Last weekend, perhaps Miami's best-known restaurateur, Michelle Bernstein, made the trip up north to Palm Beach and debuted her new restaurant, MB at the Omphoy. From her days at Tantra and Azul to the opening of her flagship restaurant, Michy's, in 2005, Bernstein has long captivated Miami with simple, elegant dishes that draw from her Latino background. In 2007, Bernstein was awarded the coveted James Beard Award for Best New Chef South, only a year after Michy's was crowned Food & Wine's Best New Restaurant and was listed among Gourmet's Top 50 in the country. Last year, Bernstein followed up her successes at Michy's by launching Sra. Martinez, a tapas spot in the Miami Design District that's garnered a host of great reviews.
And now, it's our turn to get a share of the stunning Latino-Jewish chef -- well, not us, specifically, but the well-to-do enclave of Palm Beach Island. Her fourth restaurant is in the brand new Omphoy Resort, a sort of miniature hotel and spa shadowed between the Four Seasons and a private resort along the beach. There hasn't been much released in the way of a menu for MB's. A few news releases sent out have said it would feature largely seafood and Mediterranean-inspired dishes, but if that's not a vague description in South Florida, I don't know what is.
The mystery doesn't stop at the restaurant. The resort arrived with
little fanfare. And there's not much in the way of signage to direct
visitors, which seems intentional: When I called the Omphoy after
passing its address a second time, the receptionist told me, "Yes, it's
sort of hidden. They wanted to give the resort a very private feel."
Finally, I found the long driveway leading past a very municipal-looking pool building (at least from the roadside), which in turn hid
the dark-hued resort from road traffic.
Once you find it, the Omphoy is certainly a unique-looking resort. A
smooth, onyx-colored facade and dark-tinted doors open in to a foyer
that's confounding and mesmerizing all at once. It's dark and sexy,
lined with odd shapes that never seem to meet parallel to one another.
Mirrors and glass abound and direct lighting is minimal; almost
everything is back lit. A staircase up past the front desk houses a
pool beneath with what looks like an exotic cave structure trickling
water. The entire effect is one of concealment, as if every design
decision was made to hide dimension, to take you out of place and time.
There's a certain seductive, majestically infernal quality to it all. I
think they pegged Palm Beach just right.
The restaurant is up
another flight of stairs by the zig-zagging bar, past a pool table and
waiting lounge. It too is all back lighting; dark blue pillars serving
as focal points in each of the dining room's four quarters. The whole
east wall is decked in dark tinted, floor-to-ceiling windows. In the
late afternoon you can see out of them, but since MB is not open for
lunch, there isn't much time to catch light from outside. At night, the
glass resembles a black abyss, a refracting portal that never seems to
stop. As such it's difficult to tell just how large the room is. You
feel simultaneously alone and surrounded, even as we were ushered to a
white-draped booth by the northern edge.
The menu is small and rotates daily -- both the wine and drink lists
are larger. Apparently, much of the herbs and vegetables are culled
from a rooftop garden, which, coupled with the day's fresh seafood
haul, informs the menu choices. There are three salads, three crudos,
and about eight starters and entrees each, many of which seem inspired
from Bernstein's other restaurants; all of them being extraordinarilly
simple (asparagus with poached egg, braised short rib, seafood
tagliatelle, boulliabase, fried chicken). We decided to start with
something from the garden, a simple salad of butter lettuce and
escarole with strips of anise-flavored fennel, crisp radish, and some
very mild nicoise olives ($9). Clean, crisp, fresh, especially with a
dressing of lemon juice and (grapeseed?) oil and not much else. I could
hardly resist the draw of Bernstein's sweetbreads ($14) -- the woman
knows her way around some thymus, as regulars at Michy's will tell you.
Here, the preparation is pretty classic -- breaded and fried to a
uniform crisp, and dressed with a sort of caper and lemon supreme
gremolada. The supple, oblong gland is perfectly cooked, melting and
delicious against the supremely crisp coating. MB keeps it raised off
the plate slightly with a stack of julianned carrots and string beans,
a sort of crude crudite with the addition of ranch dressing on the
bottom. The whole thing reminded me of chicken wings... in a good way, I guess. I
would probably skip the ranch next time, however.
Another offal entry: seared foie gras on a folded pancake with a sweet,
salty maple sauce and razor-thin slices of apple ($20). It's a playful dish made more serious by the excellent presentation and the intense
flavor -- there's a sear on the duck liver that would make Malliard
proud, lending the caramelized liver a concentrated, almost beefy
flavor. Great stuff.
We sipped on a few drinks from the bar as we waited for our main
courses, an aum-foy (gin, grapefruit, basil, $12) and a nacional
(cucumber, tequila, chile, $12), the first of which was a fine drink.
The nacional, however, well... it sucked, to put it bluntly. The
cucumber was faint, the chile non-existant. It slinked closer to
margarita territory than anything else. While we imbibed, Michelle
Bernstein emerged from the kitchen and made a few controlled passes
around the dining room in a white chefs coat and long white skirt that
matched the servers.
For our entrees, we stuck to seafood: Malaysian curried snapper with
hearts of palm "slaw" ($25), and salt-encrusted dorade (sea-bream) with
thin mash and wilted spinach, perhaps a riff on steakhouse cuisine
($29). The snapper I didn't really want to order, but my companion did
-- it sounded sort of boring, plus I felt the curry might overpower the fish, though our waitress (who
was extremely well-versed in the menu for day four or five) assured us
it would not. She was right, though I didn't really love it. The curry
was more of a light broth infused with lemongrass and spices, which
went nicely with the white flesh of the snapper. And the hearts of palm
I dug deeply, though it was less a slaw than a sort of pico de gallo
ladelled into empty cylanders of the tart fruit. Accompanying sticky
rice added some body, I'm just not sure this dish really excelled
beyond something passingly interesting.
The dorade, on the other hand, was sublime. A busboy had brought it out
whole, still encased in salt for inspection, then hauled it back to the
kitchen to plate. They could've done a better job in that department,
as the filets were cut off and arrived loosely stacked atop one another
above a very messy spread of whipped potatoes and a hastilly sided
stack of spinach. But the flavors were fantastic. The dorade was
wonderfully oceanic, firm and meaty and moist all at once. There were flecks of large-grain
sea salt on top that you wouldn't get with each bite, resulting in
little waves of pleasure between the simple, pure flavors of the sea
and then explosions of salinity. The mash was really interesting too:
basically a starchified transport for sweet cream butter. I'd order
this again and again.
We wrapped up our meal with a cup of French press coffee and two
desserts, a tray of ganache-filled donut holes sided with coffee
pudding and a 66% dark chocolate tart with fig sabayon ice cream($7 each) -- the
ice cream was extraordinary, in silky texture and in lucious fig flavor. I'd skip the rest next time. All told, service knocked it out of the park considering this was the
first week. They were gracious, helpful, and -- best of all -- amazingly friendly. We ended up talking to one of our servers (we had two) Dupree, throughout the night. Really funny, awesome guy. And the kitchen did well, too -- I really liked the simplicity
of everything, the willingness to let ingredients speak on their own. Some might find it predictable, and maybe, in a way, it is. But since the rest of the resort experience is so mysterious, MB's is a fine dose of reality in an a stretch of Palm Beach that already has its fair share of pretense and illusion.
