AT PENNY, THE CLAUD TEAM UPENDS THE WINE BAR, YET AGAIN

When it opened almost two years ago, Claud was part of a movement that has revolutionized wine bars. Instead of a standard selection of charcuterie and cheeses to go with predictable wines, it offered ambitious, inventive food such as snail croquettes, raw razor clams, and a bang-up chicken with foie-gras drippings. The food was matched with a wine list laced with classic French reds and quirky small-production vintages from Germany, Italy, California, and Spain. It was a new framework for an old standard, which prompted the question that persists: Is it a wine bar or a restaurant?

Now the Claud duo, chef Joshua Pinsky and wine expert Chase Sinzer, both vets of Momofuku Ko, have opened a place directly upstairs from Claud, at 90 E. 10th Street between Third and Fourth avenues, known as Penny. Does that mean it’s cheap? Assuredly not! But Penny is even more of a wine bar than Claud was, with a menu almost entirely seafood — le cru et la cuit, as they say.

Once you’ve ascended the stairs past a lavender neon letter “P,” you’ll find a deep and narrow room in which all of the 30 or so seats line up to a gorgeous black-and-gray marble counter of considerable length. Most are reserved for walk-ins, which means you’d better get in line around 4:45 p.m. or so for the 5 p.m. opening.

Yes, you can get raw bar items — oysters, clams, shrimp cocktail, mussels, and periwinkles, if you so choose. That’s not the direction we were headed: Our excursion through a very delicious menu — perhaps more delicious than Claud’s — started with a loaf of brioche ($8) warmed in a convection oven. The browned top is salted and seeded, and it comes with some very good whipped butter: Adding three spindly anchovies costs an additional $6, and you’d better do it. In fact, order another loaf right away because it will be needed to sop the sauces that are to follow — and the bread service is the biggest bargain on the menu.

There are reminders of the bill of fare downstairs at Claud, and the prime one is the pair of raw razor clams ($14), minced and redeposited in their shells with giardiniera, making them notably pickle-y. Next arrives a dish that may remind you of summer picnics — a classic potato salad, soupy with mayonnaise, topped with paprika-dusted octopus tentacles that might have been borrowed from an old-fashioned Spanish tapas bar. You’ll demolish it ($19) in three or four bites.

We washed it down with sips of a mysterious Catalonian white by Bodega Clandestina, called Blanc Sense Papers, organic, unfiltered, and seemingly ignored like a forgotten child during its fermentation. It was astonishingly great, and a bargain these days, at $17. In fact, all by-the-glass selections fall in the $12 to $28 range, and even the cheapest glass — an old vines Alsatian Pinot Blanc — was well worth drinking. Sake, sweet wines, and sherries are also options. The by-the-bottle selection is voluminous, most in the over-$90 range. As you are perusing it, Sinzer may stroll up and tell you there’s an even longer list that is distributed only on request.

I wondered whether the oyster pan roast ($29) was inspired by the dish of the same name at Grand Central Oyster Bar, where it is mainly cream and shellfish steamed in a counter-mounted contraption and flavored with what tastes like ketchup. Luckily not. Here instead is a painstakingly assembled pot pie, wearing a top hat of puff pastry, with three small oysters in lieu of the usual chicken. Not bad, but still our least favorite dish of the early evening.

The item that most approaches an entrée in size is a filet of Dover sole ($41) flavored with bay leaf and topped with baby mushrooms and gobs of bone marrow. In its rich brown sauce, the flavor is exquisite, and don’t worry about the bones sticking out on one side — they’re just for show, like the exposed eaves on a vacation cottage, and the planks of fish easily pull away. This is where you need that brioche again.

Like Claud, Penny represents a new chapter in the development of the wine bar genre — with intriguing food restricted to the aquatic; a thoughtful and quirky selection of wines, very affordable by the glass; and a goal-directed experience, where the goal to eat at a fair clip as in the lunch counters of yore, and then leave unceremoniously. It’s an experience I suspect the public will willingly endure.

2024-03-28T18:13:57Z dg43tfdfdgfd