SHORT of hayrides from the curb to the coat check, there’s not a whole lot in the way of farmhouse allusions that the new restaurant Irving Mill doesn’t try.
I spotted two metal watering cans before I reached the host station, one of them perched near an antique bin brimming with pomegranates. The restaurant’s floors, wainscoting and tables bring to mind barn wood.
“What did this used to be?” asked one of my companions, taking in the straw-colored space near Union Square that Irving Mill inhabits.
“A stable?” cracked another.
The quip shortchanges the polish of the place, which is gussied up with enormous floral arrangements — in muted colors, of course — and bracketed on opposite walls by semicircular booths. Servers wear crisp white shirts under their suspenders. They’re the kind of farmhands you find only below 23rd Street.
And Irving Mill, named for its proximity to Irving Place, is the kind of restaurant you find more and more of: an ode to the seasons and the simple life, built, paradoxically, around elaborate décor and dishes that take nature’s bounty and tweak it a bunch.
It’s also a self-conscious heir to Gramercy Tavern, which long ago helped to usher in the whole rustically urbane (or is it urbanely rustic?) genre. Irving Mill’s chef, John Schaefer, spent more than a decade cooking there, and Irving Mill’s layout — a casual front section with a prominent bar, a quieter back area with more elbowroom between tables — recalls Gramercy’s.
If only it performed at the same level. It’s a pleasant restaurant, make no mistake: comfortable and good-natured, with a selection of about 20 wines by the glass that represent real diversity and reflect real thought, not just the default presentation of a pinot grigio here, a pinot noir there. The equally thoughtful list of bottles has many tempting selections in the $40 to $70 range.
In fact prices in general aren’t as steep at Irving Mill as at many restaurants with lesser standards or ambitions. No dinner entree is over $28. A four-course tasting menu, including dessert, is $54.
And at Irving Mill’s finest moments, with its finest dishes, it’s decidedly more than pleasant. The grilled quail at the center of one appetizer quickly silenced a quail naysayer at my table, who foresaw a bony, puny bird. This one had plenty of juicy meat, placed over stone-ground grits flavored with Cheddar cheese and dusted with smoked paprika.
If you follow that dish with a main course of braised rabbit — served here with pork sausage, salty black olives, roasted shallots and a potato purée — you’re bound for a tremendously satisfying meal. With the rabbit, as with the quail, Mr. Schaefer takes a meat that other kitchens sometimes render stringy and gets tender results.
Stringy, however, aptly describes the short ribs I tried on a different night. They reminded me of pro forma pot roast, an association underscored by their unimaginative adornment with carrots and a horseradish cream.
Inconsistency dogs Irving Mill, and is perhaps best exemplified by the change in the cauliflower ravioli from one of my visits to the next. The first time out, the gently firm pasta was cooked just as it should have been, and the cauliflower had real presence. The second time, the pasta was limp and the cauliflower a washout, beyond the salvage efforts of the hazelnuts and the capers (too few and too retiring) in the mix.
The dinner menu is divided into about 10 appetizers, 8 entrees and 4 sides, including brussels sprouts, the rags-to-riches vegetable story of recent years. At Irving Mill they’re unusually tiny and unusually terrific.
Apart from the quail and the ravioli (on their good night), I couldn’t find an appetizer to get too excited about. I enjoyed chicken liver crostini, but it’s rare that I don’t. Octopus had vaulted past tender to mushy, and a soup made with roasted garlic, white beans, sheep’s milk ricotta and rosemary somehow managed to be boring, not to mention sludgy. This is a menu that reads more flavorful than it tastes.
How, for example, did the tangle of wild mushrooms, butternut squash and orecchiette that encircled lamb shoulder — which was braised, like the short ribs and rabbit — manage to make such a weak impression? At least the lamb itself was superb.
So were the sea scallops on a tasting menu, and the hen-of-the-woods mushrooms with them had exactly the nutty, earthy charge they were supposed to. It’s hard to get a handle on Irving Mill, because pitch-perfect dishes keep company with off-key ones.
Given the meaty predilections of New Yorkers today, it was surprising to find that half the entrees were fish. The standout was Arctic char, served with lentils and Savoy cabbage.
Among the desserts, by the pastry chef Colleen Grapes, there weren’t any big disappointments, but there was just one knockout: a rich, tangy Greek yogurt panna cotta with stewed apricots and — most enticing of all — a bevy of toasted pistachios.
More in keeping with the restaurant’s countrified soul were a pumpkin and apple strudel and a cranberry and apple crisp with a topping of almonds and oatmeal. The crisp is by far the better choice.
A plate of warm cookies comes just before, or with, the check, because that’s the kind of down-home hospitality Irving Mill means to project.
But projecting it in a 110-seat space as open and vast as this one — it really could be converted into a barn — has a somewhat awkward, counterfeit effect. Cultivated rusticity usually works better in a series of smaller rooms, or on a smaller scale.
Here it feels forced: “Green Acres” goes to the Greenmarket, with a lilt in its gait but some bramble on its path.
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