Mad City Café and Grill

With topsy-turvy design elements, original menu items named for New York City landmarks and film classics screened on small monitors, this is a place to have fun. And oh – the food is good, too.

By:Kate and Tom O’Neill
   Mad City Café and Grill is a find. Just two blocks off Route 1, this small restaurant with a neighborhood feel is tucked away on a quiet residential street in North Brunswick.
   Offering imaginative, enjoyable alternatives to other restaurants in the corridor, chef/owner Bruno Pascale cooks good food with few disappointments. The atmosphere is eccentric and fun, the service friendly and efficient. Mr. Pascale has a knack not only for preparing meals that please, but also for making his guests smile — first at the eccentric décor and then from the satisfying food. Joining friends after a tense ride through a sleet storm, we relaxed instantly as we surveyed the menu, with dishes named for New York City landmarks and neighborhoods.

   Mr. Pascale is a movie buff who called his restaurant the Mad City Café and Grill as an homage to a favorite film, Mad City. In that 1998 drama, a dim-witted security guard, played by John Travolta, takes museum-goers hostage, just as Mr. Pascale says he would like to capture his guests’ appetites and imaginations. The film theme is carried through on several small flat-screen monitors, showing, on the evening we visited, Finding Nemo on one screen and a vintage Hope-Crosby road picture on another. The sound tracks were muted in favor of an evening’s worth of Barry White recordings.
   The menu is as eclectic as the décor. Trained at the Culinary Arts Institute in Jersey City, Mr. Pascale devises — and names — his own recipes. The menu offers seven appetizers. Trump Towers Bruschetta ($6.95) is ample for two — grilled Tuscan bread rubbed with olive oil, heaped with plum tomato chunks, fresh basil and cubes of fresh mozzarella. The Guggenheim ($9.95), baked Brie with sliced apples and slices of baguette, was drizzled with chili honey. The Brie could have been creamier, but the contrast of sweet with spicy, hot with cold, and soft with crispy made for a delightful dish. The PATH ($9.95) combined lump crabmeat with spinach and cheese baked in a flaky pastry and served in a tomato coulis. Traditional-style Canal Street Wings ($8.95) boasted a dipping sauce rich with generous hunks of blue cheese.
   Entrées arrive on handsome white china, embellished with graceful swirls of colorful sauce. Plump sacchetti (beggars’ purses) ($24.95), a Mad City special, are little pasta pockets bursting with four-cheese filling sweetened by diced pears. Supplemented by shrimp in pink sauce with their tails still on, this dish makes for sloppy eating. Bridge and Tunnel ($17.95) was a more familiar combination: sweet sausage, broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes served over al dente rigatoni in a light marinara sauce. The Tubes ($16.95) are tubular (naturally) rigatoni, pinched at each end to hold in their stuffing of ricotta with earthy, firm sautéed spinach, along with plum tomatoes and truffle oil-drizzled wild mushrooms, topped with Reggiano cheese.
   The blend of al dente asparagus, wild mushrooms and plum tomatoes in The Brownstone ($16.50) was overwhelmed by the large serving of angel hair pasta, but the garlic sauce with which it was tossed and the topping of Reggiano and truffle oil made for a savory, flavorful dish. Juicy, all-American Frickin’ Chicken ($17.50) had a crushed pecan crust and was topped with a light gravy. Accompanied by a sumptuous swirl of mashed sweet potatoes in bourbon cream sauce, this dish is not for the faint of heart. Despite the rosemary and garlic white wine demi-glace reduction, The Lower East Side ($20.95) was bland: the pan-seared, Frenched pork chop was served with sliced carrots, peppers and onions. Brown gravy topped the crinkle-cut French fries (listed as "shoestring potatoes"), making them soggy. Pasta Bolognese ($19.95) offered firm, perfectly cooked penne, topped with a sausage-packed tomato sauce guaranteed to warm both body and soul.
   Mr. Pascale makes everything served at Mad City, including the desserts. We enjoyed three selections with contrasting personalities. First, the unusual Spanish Harlem Spongecake ($5.95), served in a martini glass with three milks: sweet condensed, evaporated and coconut, topped with a ripe strawberry perched on the rim. Second, a delicate pear and apple cobbler, and third, the magnificent Fun Do ($3.95/person), made even better by sharing it three ways. Thick, creamy chocolate in a miniature fondue pot, lay ready to coat marshmallows, strawberries, pineapple or pound cake, served in dippable chunks. The only way we can imagine improving this near-perfect dessert would be to allow the chilled pound cake to reach room temperature before delivering it to the table. We finished up with huge cappuccinos, served with rock sugar on a stick as the sweetener.
   His restaurant, Mr. Pascale told us, is "crazy casual." Its topsy-turvy elements of style include bent-stemmed wine glasses, curvy water glasses in Necco wafer shades of green, yellow and purple, a triangular menu, Japanese lanterns and knick knacks everywhere. Mr. Pascale’s idea is to devise unusual combinations of cuisines, then "mix it all up and make the presentations crazy." Crazy like a fox perhaps: he aims to build a restaurant franchise around his concept. However whimsical the surroundings, the cuisine rests on a solid foundation. Those sacchetti would be an unusual and well-conceived achievement in any restaurant. A little more consistency and restraint in the conception and presentation of each dish — more method in the madness — would make Mad City a "must visit" destination rather than a fun alternative.