Marks the spot: The sleekly designed dining room at Aix.   (Photo: Kenneth Chen)

Comeback Chefs

Like pro-football coaches, talented big-city chefs lead uncertain, peripatetic lives. They roam from kitchen to kitchen and sometimes vanish for years at a time, but when they return, it’s often in a blaze of glory. This year’s comeback award goes to Andy D’Amico, who began his New York career two long decades ago. Now, like his compatriots at AIX and COMPASS, he’s found fortune serving good food to the ravenous, restaurant-challenged masses on the Upper West Side. You can get all sorts of fancy, Provençal-inspired items for breakfast at NICE MATIN (try the scrambled eggs with spicy lamb sausage), and little baskets of beignets filled with squash blossoms for lunch. My fatso uptown friends swear by short-rib daube (flavored with citrus) and the grilled sweetbreads (served with merguez sausage, lentils, and a rosemary aïoli), and to top off a big trencherman’s luncheon, there’s no better dish on the upper reaches of Amsterdam Avenue than D’Amico’s colossal “five-napkin burger,” muffled in sautéed onions and a chewy layer of Comte cheese.

There’s also a fine burger on the new menu at BOLO, where Bobby Flay seems to have returned to the kitchen, at least in spirit, after spending time tending to his scattered, ever-growing culinary empire. His new menu includes (for lunch) a fine example of that delicious, potentially disastrous dish, grilled octopus (it’s charred and served with grilled lemons), plus an array of inventive tapas like salty cod fritters in garlic sauce, skewers of pork and potato sprinkled with smoked paprika, and little cherry-size saffron rice cakes with a shrimp balanced on top.

Tapas is also one of the many new themes at DJANGO, in midtown, where the talented, well-traveled new chef, Cedric Tovar, has scrapped the old unilateralist brasserie menu in favor of dishes like steamy spiced beef tagine, tuna tartare flavored with yuzu and green apples, and racks of lamb paired with lamb-shank moussaka. The tapas menu is available downstairs in the swanky, gypsy-themed lounge area, although if you ask politely, like I did, the waiters will bring a sampling upstairs (try the shrimp and calamari acras and, yes, the grilled baby back ribs), grandly arrayed on a long wooden tray.