EDITOR’S NOTE: We love breaking bread with exciting people, and a pint of good beer never hurt a conversation. It’s in this spirit that we bring you Late Plates, in which we interview great minds, talents and professionals over America’s best late-night eats. Our first chat is with Morten Sohlberg, proprietor of six (seven, soon) restaurants and owner of Blenheim Hill Farm. GP editor Jeremy Berger met Sohlberg for late-night Asian food at Shanghai Mong, one of Sohlberg’s haunts in New York’s Koreatown.
The facade of Morten Sohlberg’s new restaurant is an untidy shell of plywood. I rattle the makeshift door loose and find him inside looking at blueprints and walking among piles of wood and power tools. Soon, this corner spot on one of the posher blocks of the West Village in New York City will be a restaurant called Blenheim, serving food mostly sourced from his farm in upstate New York. It’s his seventh food-related project in the city (not to mention the farm), after a handful of creperies, restaurants, and a catering business, and something of the crown jewel, where he’ll be gunning for stars from the Michelin Guide and The New York Times. Right now, though, it’s a bit of a mess.
For Sohlberg, 44, a native of Oslo, it’s not just that the food here will be of a higher caliber than his previous restaurants. The entire concept is a step forward. “We’re not just buying from farmers”, he says, showing us around the kitchen. “We are the farmers. That allows us to do something very different. We have the freedom to do more R&D and experimentation. We have the ability to grow crops that farmers can’t because they may not sell the crop, or the crop doesn’t work out. We’re financially sustainable as well as environmentally sustainable.”
SOHO, 9:55 p.m.
It’s almost 10 and we’re hungry. Of all the neighborhoods in New York this one isn’t the ideal destination for quick or affordable bite. We lock up Sohlberg’s restaurant and duck into Corner Bistro, which has one of the best bacon cheeseburgers around, but there’s a line of eight parties waiting for a booth. Around the corner there’s a new restaurant called Wallflower with $14 cocktails and foie gras sandwiches; while none of us look down on the finer things in life, we call an audible and catch a cab up to Koreatown, where Sohlberg likes to eat after working in his restaurants. This piece of midtown Manhattan, centered around the block of 32nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, is rich with culinary options. There’s premium steam table food, weapons-grade kimchi, a faux-French bakery, food and beer and karaoke at all hours.
We end up at Shanghai Mong, a self-proclaimed “Asian bistro” that serves a staggering range of foods around the clock. You can get lemon creme dumplings and you can get beef and broccoli. We order kalbi, a style of marinated grilled beef, lettuce chicken wraps, spicy stir fried tofu and a bowl of spicy pork bibimbap, a signature Korean dish of vegetables, meat and rice served in a hot stone bowl. Sohlberg, who doesn’t drink, orders a sparkling water with mint leaves. It turns out mint leaves are the one thing they don’t have.
