Restaurant Review: Game Meats, Barnacles and Other Adventures

Since it opened on a high-traffic strip of Avenue A in the spring, Foxface Natural has kept a low profile, as discreet and self-contained as a sealed envelope. At times it almost seems to be hiding. Slats on the window make it hard to see inside from the street. The exterior is painted battleship gray. There is no sign.

Nevertheless, the restaurant has attracted a small and fervent following. I don’t know many people who’ve eaten there so far, at least compared with Libertine or the new I Sodi, but the ones I do know say it’s their favorite new restaurant. It has become one of mine, too.

Whether it will be yours may depend on your tolerance for eccentricity. The soundtrack is heavy on recent Australian punk bands like Amyl and the Sniffers, the Chats and Alien Nosejob, played loud. The menu demands an adventurous spirit. If you get the whole fluke, roasted in a wood oven and served in a lake of olive oil with fistfuls of chopped garlic and parsley, the fish will not be filleted for you on a tableside gueridon. You will pick the flesh from the bones yourself.

For the right diners, this will be an exciting chance to learn about flatfish anatomy. For the wrong ones, it will be a nightmare. As a dinner companion in the first category put it while he was contemplating how best to eat the dorsal fin, which had browned in the oil into a long, crunchy and, as it turned out, delicious ridge, “This is not a restaurant for Karens.”

Foxface Natural describes itself in its Instagram bio as “a natural continuation of Foxface sandwiches.” This is like calling day a natural continuation of night. It’s accurate, but it leaves a lot unsaid.