Achilles Heel — Restaurant in New York

This was one of my favorite restaurants. Everything used to be spectacular and I learned to trust the restaurant even if the menu turned me off a bit. They consistently surprised and proved my sensibilities wrong...

Until this last visit. The menu is now largely Korean inspired, which is great and I was hoping for bold flavors with strong spice.

The menu wasn't terribly interesting but that's okay, Achilles is known to wow me when the words do not. Sadly the opposite happened. Every dish felt amateurish. A handful of potato chips on top of a veggie slathered mackerel with heavy tomato notes. The attempt at adding crunch just made it unpleasant to eat. The flavor was one blah note, the chips for textural crunch, and the buried oily mackerel just wasn't good or fun to eat.

The braised chicken was similarly muddled for flavors. Certainly the meat fell off the bone but the butchering of the bird left the back in which when served over a bed of croutons also made this dish tedious and unpleasant to eat. Did I just bite a crouton or a spine? That was a question I had to ask myself more than once.

Overall the technique wasn't there. The finesse wasn't there. This was a favorite place to be delighted by unexpected elevation. Now it seems to be a monotonous flavor note with nothing worthwhile to highlight as worth your time...

It is with a heavy heart that I write this review. Achilles Heel has been my favorite NYC restaurant for more than a decade, and even though chefs have changed a couple of times, the quality of the food has been consistent and spectacular, up until now. The new menu consists of bland dishes with the same muddy flavor profile. The bread with the bean-dip was stale and unpleasant to chew, and could have used a simple fix of having it toasted. The presentations were messy and not fun to eat, like a microwave-dinner tasting braised chicken that floated in a murky sauce with impossible to decipher ingredients. The textures were all wrong - the mackerel erased by unnecessary heap of potato chips on top and the chicken paired with hard croutons underneath, giving each bite an unpleasant sensation like you are hitting a bone. Before the restaurant was a bargain for the quality of food vs the price, now the $200 price tag for two people made me feel cheated. I love this place so much and it was the saddest dinner...

womp. pretty disappointed i have to say. First things first the setting is cute, there was a pot belly stove with a big fire near the entrance of the establishment. Points for that as that is very unique and definitely gave a certain ambience. However, the menu is tiny with very few (2) meat options, one of which was $45 chicken. The other was a single link of sausage on top of cooked cabbage. It was yummy cabbage and yummy sausage but damn… that wasn’t a meal. We left hungry while spending way too much money. Not to mention they had a DJ that night and he was playing mediocre punk music from different eras and the music was so loud I could barely hear anything. It’s a small intimate place, having the music that loud is unnecessary and unwarranted. The waitresses forgot about our table and forgot to bring us our second drink. I had high hopes. Probably won’t...