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Bridges Opens With Eel Dumplings and Comté Tart
Photo: Eric Helgas
The chef Sam Lawrence has been thinking about pastry crust. The Melbourne native had worked in Paris and Hong Kong before ultimately landing a job as chef de cuisine at Estela. He left in 2022 to launch his own project, Bridges, and he’s spent a good portion of that time perfecting a recipe for a savory tart that will, at last, be on the menu when his restaurant opens on September 25. Lawrence starts with a short-crust-inspired pastry made from malted barley for a toasted, caramelized flavor and a softer-than-expected texture that matches the filling, a custard with 24-month-aged Comté cheese blended into the egg yolks. “It’s salty, toasty, hazelnutty,” Lawrence says. (It may look familiar to anyone who has eaten at Planque in London, a neo-bistro run by Lawrence’s friend Seb Myers, who has had his own Comté tart on the menu. “I was texting with him about my tart in 2019, and he said, ‘Oh, I was making a tart and I thought of you,’” Lawrence recalls, smiling. “I’m like, ‘I can’t take mine off my menu — I’ve been trying to do this for a couple of years.’”) Lawrence tops each of his slices with chanterelles sautéed in butter and a pan sauce made of oxidative Vin Jaune, cultured cream, and anise hyssop: “I want the tart to feel pretty elegant.”
The same can be said for the rest of the food, such as grilled king crab with béarnaise sauce, steamed turbot with rice and clams, and smoked-eel dumplings with preserved cherry-tree leaves. “You can’t really shy away from the experiences you’ve had, and I think it would be a mistake to blindly try and say, ‘I want my cooking to be so different from Estela’s,’” Lawrence explains.
It was while working for Ignacio Mattos that he met his now-business partners Josey Stuart, who managed openings for Mattos’s restaurant group, and Nicolas Mouchel, a regular customer who worked at the Nomad. The three had been talking about opening a restaurant for a couple of years and had checked out more than a dozen different locations. Eventually, they returned to the first spot they saw: 9 Chatham Square, formerly the home of the dim-sum restaurant Hop Sing. (The restaurant, which had been open since 1973, closed in 2020.)
They’ve spent the past six months building out the restaurant, peeling back layers of walls, which led them to some old murals that were unfortunately too damaged to recover, and removing old equipment. To design the space, they brought on interior designer Billy Cotton, who has worked for clients including Cindy Sherman. This was Cotton’s first restaurant project, which was appealing for Stuart, since it was the group’s first opening as well.
Photo: Eric Helgas
Photo: Eric Helgas
There’s a 12-seat bar up front, with a couple of tables reserved for walk-ins, that gives way to the main seating area. There are, the group says, seven “cozy corners,” by which they mean snug banquettes in quiet corners. The dining room is long and narrow, yet Cotton was able to, as Lawrence put it, make it not feel like train tracks. (They did this, in part, by putting service stations in the middle.) And in putting the space together, they sought to avoid creating a Siberia at all. “I think we did an okay job of creating a lot of good tables,” Stuart says. “And I do feel like this dining room is going to be very dynamic in terms of having a lot of people feel like they’re in really good seats, which is exactly how you want to feel.”
There’s an austerity to the room — “We got inspiration from Chatham Towers, which is pretty brutalist in the architecture,” Mouchel says — thanks to the chrome light fixtures, glass bricks, and concrete floor. Maroon rectangles on the floor match the paint in the private dining room, made of marble.
After two years without a kitchen of his own, Lawrence is mostly just happy to be cooking again. He’s been testing recipes like grilled sweetbreads brushed like yakitori with a sticky-sweet glaze, a salad of Kabocha squash and dandelion with Brabander cheese. Other ideas will roll out as the weather cools down, like celery root with a smoked-eel broth. The menu closes out with a trio of cheeses, and a handful of desserts including plum sorbet with halva, and Vin Jaune gelato that Lawrence says tastes like peach skins. There’s another tart, as well, made with chocolate and buckwheat, and one dish on the menu that nods back to Australia: toasted meringue with coffee, lemon, and fig-leaf oil. “This is our Australian toasted meringue that we grew up eating,” Lawrence says. “It’s everywhere there.” And before you even ask, yes, Myers has a similar dessert at Planque, too.
Photo: Eric Helgas
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