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Bloomingdale Road has an ancient, folksy name (it’s the old British name for the road that became Broadway), but the room and menu feel like a cockeyed jumble of formerly fashionable dining conceits. The space on Broadway at 88th Street has had many incarnations (it was last an upmarket brasserie called Aix), but I’m not quite sure what theme the new owners are attempting. The menu is a grab bag of overworked comfort items like “grass fed” hamburger sliders, Manhattan-clam-chowder shooters, and salty-sweet shreds of country ham glazed in Coca-Cola. There’s a café zone on the sidewalk and a neighborly bar area with a flat-screen TV. The wait staff are dressed in eighties-era blue-and-khaki Gap uniforms, and if you squint your eyes, the aqua-colored banquettes in the back look like they’ve been lifted from an Automat in Atlantic City circa 1962.

Bloomingdale Road’s kitchen is run by Ed Witt, a talented chef whose cooking I admired when he labored briefly at a doomed restaurant in Chelsea called Varietal. But his efforts here are foiled by a combination of bizarro conception and spotty technique. The burger sliders were hard as vulcanized rubber, the “country fried” quail was seized in a greasy batter, and the macaroni and cheese lacked cheesiness. I did not have the courage to order the spaghetti-squash-and-grilled-tofu entrée, but I can report that the funky-tasting lamb “julep” (a pairing of leg and ribs) did not benefit from its scattering of stale popcorn. The kitchen produces a decent deviled egg, however, and a nice Cheddar-rich baked potato, and if you make it to dessert, you will find an excellent tart-style homage to the most durable comfort recipe of all: peanut butter and jelly. — Adam Platt

Deviled eggs, twice-baked potato, New York strip, peanut-butter-and-jelly tart.

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• Adam Platt's Full Review (11/3/08)

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