna carpaccio, with long hots, Granny Smith apples and soy.

[ review ]

You've heard about the writing on the wall — but what of the writing on the table? At Adsum, chef Matthew Levin's lasciviously anticipated debut, No. 35 bears a nasty, carved-in note: "F.U. Matt."

While the diss could have been scrawled by a diner subjected to Levin's capricious Kool-Aid-pickled watermelon, or a jilted Lacroix apostle horrified by Adsum's lack of starch, all that's known about the author is that he or she was a chemistry student in a high school in Schenectady, N.Y., source of the soapstone tabletops that eventually made their way to Queen Village.

At Adsum, Levin is the one saying F.U. to the ultra-refined food he was cooking uptown. Adsum is pierogies with smoked buttermilk and poutine with foie gras, a Pied de Cochon of his own, where dinner is set to '80s M.J. and Vanity 6.

The name means "I am present," and though it sounds more like an Excel function than a Latin decree, it fits the 35-year-old chef. Adsum is the third concept he's floated since leaving the Rittenhouse Hotel, and the first to come to fruition, this one with the help of co-owner and hospitality techie Kar Vivekananthan. "I thought this was the next step in the natural progression of my career, that it would happen really easily," Levin said during our interview. "It was a hell of a lot harder than I thought."

Humble pie for Levin and apple for us, pumped with luxurious dulce de leche, laced with garam masala for a thrilling Far East inflection to an American classic. Dessert might be a strange place to begin, but the bazaar of spices lends the pie a savory quality that could qualify it as an appetizer. I think of it as an apple curry, topped with one of the finest vanilla ice creams in town.

At Adsum, dinner and dessert get their lines crossed in wonderful ways. Caramel on the octopus. Butterscotch on the scallops. Sioux City Sarsaparilla, reduced with sarsaparilla and licorice roots, rosemary and sage, became an inky glaze for a lamb shank leaning on bacon-fried Brussels sprouts and confit red peppers. Braised in brown butter fortified with housemade Worcestershire, short ribs join popcorn, which Levin purées, presses through a tamis and picks up with stock and butter. The popcorn porridge was ridiculously good, the beef so tender my fork didn't shred it so much as the meat recoiled from its tines.

Pork butt got the slow-roast in preparation for a mole sauce made with everything from bananas and pistachios to black olives and balsamic. You'd never be able to pick out any of those flavors in the clay-colored sauce (or any of the other 20-plus ingredients), but blended, they created an earthy cloak for the pig. Accompanying planks of fried naan, though interesting, shattered when used as pork shovels.

Some of the best dishes at Adsum are the most straightforward: a sliver of cheddar astride Honeycrisp apple butter and a heavenly bacon-fat biscuit; tuna carpaccio that ate like Parma ham, electrified with chopped long hots, Granny Smith matchsticks and soy; or the dearly departed ricotta gnudi, expecting resurrection in squash form. I savored it under the awnings at Adsum, spearing each featherweight bite with seasonal comrades of sweet sautéed corn, heirloom tomatoes and leaves of licorice-y tarragon. The weather was not quite summer, not quite fall, a balmy breeze drifting through. Moments and dishes you don't want to end.

Another night, biblical rainstorms shook the city, but inside, Adsum was packed with young hedonists merrymaking before the great flood, sipping Unholy Water, a beguiling mezcal elixir swirled with smoked blackberry-balsamic vinaigrette. Late-night deals the restaurant releases on Twitter and Facebook lure these nocturnal gastronauts to the happening bar, like ill-fated children to the chants of the Sanderson Sisters.

Three-dollar canned beers make for reliable wee-hours action, though I find it hard to turn my back on cocktails from spirit guide Preston Eckman. His Poppy Doble is reason enough to get thy drink on here; it's a Hemingway daiquiri at a bake sale, nutty-sweet orgeat syrup and toasted poppy seeds applied to the rum-maraschino-grapefruit formula. Mulled red wine gave a mellow harvest inflection to rye and cognac in the View of Vieux Carre, a riff on Eckman's favorite cocktail.

Leather-bound journals and medical curios line the bar shelves betwixt bottles of Luxardo and Carpano Antica, all part of Adsum's carefully curated laboratory atmosphere. Servers add to it, pouring wine from Erlenmeyer flasks, and so does Levin, huddled over a table of vials and beakers on the restaurant website.

The molecular skillz for which Levin is known appear on the menu now and again. Take the pierogies, their potato-plumped middles strung with sweet, thyme-kissed caramelized onions — the clouds of buttermilk dabbed along them are frothed with an injection of NO2 and "smoked" with freeze-dried hickory juice. Pickled mushrooms get the same powdered hickory treatment; Levin pan-roasts them with sour cherries, brandy and shallots, then pours a smoke-suffused sherry vinegar-based brine over the hot 'shrooms. Three days later, the little flavor bombs are just itching to detonate.

The aforementioned apple pie makes a far superior finale to other desserts, though the chocolate beignets pumped with cream cheese icing would satisfy those not suffering fritter ennui. Another unexpected finale came from the bar in the form of Eckman's dessert-like Lady Grey. I fell hard for this egg white-frothed enchantress; I could have spent the night prostrated at her perfume counter of creme yvette, Earl Grey syrup, vanilla bean, lemon and orange oils. (There's cognac in there, too, fellas.) I love her so much I'd carve our names in a tree. Or better yet, a soapstone table.

(adam.erace@citypaper.net)