Subway Fare

Under the sidewalk, Noksu shoots for the stars.

-  MATTHEW SCHNEIER

IF EATING IN THE subway is this city’s last durable taboo, Noksu has its provocations built right in. The 13-seat dining counter, wrapped around a shockingly pristine kitchen, is housed in a former barbershop in the northeast entrance to the Herald Square B/D/F/M/ N/Q/R/W station. To enter, you descend into its bowels like any commuter and, armed with a six-digit door code to ease your way, take a left where the crowd surges right. Inside, Noksu is all gray-veined marble and inky abstracts, a frictionless dreamland where the chairs push you in. “Sit all the way back,” a jacketed captain says, “and I’ll do the rest.”

During two nightly seatings, Noksu fills with takers for chef Dae Kim’s 12-course menu. Just 27, Kim has the piecey hair of a K-pop heartthrob and the technique of a hardened modernist. His plates are painstakingly arranged by tweezer: miniature gardens of edible flowers, gelatinized spheres, and weightless foams, often all at once. Even before the optional additions of Hokkaido uni or Italian white truffle, there is a risk of muchness: A finger bowl of oyster and snapper with cured roe and apple sorbet was positively hectic. More focused was a rye tartlet, crowned with tiny petals of hakurei turnip and blobs of preserved umeboshi plum concealing a filling of sweet, whisperingly saline crab innards, meant to be taken down in one bite.