north

I don’t give 4 stars that readily and this place is a place to go if you want taste and adventure. Familiar Asian tastes but with an unfamiliar presentation. I am not sure if it’s because I was hungry and with good company, but I think I would eat there daily if I could. You order a dish and the whole table gets servings of it. Some dishes are large enough that there is one plate of it. We had a large group and tried almost every dish they had. There was one dish I lot was just crispy chicken smothered in thousand island dressing, which I did not care for. Others seemed to like it, but what do they know. Go here with a date, gather here with a crowd, but don’t go here if you’re in a rush.
4 7 years ago (19-05-2018)

Everything is crazy good. Amazing mignonette and hot sauce to go with the delicious Salt Pond oysters. The Dan Dan noodles with mutton and squid is awesome - just the right amount of spice balanced by fresh herbs and great variation of textures. The celery root pudding is a shockingly good mixture between apple pie and bread pudding. Decent beer menu.
5 7 years ago (09-04-2018)

This place is a favorite. They have moved to a larger space which makes it easier to get a table. creative delicious food excellent for vegetarian and fish options. Every time I go here I am delighted by the majority of the food and there is usually dish I wish I hadn't chosen. That's why they only get four out of five stars from me. Still totally worth it.
4 7 years ago (18-03-2018)

Maybe it was bad to come in on a Wednesday night. It didn't seem like our server was too excited to take a party of five an hour and a half before the restaurant was advertised to close. We did order some food but the portions received didn't equate to the quality of what was being served. Their site will give you this huge cop out about how difficult it is to work in the restaurant business and how quality food using "community agriculture and aquaculture" can't be measured but it actually sounds like who ever wrote it is telling you how bad the place really is before you even go there. I will give them an 'A' for originality as I had never had some of the dishes they had on their menu anywhere else but try not go there with big groups, perhaps eat prior to going here and don't be mad afterwards especially​ if you visited the restaurant's website or read this review . UPDATE: I have not been here since my atrocious experience the first time I wrote this review. It seems like the website "mission statement" has changed. Perhaps I'll visit again someday, perhaps not.
1 7 years ago (02-04-2018)

Sometimes I find myself at restaurants that are not really in it for the money - they're open merely to piss me off. "north" is such a place. The food is a mixed bag but mostly good, and the service was great, but "north" is too annoying for me to deal with intellectually. More on that in a few minutes. First, let's talk about the food. Out of everything I ate, I liked the "Pan Roasted Parsnips" the most. I love roasted parsnips, they're "nutty," they have an inherent spiciness, some sweetness - and of course a bitterness as well. Pairing with hazelnuts, raw carrot shavings, bitter greens, and a ginger-orange dressing was smart, and accentuated each of the essential flavor elements of the parsnips. Also successful were the "Tiny Ham Biscuits" with country ham and honey mustard. These tasty little ham-stuffed biscuits were fluffy, warm, and buttery - similar to Red Lobster's - and contain strips of (presumably) pan-fried country ham, some pieces crunchy, others chewy. The "Whole Fried Almost Boneless Flounder" was good, though not a stand-out, even if I liked the texture of the chewy skin and delicate, flaky meat. Flounder is a lean fish that can sometimes dry out, so takes some skill to batter and deep-fry a whole fish and for me to be perfectly content with how each part of it was cooked. The spicy sambal and the cool cilantro mayo provides both contrast and big flavors that diners can dial up to their taste. Where things broke down for me was with the "Hainanese Chicken and Rice," usually one of my favorite cheap and simple street food dishes with big chicken flavor, here bland and terrible, and offered at $25. There was no seasoning on the chicken. No seasoning in the broth. No seasoning in the rice. NO SEASONING!!! Ugh. Unless you're going to provide me with a way to season my food, you better be doing it in the kitchen. The watery sake/soy sauce was plain-tasting and didn't add anything. The "Warm Celeriac Pudding" was an over-engineered mess. Even if the 82 different contrasting flavors in this dish worked together, I generally prefer to not be challenged in this way by my dessert. So why else do I have such problems with a place serving "Asian grandma food" packaged as haute cuisine? After all, haven't I awarded 4 or 5 stars to many similar restaurants? First of all, no reservations at "north." This policy is infuriating. I understand that we should expect this from a Momofuku alum like Chef-Owner James Mark, but what seems to be missed here is that David Chang's reason for not accepting reservations was to communicate a lack of pretension. When "north" emerges as a culinary destination, heralded as one of the Providence's best restaurants, and it is subsequently moved into a boutique luxury hotel, the lack of a reservation system strikes the exact opposite chord and becomes ultra-pretentious. Secondly, Chef James Mark's has scribed an iconoclastic manifesto on North's web site with a pithy title of "confronting embedded racism that pervades the restaurant industry," (I've left the capitalization intact) about the industry not hiring non-white front of house staff, and how he doesn't wish to be part of that problem. Unfortunately, this rings entirely hollow and comes across as slick racially-driven marketing when one shows up at his restaurant on a Wednesday night and the FOH staff is... entirely white. Lastly, do you want to look at north's menu? It's not on their web site. You need to go to their Twitter page, where Chef James Mark liberally throws around F bombs, because things are getting real. I could probably go on, but I won't. Let's just leave it that I have philosophical disagreements with this restaurant's point-of-view, and their food is not awesome enough for these philosophical issues to not matter.
3 7 years ago (07-06-2018)