Sen's Pretty Good, But Hot

One of the best Absolutely Fabulous jokes comes when Edina tells Patsy she's going to open a shop. "What are you going to sell?" asks her friend, and Eddy replies, with relish, "Gorgeous things."

Sen is a new restaurant for the kind of people AbFab lovingly mocked: those who understand how something can be so gorgeous that whatever else it is besides doesn't matter. It's sort of like having an artistic eye, except that fabulousness is ephemeral, which is really what makes it fun. And shallow. Note that when fashion adopts a positive adjective (not just "gorgeous" and "fabulous" but "delicious" and "sexy" too), its meaning quickly evaporates into the ether. That way, praiseworthiness can shift like the wind. Objects are fleeting and irrelevant. The point of the fabulous game is to pursue the vapors.

The people behind Sen have run on this particular gas before?Asian style. Their histories include hands in Bond Street and the original Sushi Samba, on Park Ave. S. The former was the last true downtown-restaurant-of-the-moment; one moment later, the hipness of every hip scene was diluted by dotcom dorks and Puff Daddy. Sushi Samba is the kind of excuse for a hip place that came next. The food was overdone yet underwhelming, the location a bad joke. It doesn't get much less gorgeous than the bridge-and-tunnel singles scene of Park Ave. S. But that sort of slumming was the smart move for a restaurant owner after his slice of Boomtime Pie.

Now that that's over, the smart move is a relatively low-key mid-90s type of hot restaurant, with neo-modern style, a worldly outlook and a good publicist. The spot? Midway up Ave. C, of course. The food? Gorgeous, yes, but in this case also Vietnamese. It's not bad.

Summer rolls ($7) come in rice-flour wrappers, thin and beautiful. They're stuffed with curly noodles and some beef or shrimp. For taste excitement you need to dip them in the provided hoisin sauce and red chili paste. Shrimp toast ($6) is another simple appetizer: the shrimp are minced, doused with basil-infused olive oil and spread on a slice of toasted baguette.

Tastier starters include a green mango salad ($8) and calamari with stuffed prawn ($8). Both impressed with choice fresh herbs and vegetables. The salad featured Thai basil and cilantro in perfect proportion wrapping crunchy strips of mango and pink steamed shrimps. A pineapple-lime dressing provided the juice. The squid and prawn were nearly as electric, grilled as they were and served with thick, pure tamarind sauce. The garnish was a lively slaw of root vegetables.

We also tried the quail appetizer ($9). It comes halved and pan-seared with a side of sticky rice. The menu says the bird is cooked with five spices, but the dark, rich meat must have eclipsed them. The best part of the dish was the rice, which had a slight anise flavoring and authentic Far Eastern stickiness?a soulful quality native audiences expect but most East Village diners wouldn't necessarily demand.

I loved dipping my quail in a little nuoc mam. That's Sen's third table seasoning?you might have to ask for it. The sauce is made from fermented anchovies, and it's a common base note in both Vietnamese and Thai cooking (in Thai it's called nam pla). I've never known it to be used as a seasoning instead of an ingredient, but maybe Sen thinks cooking with nuoc mam would make their food unfashionably salty. To me it's secretly deep stuff, like the terse bassline of a funk song?crucial even if it goes unnoticed.

That brings me to Sen's dinner music, which, perhaps coincidentally, eliminated the terse basslines of some classic soul songs. I'm talking about original Bob Marley and the Wailers recordings, remixed for the club market. They're the kind of thing that can make even the most humble critic feel sorry for trendy people.

The room is also pretty ugly. A very prominent polished-wood banquette with embroidered throw pillows for your back, at least, qualifies as "gorgeous." Rose petals and Kiehl's products in the bathroom is another highlight. But overall the setting is too cold. I'm sure it will look better when filled with meticulously groomed, genetically blessed young rich people, which I'm sure is the plan.

Vietnamese curry entrees come with beef or shrimp ($11 or $13). I chose beef and enjoyed the brown sauce?very garlicky but also tropically fruity. Chalk that up to proper use of lemongrass. Slices of topnotch shiitake in there were a major bonus, but the real delight of the dish I was served was its sliced steak. When a restaurant offers "beef curry," the cut could be almost anything, but what everyone wants is sirloin sliced thin against its grain, so it falls apart against the teeth. Sen serves that.

My curry didn't come with any rice or noodles. The same turned out to be true of the ironpot chicken and the "mignonette" steak dish. You can order a side of sticky rice ($3), but the waiter didn't push it, and the meat counts were high enough that we didn't need any. That's how you can be sure this is the first Now Restaurant of 2003: Sen is low-carb.

And if you're not on the boat you ride second-class. Sen offers vegetarians?last year's restricted eaters?a stir-fried noodle dish ($10) that would go unnoticed in any number of Hong Kong-style takeout joints. Some Greenmarket long beans are a nice touch, but it doesn't make up for the dish's greasiness.

Yam soup ($6 or $10) was another item that reminded us of storefront Asian fare. It came recommended by our waiter, which is bizarre because the stuff didn't taste like yam at all. It tasted like egg-drop soup from the old-school paper carton. It looked like egg-drop soup from the old-school paper carton, too.

The mignonette ($18) is billed as "seared filet mignon cubes, caramelized garlic and pearl onions with sauteed chayote and spicy pepper corn sauce." Cut that description off at "garlic" and you'll get a clearer picture. There also seemed to be some hoisin involved in the searing, which worked. The same couldn't really be said of our garlic's caramelization process. And chayote, a Mexican tuber, was a pretentious addition. But the mignon was calidad.

The ironpot chicken is the entree I'd most readily recommend. It's a stew with not too much liquid. What broth there is covers the bottom of the black bowl, steaming instead of suspending the meat and vegetables. The boneless chicken was touched through and through with ginger essence, earthy spice seamlessly interlaced with the meat. Quail eggs were the special accompaniment?another pretentious touch, this one welcome, because gingery little boiled eggs are just cool.

For drinks, Sen has a sake selection, including hot ones infused with lemongrass, pomegranate or clementine ($7). There are also red and white French wines, and Asian beers. A liquor license is pending.

Among the dishes I didn't sample are a grilled shrimp appetizer with Japanese eggplant, a lobster and lotus root salad, a grilled lamb chop crusted with lemongrass (the most expensive item on the menu at $22), rice noodles with ox tail in anise broth, pork satays and whole boneless fishes. Dessert options ($4-$6) include Vietnamese creme brulee, almond cake with mandarin sorbet and apple cromesquis with toffee tamarind dip.

Personally, I'm unlikely to eat again at Sen, because the good friends who are my regular dining companions all but hated the place, even though they enjoyed a lot of the food. It was the first time I ever split with them thumbs-up/thumbs-down on a restaurant. It all came down to conflicting feelings about our waiter.

We visited Sen twice and this guy served us both times. He's a handsome thirtysomething guy?a cool, confident Manhattanite. And he wants to chat. When you chat with him he sort of brags (about which top designers just had their Christmas party at Sen) and sort of flatters you (for being there, and for ordering the crummy yam soup), and he returns to each table often to chat some more. I recognized the sort of conversation he was trying to start, because I've been to fashion shoots. To me, it's interesting how tacitly agreed-upon shallowness paves the way to lively social intercourse. My friends just thought the guy was a nuisance. But it can be fun to pretend you're cool enough to talk to someone pretending to be really cool.

The make-believe aspect of trendmongering is often overlooked. I'm reticent to judge the sort of diners who'd choose pretty good Vietnamese at a hot restaurant over stellar Vietnamese for less money out in Queens. No fair saying good taste is real but "in" taste is fake. Our waiter demonstrated that there's a gorgeous thin line between the phony and the openhearted. Sen is walking it.

Sen, 111 Ave. C (betw. 7th & 8th Sts.), 254-7773.