Some of the more interesting appetizers are also available as main dishes, namely the buranee kadu, a seductive dish of slow-cooked sweet pumpkin with onion and tomato, seasoned with cinnamon and cardamom and served under a veil of yogurt; and the buranee badenjan, made with eggplant, also slow-cooked with onions and, during the summer, tomatoes from southern New Jersey.
Many of the most seductive cooked dishes on the menu also have Asian spins, like the crab-shrimp cake crusted in toasted sesame seeds and glazed with a miso sauce, and the toss of Asian noodles, firm jumbo shrimp, snow peas, carrots and peppers in a ginger brown sauce.
But I wanted a puttanesca dressed for spring, with the spicy pungency that makes the dish seductive freshened up with something lively, green and biting.
We have a wonderfully aromatic paella, each grain of rice perfect, the socarrat – toasted rice crust – magnetically seductive; the real Valencia dish contains no seafood, nor red pepper.
Some dishes are simply seductive; others are bold, like sliced sea scallops topped with caramelized cauliflower and served in a caper-and-raisin emulsion.
But then his cooking also undercuts itself, some dishes mirroring the setting: seductive in the abstract, less so in actuality.
Valentine's Day is a typical day in the year to dish out love, whether it's seductive or silly.
There is even a Calcutta Jewish dish, chicken makmura (ground chicken balls in a seductive sauce with raisins, almonds, fennel and cardamom).
Eventually, however, I decide it makes the tarte slightly too redolent of a boozy Christmas cake; seductive, but hardly true to the spirit of the original dish.
Shelden's pappardella, named after Don Shelden, one of the restaurant's investors, is the most traditional of Chef Luis's pasta dishes: the wide flat noodles were embraced by a seductive, Parmesan-enriched cream sauce with black truffles.
These slightly sub-par dishes didn't dent our confidence in the Boundary experience, so seductive is the room, and so winning the service.
