The city’s most thrilling new restaurant is a narrow, 28-seat spot on Avenue A where kangaroo’s the name of the game.
Foxface Natural opened last spring, and its wild-and-woolly menu has been polarizing. Most critics and diners have loved it, but some have been quite negative, likening dishes to “elaborate jokes.”
In addition to kangaroo tartare, there is sometimes soup of wild snapping turtle and gooseneck barnacles.
But there’s no exoticism for its own sake, as was the case at the ghastly, long-gone New Deal in the West Village, which served lion and giraffe. Foxface Natural serves no endangered species; its shtick is sustainability, explained owner Ori Kushnir, who runs the house with his life partner Sivan Lahat.
Foxface Natural lurks behind a sign-less facade at 189 Avenue A (East 12th Street). The colorless room makes a suitably blank backdrop for the pyrotechnics on the plate.
Chef David Santos’ disciplined cooking belies Foxface Natural’s gimmicky image. Despite early reports, camel appeared only briefly as a pasta filling. What makes the place special is the kitchen’s way with influences and spices from southern and northern Africa, France, Peru, and of course Down Under.
Despite their lovable looks, Australia has too many kangaroos — 43 million as of 2022, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That’s as twice many kangaroos as humans, and they threaten farm crops and property. Kushnir said the government is encouraging citizens to consume more of them. They’re taken wild and killed as humanely as possible.
There’s nothing gamy about the ‘roo, which is mild-flavored enough to mistake for veal. But the oozy tartare made from loin meat (the animal’s lower back) chopped to order is arrestingly complexioned with spices and eggplant puree. Crisp Sardinian flatbread makes a perfect platform on which to blend them.
Other dishes were even better. Tilefish quenelles, a slightly modernized take on the classic, might have taxi’d over from wonderful La Coucou. The creamy dumplings were lightly bound with milk and egg and served with a tomato-y Nantua sauce made from shrimp heads and shells.
But the scene-stealer was Boer goat – oak-smoked shoulder meat from a prized South African breed that’s vividly spiked with North African spices. Succulent and somewhat gamy, it’s a dish to chase on a bitter-cold winter night.
The wine list is, unfortunately for my taste, all-natural, but the service is unnaturally excellent. A well-drilled team whisks plates through the tight confines with grace and poise — a wonder when so many fancier place can’t find staff able to pour water.
The restaurant follows the owners’ Foxface, a funky sandwich shop that served such everyday favorites as elk osso buco and ‘nduja-simmered tripe before it closed in the summer of 2022.
Kushnir and Lahat needed a proper chef for their sit-down venture. They’ve known Santos, who owned the late, well-regarded Portuguese bistro Louro, “for a very long time,” Kushnir said.
“He was more or less retired, consulting but not a full-time chef. We said, ‘Well, do you want to come back into the craziness?” Kushnir laughed.
The eclectic lineup changes daily, subject to availability which the owners and Santos map out at weekly meetings and day-to-day.
“It’s genuinely collaborative,” Kushnir said. “Sometimes it’s just driven by ingredients we’re able to get,” such as line-caught fluke “handled by fisherman the way it should be handled, the Japanese way” — a humane slaughtering method called Ikejime that euthanizes a fish before killing it and yields a firmer cut.
I asked Kushnir if he enjoyed the controversy and drama that attended the restaurant’s early months.
He glanced around the jam-packed dining room. “
“Obviously yes,” he said, with another hearty laugh.
