The vitality of Manhattan’s Koreatown is all out of proportion to its two-block length, for the street teems with locals and tourists, many of them Asian and most Korean, all here to pop in and out of the numerous Korean eateries that line the brightly lighted stretch of the formerly entrenched Garment District. Most are quite casual, like The Kunjip set on two floors; Jongro BBQ within Karaoke City; Udon Lab; and Bangia gastro-pub.
        Antoya, now open six years, is somewhat more upscale, though wholly unpretentious, with a long bar and entry room and a rear dining space, somewhat louder, all set with back-to-back booths fitted out with a brazier at the center of the table.
         There is a 12-seat Chef’s Counter that serves both a 10-course meal with paired wines included, via wine director Joo Lee, previously at Eleven Madison Park. 
         It’s a long menu with many categories, so, assuming you are going to want at least one of the barbecue selections, confer with your waiter as to the best way to go about it, since there are some options with several cuts of meat on the plate. Everything comes on rustic ceramic plates and bowls of different colors and textures. The meats come raw to the table and are cooked by your waiter on the brazier.
         Begin with gyeran jjim ($5.99), a lovely, steaming egg custard soufflé with mushrooms, bacon, melted Gouda, a dollop of  pink cod roe and truffle. Mandoo ($14.99) is a crisp finger dumpling filled with fried beef and pork, while pajeon ($16.99) is a crisp, salted scallion pancake.
         Korean chicken has taken hold in competition with Buffalo wings, and dak nalgae twigim ($22.99) are served in a spicy-sweet marinade that gives up more flavor than the simply fried Buffalo variety.
         Notable is the array of half a dozen side condiments, individualized for certain dishes, all of them adding various tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter—that enhance just about everything at Antoya.
      Kkotdeungsim ($58.99) is a well mottled ribeye steak rolled and skewered, while osam bulgogi ($35.99) combines spicy stir-fried squid and fatted pork belly. Chadol Kimchi bokkeum bap ($25.99) is a wonderful, multi-flavored big bowl of fried rice and sliced  beef brisket liberally layered with moderately pungent kimchee.
      Everyone’s doing “crafted cocktails” these days but Antoya’s are well worth breaking your martini habit for. Try the Lava Lamp with coconut rum, triple sec, grenadine and lime juice topped with Sprite and Bailey’s Irish Cream ($18). They also serve Korean soju, the clear grape brandy, in four varieties, some flavored., as well as traditional Korean spirits like jinro ilpoom, bok bun ja and the rice wine saeng makgeolli.
     Antoya has certainly established itself among the newer Korean restaurants as a more refined, unrushed restaurant serving a daunting array of fatted beef. And rather than fast-paced “who gets what?” service, your meal will be hospitably plated and explained and you’ll have time to learn about this exotic cuisine as you go.

Open daily for lunch and dinner.

                                                                                                                    ❖❖❖

                        Remembering Chef David Bouley (1953-2024)
                                                 By John Mariani

        David Bouley, one of America’s most innovative chefs, has died of a heart attack at the age of 70 at his home in Kent, Connecticut. 
     Known for his exacting standards in the kitchen and a restless drive to create, Bouley was emblematic of the highly independent chef of the New American Cuisine that changed the perception of our nation’s food around the world.
       His focus on using the best, sometimes exotic, ingredients combined with classic French culinary technique—he had dual French citizenship—became a hallmark of the best of his colleagues’ work in the 1990s and afterwards. In 2020, the French Government bestowed upon him the title of Knight in the Order of Agricultural Merit for outstanding contributions to food and agriculture. And for his lifelong mission to make food that was healthful and to spread the doctrine of good nutrition, Bouley garnered Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University and the Rogosin Institute, an affiliate of New York-Presbyterian Hospital.        
       Born in Storrs, Connecticut, on May 27, 1953, he spent summers milking cows and making butter at his French grandparents’ Rhode Island farm, which gave him a lifelong connection to the land from which his ingredients came. After attending the University of Connecticut at Storrs, he took jobs in restaurants in Cape Cod and Santa Fe, then went to France to study the Cours de Civilisation Française at the Sorbonne in Paris.
       There he discovered his interest in food and culture and was soon traveling the traditional road of young cooks to join the kitchen brigades of restaurants in France, which included the renowned Moulins de Mougins in Cannes. Paul Bocuse in Lyon and Auberge de’L’ill in Illhaeusern. Next stop was New York at some of the city’s finest French restaurants like Le Cirque and La Côte Basque.
           In 1985 restaurateur Drew Nieporent opened Montrachet in a dreary stretch of TriBeCa that helped galvanize the neighborhood, hiring Bouley as chef. Quickly they acquired a New York Times rave review, praising innovative dishes like smoked eggplant and roasted red pepper terrine, roast duck with wild mushrooms, leeks and pearl onions in a red wine sauce tinged with cinnamon and smoked salmon in a mousseline with sevruga caviar. By then, however, Bouley’s sense of perfectionism sometimes meant long waits between courses, causing titanic battles between him and Nieporent, with Bouley exiting to open his own namesake restaurant nearby in 1987.
         From then on, Bouley got nothing but raves from every quarter, including Michelin stars and six James Beard Foundation awards. Bouley was a very beautiful restaurant, softly lighted with votive candles and smelling of ripe apples piled in baskets in the foyer. Still, the long wait times persisted as he lingered over a cook’s dish and, if it was not perfect, throw it in the waste can and tell the cook to start it all over again.  Once, when I dined there with Ella Brennan, owner of Commander’s Palace in New Orleans and her new young chef Emeril Lagasse, the wait between courses—and there were a dozen of them—could be a half hour, causing a still hungry Lagasse to remark, “Do you think we could send out for pizza while we wait?”
         By then Bouley had become a celebrity, even named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” in the world in 1994. After becoming obsessed with bread making, in 1997 he relocated Bouley as Bouley Bakery, which he used on 9/11 as a base to feed rescuers at Ground Zero. Then, in 1999  he opened an idiosyncratic Austrian restaurant named Danube, authoring East of Paris: The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube.
     He was still in the vanguard of modern cuisine at the turn of the century, but sometimes difficult to locate. Where Danube had been, he opened Brushstroke in concert with the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka. Next came a lecture series and dinners focused on healthful food called The Chef & The Doctor. Then there was Bouley Test Kitchen as a private event space and learning center for visiting guest chefs, while he began developing products for Bouley enterprises, including Bouley at Home, which closed when the pandemic hit.
      His imagination was feverish, his ferreting out of new, healthful ingredients his guiding light, as his cooking became less rich than the butter-and-cream cuisine he’d learned in France and which he’d turned into tasting menus, which in France would have been six or seven course; at Bouley it was twelve, paving the way for other chefs worldwide to increase it to 18 or even, in the case of Spanish innovator Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, up to 50.
      “I reviewed David and his brilliant team three times in as many locations (all four stars),” says former Times critic Brian Miller. “His restaurants always carried the aroma of astonishing intelligence and endless innovation. What a historic loss to our profession.”
      Not many chefs deserve historic status, and fewer still might be called icons. But in the case of David Bouley his name will join the great ones—including some of his illustrious French mentors—who helped define the best and most influential of their era. 
      Bouley is survived by his wife, Nicole Barthelme, and five siblings.

         Katie sighed and said, “I know what you must have  been going through. But does it mean you have to leave the Church?”
         Joseph shook his head. “Katie, it just got worse and worse. There was a real cover-up going on.  I wrote letters to De Castro’s superiors and heard nothing except that the Church was policing itself on these matters and that I was a good soldier to report it. Bunch of bullshit. They just swept everything under the carpet. And the damnable thing is that the parents mostly seemed okay with that. Some even believed their daughters had been the seducers and needed to be sent away.  And you know where that was?”
         “To another Catholic school?”
         “In most cases, yes, but if the girl had really been accused of seduction or even being complicit in the acts, she might have been sent to a very tough Catholic reformatory.”
         Katie tried to think of any reformatories in her memory where such girls might have been sent.  She remembers some girls going to other states, without their parents, and, in a few cases, girls who did of their own accord break from their families.  In one instance a seventeen-year-old senior ran off with a young priest at the high school.  Katie heard they got married, had kids and then lost track of them.
         “In the Philippines there were a handful of such places,” Joseph said. “The girls were locked in, had no freedom whatsoever and made to do some of the work on the property and for the local parish. Only when both the nuns and the parents agreed the girl was ready to re-enter the wicked world did they have a chance to get out. Which might well have been after years of virtual imprisonment.”
         “I had never heard of that.”
         “Then I don’t suppose you ever heard about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland?”
         Katie shook her head.
         “I’d never heard a word about them either, but it seems that right up until a few years ago, maybe the mid-1990s, there were these Church-run reformatories—they actually called them ‘asylums’—for wayward girls that go back to the eighteenth century. And from what I’ve heard, they were just brutal places.”
         “These were girls from the Irish schools?”
         “Most of them were apparently prostitutes and orphans, but yes, a parish or a parent could turn in a girl if she got pregnant or because they seemed overly sexual, even flirtatious. Unless they could get the girl to join a convent, once inside laundries she couldn’t escape, and she’d spend their days working under horrible conditions in the laundry room. A lot never made it out.  I’ve heard there have been some unmarked graves on the properties that may contain the victims who never got out.”
         “And this has been documented?” asked Katie. “How many girls were involved.”
         “No one knows. This kind of thing is just now being admitted to even exist in Ireland. No one I know of has written anything much about it.”
         Katie was starting to understand why Joseph was sitting before her.
         “So you left the Church because of your frustration?” she asked.

         “Frustration is one of those things priests are supposed to endure,” he answered. “But, Katie, we’re talking about crimes here.  And nobody, not the Church or the local police—and I’m assuming this is as true in New York right now as it is in the Philippines and Ireland—is doing anything to stop it or expose it. Nobody’s getting arrested, nobody’s going to jail, even though the Church’s superiors are completely aware of criminal activity. I felt like a fool after leaving De Castro’s office. I realized he was basically holding me to a vow of silence I could not keep.”
    “Like Bing Crosby.”
“Guess so.  And that’s why I left. In the end, Katie,  thought I could do more on the outside than on the inside. But I’m going to need a lot of help.”
         Katie saw it coming into focus now.
         “And you want me to help you with this work?”
         Joseph smiled weakly and said, “I’ve got nowhere else to turn, Katie. You’re an award-winning reporter. You can, what do they say, ‘blow the lid off this story?’”
         “The lid being the entire Catholic Church? As in St. Peter’s dome in Rome?”
         “If that’s where it leads, maybe so.”
         Katie racked her brain trying to think of any other investigations by journalists into such allegations as Joseph Evangelisti was making.  In the back of her mind she remembered a colleague at McClure’s who had once worked for the Boston Globe told her about an investigation by his paper of child molestation among the city’s Catholic priests back in the 1970s. But, said her colleague, nothing ever came of it. Word was that both the Boston archdiocese and the city’s District Attorney had it shut down, with the compliance of the paper’s editor-in-chief and publisher.
         Katie had asked her colleague if anything had happened with the story since, and he said that no one had ever followed up in all those years.
         Katie told Joseph that story and said, “Things may be different now—that was like twenty-five years ago—but that shutdown sounds like what you’ve been describing is still going on.”
         Joseph nodded, saying, “It goes on, definitely it goes on.”
         “Let me think about this, Joey. It’s a very, very big deal and sounds like it has tentacles.  I know an ex-cop I’ve worked with on some investigative stories in the past.  He’s very smart, very honest and, lucky for us, he comes from the Bronx and is an Italian-American Catholic. I think we should all get together for a meeting right away.”
         Katie Cavuto and David Greco had already gone up against Italian mobsters in Naples, Chinese mobsters in Taipei and a Moscow-controlled drug syndicate, and they almost lost their lives doing it.  Great articles had come out of those endeavors but Katie wanted to avoid any further involvement with such dangerous groups with intentions to murder David and her.  Dealing with the Catholic Church this time didn’t seem to her to fall into those categories of criminality, even if she thought she knew the Church was involved in all sorts of shady financial dealings around the world.  The Church was a very big business and, far more than it should, rendered to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s while often keeping God’s things way in the background.
         “Did you tell your parents all this?” asked Katie.
         “I did.”
         “And they were O.K. with your leaving the priesthood?”
         Joseph folded his arms as in an embrace. “Well, they told me something I never knew anything about.  It seems that when I was about six years old my parents got a call from our parish monsignor asking if a priest who’d been there for only about six weeks could stay at our house for one night and that he would be leaving for Rochester in the morning. My parents said of course. You remember, Katie, that having a priest even visit, much less stay, at your house was a great privilege in those days.
         “His name was Father Keenan and he already had a reputation as  whiskey priest, so my father didn’t offer him a drink. So, when it came time for him to go to bed they put him in my bedroom—he got the bed and I had like a sofa to sleep on. Now, I don’t remember this, but apparently at some point I came downstairs and told my parents Keenan wanted me to hop up on his lap, and I didn’t want to.”
         “Jesus! What did your parents do?”
         “My father says he literally grabbed Keenan by the collar and threw him out the front door and his suitcase after him.”
         “Did he call the police?”
         Joseph shook his head. “No, you didn’t call the police about priests. My father just told Mom, ‘Let the new parish deal with the bastard!’”
         “So, they told you this story now because. . .?”
         “Because they believed everything I told them and the reason I was leaving the priesthood.  Mom broke into tears and my father hugged me and said I should do what I needed to do. He said he was proud of me for what I’d already done.”
         There was a pause, then Joseph asked, “So will you help me on this?”
         Another pause, then Katie asked, “You got a cell phone, Joey?”