Riding a River of Austro-Hungarian Cuisine at the Danube

NEW YORK — After several years in restaurant development limbo, David Bouley, the prodigiously talented New York chef, recently launched his latest venture a stone’s throw from his thriving Bouley Bakery in New York’s TriBeCa. Called Danube, it’s Bouley’s riff on turn of the 20th century Vienna and Mitteleuropa cooking.

Austro-Hungarian cuisine has been around, mind you, since the Empire. And L.A.’s own Wolfgang Puck, who actually is Austrian, beat Bouley to it. (Puck put his favorite childhood dishes on the Spago Beverly Hills menu a few years ago.) But it’s new to New York and to much of the rest of this country, and when such a high-profile chef as Bouley forsakes the Mediterranean or California for Vienna, it’s news.

Danube, which is close enough to Bouley Bakery that the chef can stroll from kitchen to kitchen, is stunning. Bouley has been involved in every aspect of its conception and construction. The dining room is a gorgeous collage of texture and pattern, with sinuous velvet banquettes and Klimt-inspired mosaics and paintings. The 70-seat restaurant is a comfortable and intimate space. And the service is as good as it gets in America.

Working with Salzburg-born chef de cuisine Mario Lohninger, Bouley has created a severely elegant menu of Austrian dishes refracted through his essentially French sensibility. On a first visit, go for the full deal: the chef’s tasting menu. Don’t plan on anything else that evening, because you’ll spend several hours at the table. Minimum.

First, there are the wines to consider. Danube, as might be expected, is a showcase for the great bone-dry white wines of Austria, particularly Gruner Veltliners and Rieslings from the Wachau region. The Austrian sommelier, Alexander Adlgasser, who comes from Jean Georges in Manhattan, really knows his stuff.

To begin, Bouley might send out a quartet of little tastes that includes a sardine threaded through a thin slice of potato and deep-fried or an ethereal gravlax on a fennel salad stained with beet juice. For me, the killer dish is the sparkling clear consomme with tiny marrowbone dumplings that literally melt in the mouth. I loved the Carinthian cheese ravioli, too, with smoked chanterelles. After a series of small courses, the waiter presented an extraordinary pan-braised whitefish stuffed with a thin layer of young sauerkraut like the vein of ash in Morbier cheese. Then came a taste of Wiener schnitzel and a game course. There was so much that, by the time desserts arrived, no one at the table could really appreciate them.

After eating at Danube twice, though, I have to wonder whether Bouley was more attracted to the idea of Vienna and Austro-Hungarian tradition than to the cuisine, because the last meal I had at Bouley years ago stands out in my mind much more than my recent dinners at Danube.

BE THERE

Danube, 30 Hudson St., New York (212) 791-3771. Open Mondays through Saturdays for lunch and dinner. Appetizers $8 to $17; main courses $29 to $34; five-course tasting menu $80. Call several weeks in advance for reservations.