The Cecil
Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
First, respect: Bebop was born here, on West 118th Street at St. Nicholas Avenue, where in the early 1940s Minton’s Playhouse hired as house pianist an unknown named Thelonious Monk, who played the instrument as if nobody knew how before.
The Hotel Cecil operated on the upper floors, already shabby. When it went up in flames in 1974, like so many things in Harlem back then, Minton’s fell silent.
Today the building is single-room-occupancy housing. It is called simply the Cecil — a name shared by the sleek restaurant that opened in September on its street level under the auspices of Alexander Smalls, a former opera singer who owned the Lowcountry-cooking haven Cafe Beulah, and Richard D. Parsons, previously the chief executive of Time Warner and chairman of Citigroup. (Minton’s, which was briefly revived a few years ago, is back in business in the same building, also thanks to Mr. Smalls and Mr. Parsons.)
In the evening, a doorman waits to usher diners in. The front lounge is very dark and come-hither, with a sculpture of abstractly naked couples in fine wire mesh above the bar. More mesh shrouds the dining room’s wall of windows. Sinuous chairs have peekaboo cutouts; lights tucked inside glass bubbles barely make the effort to glow.
I did not expect to see a geisha. She hovers in a painting by Chaz Guest, against the wallpaper’s blurred motif of Masai warriors. The juxtaposition reflects the restaurant’s culinary theme, summed up on the menu as “Afro/Asian/American cuisine.”
This sounds like a bridge too far. But Mr. Smalls’s vision, as amplified and executed by the chef de cuisine, Joseph Johnson, proves to be surprisingly focused, with the best dishes deriving from the breadth of the African diaspora. (The Asian touches are mainly footnotes.)
In beef suya, a house-made approximation of West African tankora spice rub and a flick on the grill leave the tender ribbons of meat nutty and lime-bright, with a buzz of African bird’s-eye chiles. Those chiles, also known as piri-piri, reappear, emulsified, over giant prawns, their fire tempered by a slaw of shaved green apples in lemon and sesame oil.
American classics are gently tweaked. In lieu of fried chicken there is fried guinea hen, brined with cinnamon and then flash-fried: minimalist and wonderful. Grits, served under an exemplary lamb shank, are infused with coconut milk, the richness rounded out by Kaffir lime and the trace sweetness of star anise. Collards are left raw and shaved, allowed to assert themselves without too much interference, aside from a few cayenne-dusted cashews and a faint douse of coconut milk, chipotle, lime and palm sugar that functions less like dressing than lingerie.
Some dishes verge on monumental, like gumbo with a pleasingly sour undertow of dried shrimp and feijoada, a Brazilian black-bean stew stuffed with a whole merguez lamb sausage and crowned with a slab of oxtail whose daunting layer of fat arrives already melting.
But many of the pleasures here are subtle. For wild bass, Mr. Johnson draws on a jerk recipe from his great-aunt in Barbados, balancing the heat with soy, orange and lime zest so the dish soothes rather than inflames. Wok-fried lo mein noodles, accompanying a hearty duck leg, are tinged with a delicate Indian-style cashew broth.
Mr. Smalls and Mr. Johnson are trying to find a balance between higher aspirations and pleasing the neighborhood. So here are deviled eggs, overly sweet and creamy; pint-size hot dogs, one of veal with a heavily onioned Senegalese sauce on the bun and a “kimchi” of black-eyed peas on top, a salute to the Korean community in Ghana; and a wok bar, whose choose-your-own-adventure offerings are surprisingly respectable.
Desserts are a lovely epilogue: a nicely firm rice pudding with a Kaffir lime chiboust; an airy cheesecake with candied cashews for a crust and a tart hibiscus gelée on top. But on each visit, I was instructed, by different servers, to get the pecan sticky bun. They were right.
As one meal wound down, the waiter said to my table, “Now we’re getting to the end, and I’m feeling sad.” The sense of camaraderie extends to the tenants of the S.R.O. upstairs, to whom the restaurant delivers free lunches twice a week.
“They also deserve to be taken care of,” Mr. Smalls said.