The latest behemoth restaurant to open is Aqua, at 920 Broadway, near 20th Street in Flatiron, owned by David Yeo, who also owns Hutong. Until recently it was a furniture store. Now, shaped like a mallet, the main room sprawls around an oval bar, surmounted by massive rope sculptures that make it look like a ship without sails. A long wing with a 70-foot sushi bar shoots off perpendicularly toward a separate entrance on 21st Street.
The Japanese and Italian menus are separate; there's almost no fusion going on. Our waitress tried to talk us through the ordering process by suggesting we get things from both menus, but warning that we would have no control over when the dishes arrived - making it impossible to enjoy a sequential meal of one cuisine and then the other.
With around 70 dishes between them, not counting desserts, the dual menus keep sections brief, running between two and five dishes each. This feature can be annoying when too many dishes that don't go together arrive at once - such as our rock shrimp tempura (Japanese) and fried calamari (Italian), which set down at precisely the same time, both thickly breaded so it was hard to tell them apart.
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