OPEN AI Output Prompted by Jared
Main Takeaways: • Tatiana is a new restaurant in the David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center • Chef Kwame Onwuachi's menu pays tribute to his childhood in the Bronx and Nigeria as well as his career in the culinary industry • Tatiana's menu offers a unique combination of fine dining and traditional dishes, such as okra, jerk-spiced scallops, and braised oxtails
Inputs from Airtable
The request: New Yorker Summary The AI Prompt Summarize the following passage from a magazine article. Add a bulleted list of the 3 main takeaways at the top. Make the summary body text have language that will appeal to food lovers. The Transcript There are two ways to enter the new restaurant Tatiana, in the new David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center: directly from the plaza or by way of the hall’s lobby. On my second visit, I chose the latter, wending my way through a library-like array of tables and couches, where New Yorkers of all stripes sat quietly watching a live broadcast of the Philharmonic, onstage in the auditorium just yards away. This charming but sober tableau put an especially fine point on the party atmosphere on the other side of the glass doors, in Tatiana’s dining room, where Usher was blasting and blue light cast a surreal glow on pink velvet chairs and marble tables set with gold cutlery. If this scene within a fairly staid and hallowed institution sounds surprising, that’s the point. In recent years, Lincoln Center has done its best to evolve. Tatiana, from the young chef Kwame Onwuachi, is a triumph in staying relevant while fitting into the broad category of performing arts: all restaurants are theatrical, of course, but eating here is like watching Onwuachi deliver a controlled and electric autobiographical monologue. As he does in his 2019 memoir, “Notes from a Young Black Chef,” the menu traces a childhood spent in the Bronx and in Nigeria and a career that began in the galley of an oil-spill-response vessel off the coast of Louisiana (his mother’s home state) before leading him to the Culinary Institute of America and then to Per Se, Eleven Madison Park, and the TV show “Top Chef.” (He didn’t win, but was a fan favorite.) When Onwuachi quit his job at E.M.P., the chef de cuisine urged him to “think of your ancestors”—Carême and Escoffier, David Chang and Thomas Keller. But those weren’t his ancestors, Onwuachi writes. His ancestors “ground cassava flour . . . soaked stockfish, and hit kola trees until the nuts fell down.” They were “steeped in the curries and jerk of Jamaica” and the “gumbos and jambalayas of Louisiana.” At Tatiana, which is named for Onwuachi’s older sister, he manages to pay tribute to all of his forebears, giants of fine dining included. The menu is divided into small and large “share” plates, a word I found to be misleading at times. Dumplings filled with egusi soup, a touchstone of Nigerian cooking, made with ground melon seeds, came in portions of three; jerk-spiced scallops arrived on a pair of tiny skewers; and an order of Mom Dukes Shrimp consisted of just two—albeit very large and very delicious, head-on and drenched in creole butter. Much easier to split were a bowl of okra—deep-fried until deflated but crisp, absorbent of honey, mustard, and a habanero “peppa sauce”—and a play on the Jamaican dish escovitch, here featuring medallions of sweet raw hamachi fanned with avocado slices on a pool of carrot à la nage (poached in court bouillon and reduced). From almost anyone else, a gussied-up chopped cheese, a beloved-in-the-Bronx bodega sandwich made with ground beef and Cheez Whiz or melted American, would strike me as misguided. Onwuachi’s interpretation, featuring aged rib eye and Taleggio on brioche, crowned with shredded romaine and shaved truffle, fits winningly into his story. An even more successful homage to his New York youth is the POG Nutcracker (passionfruit, orange, and guava juices and rum), inspired by his stint peddling the homemade, plastic-bottled fruit-juice cocktails sold (illegally) on the city’s street corners and beaches. The most obvious showpiece is the short-rib pastrami suya, a single, hefty blackened rib, seasoned at the intersection of Jewish deli and northern-Nigerian barbecue, accompanied by caraway-coconut Parker House rolls. I preferred an abundant bowl of braised oxtails, as large and beefy as I’ve ever seen, served with Thumbelina carrots, chayote squash, and rice and peas. It was homey and comforting but elegant and distinctive, too, the sticky, glossy morsels of meat, fat, and cartilage scraping cleanly off the bone and cutting right to the heart of Onwuachi’s power. (Dishes $12-$70.) ♦ — Hannah Goldfield