The Sea Fire Grill — a sister to Benjamin Steakhouse — offers locally-sourced, contemporary American seafood in an 
elegant dining room featuring a roaring fireplace. A perfect place to dine on a cold winter’s day.
Bread service includes an amazing whitefish spread instead of butter or olive oil. That’s smoked whitefish from the Great Lakes with mascarpone, a smidge of rosemary and chives with a soupçon of mayo. So so good, that they should get some of Maison Kayer’s breads to accompany it in lieu of their crackers and sliced bread.
Do not miss the tower of Bibb lettuce, sprinkled
with Maytag blue cheese, dried cranberries and candied pecans drizzled with balsamic ($12). A light start to a meal. Also good is a jumbo lump crab cake with Florida crab served over celery root salad and topped with frisee on a plate with a dab of both red pepper coulis and housemade tartar sauce ($20). With these, we sipped the light crisp unoaked Chablis, William Fevre, “Montmains” 1er Cru 2012 ($95) from their extensive, wine list arranged by grapes within countries.
We dined there a Monday night of a three day weekend. I should have remembered that before ordering the whole oven-roasted whole branzino ($42) that our waiter described in an olive oil, lemon and caper sauce, filleted and accompanied by a chopped frisee, tomatoes and pear salad.
Sadly, as we both 
took a bite, we looked at each other a bit surprised realizing at the same time that the branzino tasted fishy, not fresh. The caper, radish, sliced grape and frisée salad didn’t help make up for it. But the perfectly cooked rack of Colorado lamb in a hint-of-rosemary au jus ($42) did. Four huge chops came with sauteed broccoli rabe and were cooked to perfection — pink in the center as we asked.
The waiter completely forgot our sides, but did get the kitchen to rus
h to get us the fries ($10) that were crispy outside with soft potatoes in, and the unusual kale, fingerling potatoes and goat cheese (that the waiter mistakenly described as Boursin).
There is no dessert menu, as the waiter recites what’s offered. Other than their fresh fruit platter and cheese plate most all desserts are $10. Chocolate lovers will delight in the perfectly cooked, large macaron sized molten chocolate cake, oozing irresistible chocolate goo to eat with the vanilla ice cream. I suggest they switch the cinnamon ice cream from the warm upside down apple pie to the molten cake, as made a perfect foil.
– bonnie
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The Sea Fire Grill
Midtown East
158 East 48th Street
New York, NY 10017
(212) 935-3785
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