Fresh, Exciting: The pan-roasted Atlantic codfish at Mermaid Inn.   (Photo: Rick Lew)

Seafood

If you don’t feel like jetting down to Acapulco for a fancy seaside dinner, then a quick visit to PAMPANO, in Turtle Bay, will probably do. Not that you’ll necessarily find anything in Acapulco quite as satisfying as Richard Sandoval’s seafood albóndigas, served in a creamy orange sauce with a trace of truffles and melted Manchego cheese or the steamed portion of striped bass, which comes bundled in a steamy banana leaf. Then there are the Mexican-accented desserts, like crème brûlée covered with faintly caramelized bananas, or chocolate flan, which you can enjoy while admiring the great stucco fish decorating the restaurant’s outer walls, or out on the stately townhouse patio under the great, glittering towers of Manhattan.

If it’s haute lobster rolls and refined bowls of clam chowder you desire, PEARL OYSTER BAR and MARY’S FISH CAMP have the West Village pretty much sewn up. So leave it to chef Jimmy Bradley and his partner, Danny Abrams, to open their latest restaurant, THE MERMAID INN, in the East Village, where local fish fiends begin lining up in the early evening for a taste of exotic uptown foods like tartare of arctic char. The co-owners of THE HARRISON and RED CAT have a knack for producing (and marketing) elegant middlebrow cuisine, and you’ll find it here in the spicy, perfectly al dente version of spaghetti fra diavolo, containing shrimp and great golf-ball-size scallops served with a crown of arugula.

My other favorite seafood pasta is the rich lobster tagliatelle served further uptown, at RM, although for an odd amalgam of high and low, nothing quite beats the skate at OCEANA, which chef Cornelius Gallagher constructs with layers of pastrami and cabbage and plates in a mustard sauce sweetened with huckleberries. At LE BERNARDIN, meanwhile, Eric Ripert has recently managed to make a piece of black bass taste remarkably like Peking duck (the skin is crisp, like candy, and flavored with a spicy duck bouillon), although for real culinary grandeur, try the urchin, which he serves to his rapturous bigwig clientele in a nest of thin linguine, with a large spoonful of pearly gray osetra caviar (for a bigwig supplement of $50), or seviche-style, with sweet bay scallops, over crushed ice, in a large, hairy sea-urchin shell.