New England Seafood With a Side of Punk, at Smithereens

To describe Smithereens as a New England-style seafood spot is like calling “Moby-Dick” a story about fishing. The restaurant is darker and weirder, a love letter to the North Atlantic at its most ominous and brooding, written in seaweed and smashed lobster heads. Even the martini tastes like a gulp of saltwater, the last memory of a drowning man.

The chef, Nicholas Tamburo, grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts, heir to a regional culinary tradition largely unknown to outsiders beyond baked beans and chowder. To make anadama bread — folklore has it that the name comes from a fisherman grumbling about his wife (“Anna, damn her!”) — he researched recipes from more than a century ago, when frugal cooks eked out staples down to the last kernels. True to those origins, he starts by boiling cornmeal into porridge, to give the bread a sinking softness, then adds molasses. The result, fortified by rye, is dense yet tender, with a muted sweetness. Out of thrift, indulgence.

Then history goes out the window. Among the small plates that follow at this staunchly idiosyncratic East Village restaurant might be a wreath of amberjack, sunnily sour from a gloss of yuzu vinaigrette, under fresh horseradish heaped in delicate curls like Parmigiano over pasta. Bluefin tuna keeps company with skinny strips of braised kombu and rhubarb in pleated hunks, softened up by a pour of tart white verjus, liquid shio koji (a blend of fermented rice, salt and water, lending a faintly floral funk) and warming ginger. What makes this more than just a good crudo are the tiny, half-hidden nubs of oil-cured black olives, briny and buttery, with a half-remembered bitterness.

Previously the chef de cuisine at nearby Claud, Mr. Tamburo here reveals a protean mind, elaborating and extending the ocean theme. Lentils are simmered not with ham bone but with the skin from a smoked eel. Skewers of abalone, grilled over charcoal, are repeatedly dunked in a yakitori-style tare of dried fish bones and manzanilla sherry, with its exhilarating hit of sea air. They share a plate with egg yolks cooked at low temperature into a fudgy dome, resting in the luster of an abalone shell.

None of these gestures are merely intellectual. Rice melded hot with clam juice, onions slackened in white wine, butter and crème fraîche is affirmingly rich, as creamy as risotto, each grain still distinct. The foam around it is chowder, frothed in a whipped-cream canister at the last minute and dusted with bay leaf powder. Dig in and you find quahogs, hard-shell clams that, when shucked, are big enough to fill the palm of your hand; here they’re chopped down, meaty and mineral.

Smithereens is a haven for the less-desired creatures of the sea. Mackerel has a reputation for being truculently fishy but shows its delicate side here, its flesh clean and almost bright. It’s presented whole, mottled black with a barbecue sauce that borrows the sweet, smoky heat of Jamaican jerk, rounded out by molasses. (Maritime routes brought Caribbean seasonings to New England in colonial times.)

Bluefish, long consigned to lobster bait, is a fighter, the only member of its family, Pomatomidae, to have not gone extinct. Mr. Tamburo smokes it over apple wood, mollifying its oily flesh with a maple glaze deepened by fish sauce and liquid shio koji, then turns it into pâté, with crème fraîche standing in for the classic cream cheese. Almost confoundingly airy, this comes tucked under a buckwheat pancake, supple as a Breton crepe and earthy: surf and turf.

Must there be a lobster roll? This one is slightly dainty, the opposite of what you seek in such a thing. Yet so much labor goes into it. Mr. Tamburo infuses butter with lobster shells and bonito flakes, to brush over a fluffy Martin’s potato bun. The meat is tossed in a mayonnaise of roasted lobster heads cooked down with Cognac until primally marine. After all that, it tastes like a lobster roll.

More surprising is his take on clam-shack fried whiting. The fish is deboned but left whole, silvery inside its tempura coat. When I had it, the whiting was curved in a loop, as if eating its own tail; these days it’s kept straight, the better for the batter to form an evenly crispy shell.

Desserts test the limits of the cerebral. A celery-root ice cream float offers an austere clarity, if perhaps not pleasure. A mille-feuille of candied nori layered with licorice mousse and citron jam might benefit from another contrasting flavor or texture. But the apple cider doughnut! There’s enough cider in the dough that it tastes — wildly — juicy, and the outside gets a sour Haribo-esque glitter of freeze-dried apple and malic acid.

To match the food, there are New England-brewed beers and Moxie soda, smacking of wintergreen, invented by a Maine-born scientist in the late 19th century as medicine for frayed nerves. The focused wine list includes scribbled testimonials from the staff (“It makes me feel like a lizard basking in the sun”). Although the restaurant takes its name from the 1982 movie “Smithereens,” a chronicle of the East Village’s last days of punk, the soundtrack might be jazz or summer-sparkly Japanese city pop from the ’80s.

Praising Smithereens in all its strangeness feels a bit like pointing out the sulky guy dressed in black in the corner of the high school cafeteria. Friends might look askance. I’ve eaten steadily here since winter, before I took this job; it was a knockout every time. But not all my colleagues thrilled to the restaurant as I did. Vegetables are scarce. There could be more guidance on how to compose a meal. The space, below street level, is awkward, the front room set to permanent gloaming and the back room over-lit and drafty, as if you’re marooned in an unwinterized cottage on an island off Maine.

Still, who cares if the basement is grungy when the band is this good?

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