Foxface Natural is blowing up as we type

RESTAURANTS • First Person

Last Wednesday night, 7:45p, Alphabet City — a couple pushed through the door into the narrow entryway of Foxface Natural on upper Avenue A. After perusing the menu, they engaged in a brief conversation, then turned around and left, leaving empty the two seats at the end of the bar. 

Big mistake. Huge. 

Foxface Natural, which opened in May, is about to blow up. When we asked our server how it’s been going, she leaned in conspiratorially. “We’re going to have some pretty big reviews coming out next week,” she said. (Almost on cue, the New Yorker dropped a rave. Then Pete Wells awards three stars, in tomorrow’s NYT.)

It will be harder to find empty bar seats — and you do want to sit at the long bar that almost runs the length of the restaurant, not at the few tables sprinkled around — but get here: This is wildly exciting eating.

The overall scope of the menu is impossible to classify. (Check this sample menu for a sense of it, and if you order the kangaroo tartare, do report back.) It’s all happening in a tight East Village setting that recalls the early years of Momofuku right down to the awning that lists only the building address. 

“I can’t stop eating this,” my dining companion said to me as we somehow made it through two entrees, smoked Boer goat and Montauk striped bass roasted on the bone in a wood oven, doused in a beguiling tomato sauce. (Our server recommended sharing one main. This is correct.) Along with the bass came a single Italian frying pepper on its own plate, with anchovy: exactly what I want to be eating right now. Which is precisely how I feel about Foxface Natural. –Lockhart Steele

→ Foxface Natural, 189 Avenue A (East Village), Resy.