Bar Tulix NYC Brings New Ideas And Dashing Decor To Soho By John Mariani

    The reason that so many ethnic restaurants in America have such similar menus is because they have become sheer comfort food, not least in Mexican restaurants where you’re as likely to find burritos, quesadillas and nachos at Taco Bell as at an upscale restaurant with a décor of serapes, sombreros and Día de los Muertos puppets. Indeed, Tex-Mex fare is far more widely served in America than regional Mexican food. There tends to be more variety in Southwestern cities like Phoenix, Santa Fe and Tucson, but 21^stcentury Mexican food is still rare.
    Thank goodness, then, for the new Bar Tulix NYC, which opened on the edge of Soho last year, describing its cuisine as “coastal Mexican,” serving far more seafood than fish tacos. It’s an enterprise by chef Justin Bazdarich (of Oxomoco in Greenpoint and Speedy Romeo in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn) and restaurateur John McDonald of Mercer Street Hospitality (Lure Fishbar, Bowery Meat Company, and Hancock St.). Their experience in attracting a clientele begins with terrific design in a 65-seat dining area with a colorful bar that glistens with shelves of liquors that include an impressive number of tequilas, mezcals and sotols.
    As you can imagine there are several takes on the margarita. (Putting “Bar” in the restaurant’s name was not an idle decision.) Polished tile walls, rose-colored floor, hanging orange lamps that throw convivial light, dark green booths, highly colored banquettes and tall windows with a display of recycled amber wine bottles hasn’t a decorous cliché to be seen. (There’s one prime booth that allows in an uncomfortable draft of winter cold.) The night I visited the place was more than half full but not that noisy, excepting some unwarranted piped-in music. Unlike the dark and deafening Cosme, you can have a good night out at Bar Tulix without shouting. The very affable G-M Thomas McCumber does everything he can to make guests feel comfortable. The menu by Bazdarich and Chef de cuisine Asia Shabazz shows the kind of regionalism rare elsewhere and presents it all with color and flourish but no pretense. The salsa trio with crisp tostados contains habanero, guajillo and salsa cruda ($12) gets you off on a spicy route. Tuna tostaditos are dressed with mayonnaise blended with chintesle, a condiment of smoked pasilla Oaxaca chilies, seeds and dried shrimp as made in Mixes, with avocado, radish and hibiscus ($22). A mix of raw seafood ceviche is prettily plated with avocado, rounds of cucumber, grilled pineapple and radish ($25). The Baja-style guacamole with salsa verde, serrano peppers and epazote oil ( $17) gains nothing by adding flavorless microgreens; it may well be that traditional guac cannot be improved upon. Octopus is grilled to a savory crispiness with a dusting of paprika and served with red Lentils, roasted red peppers and creamy hazelnut-studded romesco ($26). Vegetable lovers will be very happy with the agave-roasted delicata squash with pepita pumpkin seed gremolata ($25), and Tulix’s nod to seafood shows up splendidly in succulent branzino that’s encrusted with masa meal, enhanced with a bouquet of herbs, and served in soft tacos with chipotle pepper, cucumber slaw and greens ($31). Generous indeed is the boneless half chicken al pastor with tangy-sweet pineapple jam, a counterpoint of salsa guajillo, cilantro and corn tortillas, which, at $29, is a bargain. So is cochinita pibil of juicy roast pork suffused with flavors of pickled red onion, cilantro and habanero salsa at $34. Another of the heartier dishes here is the braised short rib with black beans, shishito peppers and the nutty Veracruz-style salsa macha, with flour tortillas ($42).Queso fundito ($25) was pricy and a bit bland, despite its inclusion of chorizo peppers. A side of crisp red rice ($9) was delicious, dressed with guajillo and scallions.

We had a little room left for two desserts: A chocolate cake ($15) was a rich success, the tres leches, though moist, lacked the caramel richness I’d expected ($12).

Bar Tulix appends “NYC” to its name, too, which suggests there might be others to open in New York or elsewhere—they have Lure Fishbars in Chicago and Miami—and I can imagine they will be welcomed by anyone anywhere who may still cherish old-fashioned guac but who will be enticed and excited by the uniqueness of the food here.

CHAPTER FIVE

         For the third time in a week, David Greco watched the DVD of The Third Man, stopping and starting the disc, going back and forward to check something in a scene, listening closely to the dialog and taking notes.  He’d also re-read Greene’s novella, which was different enough from the final screenplay in small ways.  
         David was amazed at how much he was enjoying doing the research, for although he’d made his mark as one of NYPD’s most intuitive detectives, he was at its best in interviews and interrogations, putting two and two together, knowing who was lying and who was telling a facsimile of the truth, which was never one thing.
         David was also well aware of the many colorings of honor and admiration, allegiance and betrayal in criminal activity all at work in The Third Man.  Harry Lime had been Holly Martins’s best friend, going back to college, and when told of Lime’s perfidy, Holly refuses to believe it, then believes some of it before believing all of it. 
         David had seen that in his own work with the mob: the disbelief among wives, children and family members that their husband, father, uncle, friend could possibly be a murderous monster. Then, when the shock of recognition came, there was the moral agony of betraying a loved one or a friend who had already betrayed you.  Within the Mafia, and all the rest of the mobs for that matter, the concept of omertà was sacrosanct—a code of silence that demanded utter loyalty and forbade, under penalty of harsh punishment or death. 
         David had seen firsthand the results of not obeying that code of silence—the stranglings, the dismemberments, the drownings, guys hung up on meat hooks, and the horrific revenge taken on a stool pigeon’s family. Still, even as a lapsed Catholic, David could compare the mobs’ unspeakable acts  to the torture and murder used for the same reasons by religious zealots demanding total allegiance--Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and all the rest.  Equal butcheries based on some warped idea of honor and secrecy.  Actually, when he thought about, he’d never heard of the Mafia ever burning anyone alive at the stake.
         David had often turned mobsters to give state’s evidence against the capos, hoods like John Gotti, who back in ’91 was put away for life on the testimony of a wiseguy named Sammy `the Bull’ Gravano.  Most of the time, murderers like Gravano copped a plea rather than go to prison for life; other times they ratted out because too many of their friends had been rubbed out.  David had helped put some of those who testified into the Federal Witness Protection Program, which changed their identities and sent them out to live in humdrum developed communities in the southwest. 
         David tried to find out as much as he could about what went into The Third Man, how it came about, what Greene’s involvement was, how the final film differed from earlier drafts of the scripts.  He borrowed the Sherry bio of Greene from Katie and got hold of two recent bios, one of director Carol Reed, the other of producer Alexander Korda.
         Long before ever meeting Korda, Greene had scribbled on the back of an envelope an opening line for an idea: “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”   So, when contacted by Korda for a new screenplay, Greene offered what he called his “Risen-from-the-dead story,” set in London, which Korda insisted be changed to bombed-out, post-war Vienna as a more dramatic backdrop for a Hitchcockian-style postwar thriller.  London would look too much like Belfast, where Reed had filmed Odd Man Out the previous year.
         Risen-from-the-dead stories were hardly original to Greene; Christ’s resurrection was the most salient example, and Charles Dickens’ used the motif in his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.   Indeed, even Sherlock Holmes, after seeming to fall to his death in a struggle with his arch enemy Moriarty in the story “The Final Problem,” bounded back to life—an improbability demanded by his readers--in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
         There had even been two recent films with a similar plotline:  In 1944 The Mask of Demetrios, based on an Eric Ambler thriller, involved a mystery writer helping to hunt down a criminal thought dead, in a Paris locale; then, in 1947, Ride the Pink Horse--a film Greene had reviewed very favorably--concerned an American who goes to Mexico to find the mobster who killed his best friend, with scenes played out at an amusement park, just as in The Third Man.    
         Greene went off to Vienna to do research, finding that the city was quickly being restored but still with streets piled with rubble and half-destroyed buildings left from the war.  He stayed at the famous Sacher Hotel (as does Holly Martins in the film) and visited many of the locations he wrote into the script—the Central Cemetery, the amusement park, the sleazy nightclubs, and the sewers, after being been told the Allied Commission had a section called the “Underground Police” that patrolled Vienna’s vast network of sewers used by spies and criminals to pass furtively from one zone to another.
         In his research Greene heard from local contacts about the illicit and fake penicillin trafficking, which gave him the fictional rope with which to hang his character Harry Lime.
         Greene went off to Rome with his mistress Catherine, then to Ravello and Capri to work on the screenplay. 
         The script finished, Korda, Reed and American producer David O. Selznick went through the process of adding, deleting, altering and shifting details. In the novella the American character was named “Rollo,” but the American actor Joseph Cotton, who would play the role, objected, and it was changed to Holley.  Selznick hated the movie’s title, suggesting instead Night in Vienna, The Claiming of the Body or The Changing of the Chair, none of which Korda and Reed would agree to.
         “One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending,” Graham wrote in the preface to the novella a year after the film came out, “and he has been proved triumphantly right.”
         In the novella, after Lime’s burial, Greene had Holly and Lime’s former lover Anna Schmidt walk off together; in the film, Anna walks right by Holly without so much of a glance, all to the sound of the zither music, which became so popular it was named “The Harry Lime Theme.”       
         Casting was proceeding: Cary Grant was suggested for the part of Holly and Noël Coward for Lime, but in the end, Joseph Cotton got the former role and, despite frustrating delays, Orson Welles finally signed to play Lime.
         David was fascinated by all the anecdotes and details he culled from his research—he underlined pages of text in the books he consulted—but it seemed clear to him that The Third Man had been, like all movies, a collaborative effort, and that if Greene had created Harry Lime based on someone he actually knew, the character had been altered to fit the movie’s action.  Since Greene had originally placed the action in London and had never set foot in Vienna before going there for research in 1948, it seemed unlikely he’d known anyone involved in the black market for penicillin.  David began to think his research might be closing the door on Katie’s project, as well as any possibility of a trip with her to Vienna.