Newcomer Food and Juice a Developing Member of the Morningside Community

Morningside Heights is not noted for its culinary delights. By and large, we at Columbia are left with a choice of dreadful mediocrities, ranging from the lame to the truly regrettable. Morningside restaurants enjoy a captive audience—students are understandably disinclined to venture too far from campus, so we settle for less and restaurants need not produce anything beyond the mundane. The recent closure of Caffe Pertutti, long a blight on Broadway, has been met with near-unanimous huzzahs.
Small surprise, then, that the November arrival of Community Food and Juice was greeted with the kind of euphoria generally reserved for Pinkberry, or possibly the second coming of Christ. Since its opening, Community has been jammed to capacity nearly every night of the week, and its lunches and weekend brunches are no less popular, despite what appears to be a growing attitude among students that the restaurant is failing to live up to its promise.

In recent memory, no restaurant in the Columbia area (excepting Pinkberry) has opened with the kind of fanfare that greeted Community Food and Juice. The Eye did a feature on DeDe Lahman and Neil Kleinberg, the owner and the chef respectively, in which they expressed their enthusiasm for and dedication to locally grown, eco-friendly, seasonal ingredients. Recently, Julia Moskin of the New York Times called it “the most welcoming restaurant to appear on the Upper West Side in years,” and “a near-ideal neighborhood restaurant.”

It is not by any means a restaurant aimed at penny-pinching students, nor is it what one might call obscenely pricey, with entrées ranging from $16 to $32 (the Roast Chicken for two). Nothing is too expensive, yet at the same time, nothing is overly cheap—the burger is $13, which is extravagant. One does not go to Community for a quick meal, but one does go expecting to get value—as opposed to, say, Café 212, where we know we’re being ripped off.

The quality of the food at Community ranges from the satisfying to the casually superb. On the lunch menu, the B.E.L.T ($9.50, and E stands for egg) is thoroughly enjoyable, but the Tilapia Sandwich ($13) with pickled fennel and lemon-caper mayo is clearly a misfire. On the dinner menu, the Lotus BBQ wings appetizer ($10), whose oriental name seems to owe itself to nothing more than the presence of some Hoisin sauce, was entirely tasteless until the wings were dipped in a lemon dipping sauce, which overall did little more than administer a citric kick. Conversely, the Butcher Plate ($11), with slices of pecan raisin toast and sweet onion jam buoying up crackling chorizo and healthily potent cheddar, was downright sublime—the winning dish of the evening.
In the entrée department, the Halibut special ($32, with a lobster tail) and the Pork Tenderloin ($19) battled to a draw. While the lobster tail was happily unadorned (as lobster should be, though some melted butter would have been nice) and the halibut was immaculately cooked, the latter showed evidence of a timidity with flavoring that seemed to be consistent throughout the evening. The pork tenderloin, though it was well-cooked and wrapped with bacon, also suffered from a lack of courage with the seasoning. At one end of it, there was a delicious sour cherry compote, but not nearly enough to support the whole tenderloin.

The desserts were uneven as well. The butterscotch pudding ($6), lathered high with whipped cream, was lovely, and its texture perfect. The pumpkin crème brûlée ($7) was pleasant, but it was oddly tepid, and the crème itself tasted a little too much like the pumpkin pie filling that comes in a can.

It is critical to mention that the night Spectator chose to review Community Food and Juice happened to be Valentine’s Day—arguably the single most lunatic night of the year for restaurants, and easily the last night on which they would choose to be reviewed. Moreover, they were clearly understaffed, a matter which the servers, and the manager in particular, handled with poise. Despite the pressure of the evening, the front-of-house staff distinguished themselves quite well indeed.

There was one oddity, however, which Community would do well to correct—it offers a small deal on both its sides and breads (in which it clearly has great pride, and if the pecan-raisin slices from the butcher plate are an indication, it has every reason to): each side or bread is $6, or three for $15. Yet one cannot, bafflingly, combine the two, and order, say, two sides and a bread. The reasons for this are unclear—our server was herself unable to express them. All this is in addition to the incredulity a diner feels when he is being charged $6 for bread.

Community Food and Juice is likely unconcerned with how it is reviewed—business is thriving, lines are still out the door, and it is still far and away the best restaurant in the immediate area. It is a pleasant space, well-lit and tasteful, though the jury is still out on the wisdom of the central community table, at which diners are jammed together. The table does a good job of fostering a sense of camaraderie among diners and it can be fun to jaw with a stranger, but it is slightly awkward if one wants to have a conversation about anything more controversial than the weather. They need to solve the problem of understaffing, too—though no one needs to tell them that—and the consistency of their food and its seasoning also need to stabilize. They seem not to have found their footing quite yet, but it is only a matter of time. By all appearances Community Food and Juice will be a Morningside fixture for years to come.