A surprised look stole over my guest at Minton's when the house jazz sextet launched into the opening chords of the night's closing number.
" 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number'?" she puzzled. In the ancestral house of bebop? Before I could alert her not to expect Steely Dan, the crew had proceeded to the rest of Horace Silver's earlier "Song for My Father," from which Donald Fagen borrowed the bass riffs.
It's a famous tangent point between jazz and rock. Saucy new supper club Minton's marks a tangent point in the perception of Harlem's history — a lone spot on the map where 2014 peers wistfully back on a distant golden age. It's a triumph for its owner, media and banking mogul Richard Parsons, who made an impossible dream real.
While Parsons' less expensive, next-door restaurant The Cecil has been widely praised, Minton's might turn off those who resent Harlem's "Disneyfication" or regard Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane as quaintly as techno fans look upon doo-wop.
To those who think Harlem is "edgy," or should be, the new Minton's can seem almost square. It occupies the site of Minton's Playhouse, which in its 1940s and '50s heyday was a seminal birthplace of bop and hard bop. It closed in the early '70s and mostly stayed that way until now.
Music that once was revolutionary can today seem no more cutting-edge than old Broadway — and nitpickers might find a Lowcountry-inspired menu too suavely comforting. But even they should be enchanted by the long, pretty, narrow room graced by white tablecloths and nightclub-style golden chairs and banquettes. Customers cheerfully dress up, thanks to a jackets-required rule for men.
Walls are hung with fabrics and vintage jazz-artist photos. In the rear behind the bandstand reposes the only surviving part of the old Minton's: a radiantly restored, 1948 mural by Charles Graham of jazzmen playing astride a slumped-over Billie Holiday.
The wonderful live musicians, several of whom played here 50 years ago, go all night except for a break or two. Acoustics are so finely balanced, you hear every note even over conversation that well-drilled waiters know when, and when not, to interrupt.
Amazingly, there's no cover charge. A la carte prices (apps $18 to $26, soups/salads $14 to $18, and entrees $25 to $46) are peanuts for a meal serenaded (if that's the word for the occasional prolonged drum solo) by a sound increasingly rare in Manhattan.
The menu by executive chef Alexander Smalls and chef de cuisine Banks White is just as well calibrated — a well-executed romp through "Southern revival." Not quite three-star, it merges with the music into a three-star night.
One night, a smiling Ivanka Trump popped up from her seat to photograph the raging sextet. I was tempted myself, but my culinary responsibilities glued me to the table — as did starters like North African-spiced grilled shrimp and sherry-tinted she-crab soup given a skillet-cornbread crackle. (Pass up an oddly uninspired sampler plate.)
Dreamy cheese grits rivaled Charleston's finest. Hoppin' John pilau blissfully marries Carolina brown rice to tasso ham, mascarpone cheese and black-eyed peas.
Mildly African-inflected Southern riffs work especially well with fish. Among them: crisp-skinned brook trout fortified with cured bacon and lilted with gullah peanut sauce. Soon, soft-shell crabs, please!
On an early visit, deconstructed vanilla pound cake tasted like a burnt cigar after a waiter failed to ignite rum sauce with a lighter.
But pastry chef Mame Sow's confections, like pineapple upside-down cake, now make a proper closing note to this seductively sweet, 21st-century Harlem nocturne.
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