On the surface, Penny is a seafood counter in Manhattan’s East Village with sneaky technique from the kitchen, and a fantastic wine list. However, after many visits over a few months, it appears that would be a gross understatement. The owner’s first venture, Claud, has many accolades of its own, including 3 stars from the NY Times, but Penny is pushing progression a little further than its downstairs sibling and was a recent finalist for Best New Restaurant from the James Beard foundation, in addition to its own 3 star review from the Times.
The menu is a la carte, with multiple raw seafood options, a few anchor dishes, and a rotating cast of expertly executed small plates and shareables. The service and staff are fantastic across the board, expect the best combination of knowledgeable assistance when you need it, without their ever being absent or intrusive. Penny is mostly walk-in only, and if you show up 15 minutes before they open, you should have no problem getting a few seats. Another, more spendy option is to book a reservation downstairs at Claud, order multiple dishes, a few really nice bottles of wine (like really nice), and ask if someone can help with a future reservation upstairs when you are paying the bill.
Once seated at Penny, the first things to order are the homemade brioche with anchovy topped butter, and whatever variety of raw bar seafood catches your eye. For a taste of everything, opt for one of their signature Ice Boxes, which includes oysters, clams, cocktail shrimp, a raw scallop that should have its own Michelin star, an impossibly savory seafood sausage, and/or a shot of Vichyssois. Please eat the scallop first. The sneaky technique I referred to above is present in everything you taste, but most noticeable in the shrimp cocktail, arguably the best in the city. It hits perfectly snappy and salty at first, with sweetness slowly creeping up as the texture collapses into delicate, tender shrimp nirvana with each bite.
The oyster confit is a simple, surprisingly delicious snack of seasoned oysters bathing in chicken fat with a side of creme fraiche and spiced Club crackers that somehow reminds me of chicken liver mousse.
Stuffed squid is a must-order signature dish that is best described as a refined, aggressive flavor bomb. It tastes somehow like Portugal, Italy, and Rhode Island had a meeting about squid and came out of it with this. The bite starts spicy and crunchy, with surprise bursts of smoke and citrus followed by an undercurrent of what I swear was herbed sausage (finocchiona, a Tuscan salami made with pork and fennel seeds) or chorizo, but is somehow a combination of fennel onion sofrito, Swiss chard and cured tuna. Which, let’s face it, is pretty freaking imaginative.
Penny has been doing wonderful things with mackerel, and if it’s on the menu, I recommend ordering it. What was once a seared and sliced mackerel with deseeded, quick pickled stripes of long hot pepper, is now a mackerel+escabeche. While the dishes are very different in terms of flavor, they both show complete mastery of this notoriously difficult to work with piece of fish. With long hots, the focus was on textural interplay between the mackerel’s crispy skin, tender, meaty texture and light sweet finish, while the escabeche is a more complex arrangement of citrus, bitter, sweet and sour flavors. The first bite tastes like a crunchy, juicy, mackerel Milanese, which quickly develops into a choreographed firefight between umami bombs of caper and anchovy against the peppery bites of arugula, and high notes of citrus and garlic.
Scallop+Morels is Penny’s version of surf and turf, and proof that this kitchen is just as talented at keeping things simple as they are developing the 20 plus ingredient sauce for the escabeche. Perfectly cooked, sweet and meaty scallops sit on top of earthy, crunchy, and chewy Morels underneath. No reason to reinvent the wheel here, oftentimes simple is better when you are working with amazing ingredients and it’s refreshing to see a new, creative, progressive kitchen that also knows how and when to edit itself.
The 1.5lb live lobster is another signature dish with brilliant sauce work, perfect cook times and a prep/plating that makes it one of the easiest lobsters you’ll ever eat. I call it “lazy-man+” lobster prep, where the shell is not only cracked, but the meat is also chopped and sliced in certain spots to make removal as easy as a stab and twist. A quick dip into the pool of brown butter below and you have what might be the most refined yet simple lobster dish in NYC.
There are only two desserts at Penny and you should probably order both. The first is a homemade ice cream sandwich served between two slices of homemade brioche with a rotating variety of seasonal jams, compote, or butter, and it’s a very delicious dish. But it’s the chocolate mousse that has become my favorite over multiple visits. Drizzled with olive oil and adorned with a crown of hazelnuts, it is impossibly light and flavorful at the same time.
The olive oil adds a creamy texture to each bite while the hazelnuts provide a salty spark through the velvety blanket of chocolate. I highly recommend pairing the mousse with a sherry or madeira or whatever they are featuring as dessert pairings by the glass. They are meticulous with their selections and I rarely encounter lists that pair this well with the food across the board.