Alex Stupak’s Seriously Playful Seafood Joint

The Basque region is a big influence on the Otter’s ever-changing menu, as is New England (Stupak grew up in Massachusetts), not only in the crab-dip pasta but in a lobster roll (perfectly nice, if you like paying for lobster rolls) and a clam chowder so billowy with cream that it’s almost mousse-like. I had been wary of Stupak’s take on fish and chips, which uses oily, intense Spanish mackerel in lieu of the usual featureless white fish, but my skepticism was unwarranted: the flavor was, indeed, more assertive, but it was balanced beautifully by a beer batter as curly and bronzed as a goldendoodle, plus a kicky, salty tartar sauce. The menu nods, as well, to the Gulf Coast, to the Mediterranean, and to East and Southeast Asia, but the global pantries remain segregated dish by dish. The closest anything comes to fusion is the bread service, which pairs New England-style Parker House rolls, fresh from the oven and marshmallow-soft, with a lineup of compound butters, including one, lusciously saffron-infused, inspired by bouillabaisse, the Provençal seafood stew.

The Otter is quite beautiful. The room is weighty and masculine in an unoppressive way. The people, by virtue of both the SoHo location and the forgivingly diffuse lighting (including flickering taper candles; watch out for the corner of that menu!), are notably gorgeous. A perhaps inevitable upshot of such aesthetic concern is that a few dishes are more exciting to look at than to eat, like a photogenic pair of raw scallops, each served on its own shell, one zhuzhed up in red chile and the other in green, neither tasting of much except salt, lime, and a distant flicker of spice. A centerpiece plateau of dressed seafood, priced per person, is disappointingly constrained where it ought to be dramatic; comprising a tray of pre-portioned little bites on their own tiny plates—including oysters, razor clams, a tuna-uni thing, a bit of smoked salmon panna cotta with trout roe—the arrangement feels like wedding catering (albeit for a very fancy wedding). There’s a steak on offer, a brawny New York strip, cooked to a perfect medium rare but presented, for some reason, next to a pile of vinegary sautéed red bell peppers, and a saucier of funky, fishy crawfish béarnaise. Taken all together, the dish was total nonsense, but I suppose if you’re the kind of person who orders the steak at a place like the Otter you get what you deserve, especially when there’s a terrific swordfish frites right next to it on the menu. A hunk of meaty loin draped in a rich, mahogany sauce au poivre, it’s as close to bovinity as a fish could possibly dream of being.

It’s been well over a decade since Stupak left the pastry kitchen, but it would be a mistake to skip dessert at any of his restaurants. At the Otter, there’s a lush, minimalist take on a Boston cream pie, and a pistachio tiramisu green as a fresh-mown suburban lawn, but give yourself the gift of ordering an ice cream. No tidy, freezer-hardened little scooplets here: the portions are big enough for two or three, and come swirled up and around the inside of a ceramic bowl like a frozen whirlpool or, as one of my dining companions noted, like hummus. On one wintry visit, a bite of cantaloupe sorbet rocketed me straight into summer; on another, a plain vanilla ice cream sent my whole party into swoons. Served alongside whatever variety you end up getting are two more bowls, one filled with an olive-oil whipped cream, slightly sweet, slightly savory, the other with a pile of candied grapes, tart little purple spheres like maraschino cherries reflected in a fun-house mirror. During my first meal at the Otter, not long after the restaurant opened, a serving of ice cream cost twenty dollars—awfully high, but I came away feeling that the price was justified. Now a slightly smaller but still substantial portion is nine dollars, the bargain of the century. It’s not a high-wire act, not a wacky food-science ripple in space-time, not a throwback, or a callback, or a play on words—it’s just fantastic ice cream, and it’s more than enough. ♦