Them's good eats!

“Everything in moderation, including moderation,” it is sometimes said. At Aska, the recently reopened Williamsburg shrine to alchemical Nordic cuisine, the only real immoderation is the sheer amount of coyly inventive food. In place of the usual crescendo of fine-dining tasting menus—a few seafood skirmishes followed by revelatory red-meat battles—there is a procession of intricate tactical maneuvers, nineteen courses that span sea, field, and forest. Here is the lichen turned crouton; here, the squid turned tartlet. For a while, this gentle sleight of hand is fun. Then, all at once, it is wearying.

. . . .The new dining room is nearly unlit, and the round tables are heavy, immense, and draped in black tablecloths. The vibe is best described as hipster funeral.

“Or we could just order in?”

Some dishes stand out against the gloaming. Take the seaweed known as bladderwrack, which when Googled brings up images of tablets meant to cure indigestion, but here was served in its long, tendrilled natural form — quick-fried into a chip, and kissed with blue-mussel cream. A bakery’s worth of bread and cultured butters nearly earned its place as a standalone second course, thanks especially to the Manitoba, a high-protein mini-loaf made yeasty by an infusion of I.P.A. And kudos to whoever figured out how to compress kohlrabi so that it becomes as firm and juicy as a water chestnut, and then draw out its flavor with cucumber dust.

Yet the kitchen’s attempts at drama tend to repeat themselves. Cannibalism seems a central theme: king crab swam in king-crab consommé, and a skate wing sat in skate-wing sauce. A pile of incinerated lamb heart, served over a pad of rendered lamb fat, was something of a choking hazard (aska means “ash” in Swedish). Thankfully, a pig’s-blood pancake was heavy enough not to merit an additional bloodbath, but a birch-wood ice cream took its sylvan motif to extremes, studded with mushrooms that were variously candied, dehydrated, or meringued.

– The New Yorker, February 27, 2017