Restaurant Review

Stone House

Built in the rolling, wooded foothills of the Watchung Mountains, this dramatic restaurant and event space is a visual tour de force. Its soaring lodge motif honors the outdoors in every design element: stone walls, copper-clad fireplace, and bold wood chandeliers. Twin glass towers filled with wine bottles serve as exclamation marks.

Stone House is a place diners dress up for in droves, filling the 110-seat dining room’s tables and booths, as well as the 10-seat chef’s table with its window into the kitchen, which is open to the rest of the dining room. The bar and lounge are equally dramatic. The full menu is served there, and on weekends live jazz wafts in from the dining room.

Chef Jerry Villa is a longtime associate of Stone House owners Frank and Jeanne Cretella, who also own the waterfront Liberty House in Jersey City’s Liberty State Park. Villa, a CIA grad, has created a menu as current and American as Stone House’s design.

One standout appetizer is the ample crab cake and salmon cake duet. The crab cake is good, but the salmon cake is mesmerizing, thanks to smoked salmon mixed with  fresh. Another knockout, strozzapretti pasta, is offered in both appetizer and entrée portions. The name means “priest-strangler.” (The story goes that priests who were served the dish by Bolognese housewives would wolf it down so fast they nearly choked.) The rolled, stick-shaped pasta is blanketed with superb veal ragu braised in wine and garlic and topped with grated ricotta salata, or dried ricotta cheese. You’ll be tempted to wolf it, too.

Venison carpaccio, served with white-truffle oil, peppery microgreens, and shaved Parmesan, goes well with Stone House’s various breads, baked at Hudson Bread in North Bergen and toasted over the restaurant’s fireplace. Crisp fried calamari comes with tasty marinara with touches of basil and anchovy, and a sweet Thai chili puree. Prince Edward Island mussels rest in a wonderful Thai sauce thick with coconut milk, lemongrass, and red curry (but several mussels in my serving were less than spanking fresh). Tuna tartare was parsed in a puck hardly bigger than a marshmallow and accented only by the ho-hum crunch of cucumber.

Main courses proved a mixed bag. It’s perplexing that the braised veal in the pasta is so good, yet the braised short-rib entrée is ordinary. Mine were thready and chunked with fat. Stone House’s best entrée is lamb chops, not rib chops but velvety loin chops, with a heady, gamy flavor that most rib lamb chops never attain.

All the same, our lamb chops, requested very rare, emerged medium rare. Also overcooked was the menu’s sole steak, a pepper-crusted sirloin. A good-looking, 14-ounce hunk of choice beef, it featured a jarring seam of gristle and little trace of the advertised crust. (Villa says he merely dusts, not rolls, the steak in a three-peppercorn mixture.) The chef’s rosti potatoes, which accompany the steak and can be ordered as a side dish, are terrific: Idaho chunks sautéed in duck fat, salted and peppered.

Yet flavor was absent from Villa’s seared tuna loin. Seared Chilean sea bass had plenty of flavor; however, its miso broth was watery, its steamed vegetables bland, and its bed of mei fun noodles undercooked. A grilled “double-cut” pork chop was more successful, though it could use a more generous drizzle of agave nectar sauce, and more cheese on the sweet potato billed as gratinee.

Pastry chef Lee Wong creates whimsical platters as precious as doll houses but short on flavor. Bread pudding was heavy and insufficiently saucy; a caramel nut tart was dry; a citrus angel food cake merely sugary. A child-sized reimagined Yodel came across as more style than substance. I did enjoy the malty chocolate mini milkshake served with the yodel. The clear winner was the brownie s’more, a nutty, fudgy brick lavished with vanilla and chocolate ice cream and kitchen-made chocolate syrup.

There is much room for improvement. We hope Villa and his team make the food worthy of the dramatic space in which it is served.

Restaurant Details

  • Cuisine Type:
    American - Brunch - Modern
  • Price Range:
    Expensive
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