Glitzy, Sexy ike Has Good, Fresh Oysters

From the front door and windowed wall facing the street, it's difficult to gauge the size of ike, to notice the high ceilings or the various sequences of furniture stretching back into a dim, cavernous room. The first grounds the bar/lounge in the 50s, with those mushroom chairs and bright colors and George Nelson knock-off settees. Square booths and short, stumpish chairs are spread around the front of the room. Iron tables placed in front of the bar, against the windows, give you the feeling that you're about to spill outside into the East Village. Venture farther inside and the mushroom chairs are gone; half-circle booths wrap around tables; two metal chairs finish the circuit. The width of the table and length of the booth could comfortably accommodate maybe 10 people, but everyone seems to arrive and eat and drink in twos, couples dwarfed by their seats. And in the very back, like an overflow space for a crowd that doesn't show up, are more strange, couch-like booths and stumpish chairs, more stark tables illuminated by strange lights.

But people don't come to ike to sit in the back. It's a glitzy, sexy group stepping out of pulpy summer heat and into the 50s, filling the tables in the front, drinking wine in the windows. They're wearing smart clothes and slick haircuts. They sip glowing junebugs or grasshoppers, or drink beer from tall, elegant glasses. They've dressed up and insinuated themselves in the middle of 2nd Ave., and now they talk importantly to their friends and ignore the street. Ike has that sleek sophistication. The waiters are beautiful and attentive; the bartender flirts with customers; any one of the employees will offer to refill your drink or get you more crackers. Sometimes the waitress will recommend a dish, and that's nice, because the quality of food is less reliable than the quality of service.

Ike's menu is mostly alcohol ($7 or $9 martinis; $250 bottles of sparkling wine), with a page dedicated to small and large plates of food. The plates themselves are worth noting?everything is served on strangely angled trays, messy trapezoid shapes made from tarnished metal. The presentation is artful and pretty, though the food occasionally disappoints. Deviled eggs?five of them, topped with capers?come on a plate that's been sprinkled with paprika and dried parsley. They're small eggs with monstrous towers of deviled-egg stuffing rising from the hard-boiled half-spheres. They taste strongly of mustard powder and a mayonnaise that's a little heavier than I'm used to. The paprika adds a slightly spicy kick, but the overwhelming impression these eggs makes is one of creamy tanginess.

Cocktail shrimp?four of them?big, fleshy ones curled around a squarish bowl of cocktail sauce. The shrimp alone tastes cold, the way ice would taste were it of a fleshy texture. The cocktail sauce, which adds the only semblance of flavor to this plate, has a strong bite of lemon juice and sugar, which initially overpowers even the strength of the tomatoes. A flavor of horseradish makes it sharp, but even a good sauce doesn't make up for the remarkable blandness of the shrimp.

The night I was there, the flounder large plate became a cod large plate for some reason that the waitress vaguely explained. It's possible that the type of fish isn't very important, since the most impressive points of this dish are the sauces and sides. The food comes beautifully arranged on one of those awkwardly shaped metal tray-plates, with cod (or flounder, I imagine, if you visit ike's on a typical evening) drizzled with an orange-colored sauce. The fish is stuffed with spinach and spears of asparagus, vegetables swimming in a white sauce. A crisp crumbling of browned crab tops the fish, giving the cod?which is otherwise a bit bland?a sweet taste, though most of the flavor comes from the sharp, cheesy, orange-colored shrimp sauce. The strips of asparagus are well-cooked?not too stringy and chewy, not too bitter?and nutty, like they've been spiced with browned garlic. The white sauce flavors the spinach, making the greens milky and sweet in a thick soup of heavy cream, garlic and shallots. It's a delicious sauce that requires suspension of all weight-consciousness to fully enjoy. The slim, blonde, made-up women at ike did not strike me as particularly adept at suspending weight-consciousness.

A half-dozen oysters, my favorite of the small plates sampled?six large oysters opened over ice, grossly colored and smelling strongly of salty seafood. My problem with oysters is that sometimes they're too slimy and when you swallow them, you can't help but think about what you're doing: putting a little animal that lives in a shell inside your mouth and either slurping it down or?gulp?chewing all its little shell-animal parts. But ike oysters are soft, delicate and creamy. And they taste very fishy, but don't have the overpowering flavor of salt. Instead, they have a subtle sweetness and a full, heavy aftertaste that will stay in your mouth until you take a bite of something else. A waiter?not "mine," just one of several who doted on me and everyone else, the one who would coo as I left, "Please come back," as though it really mattered to him?told me the oysters had just arrived the previous day.

They come with a second plate, a mini plate of sauces and oyster crackers. One little bowl holds cocktail sauce; one's filled with a greenish-looking liquid and flecks of vegetable, which a waiter identifies as vinegar and shallots. The vinegar burns with tangy intensity and seems like the only part of the sauce that could explain the vague spiciness, until you hold up a spoonful to the feeble bar lighting and see large, black chunks of pepper sprinkling your shallots. In the last mini-bowl is surprising relief from the vinegar strength?tiny cubes of diced cucumber floating in lemon and lime juice, a combo that tastes like unsweetened lemonade. It's acidic, but the cucumber cools the citrus, neutralizes it.

Skip dessert. The cookies, served warm and with the waitress' recommendation, are good, but not remarkable or worth five dollars. They're too sweet, nicely soft, like something the Pillsbury Doughboy would endorse. And the brownies are just as sweet, a little dense, not as good as boxed brownie mix makes. Even the minuscule scoop of ice cream tasted cheap, melting immediately into thin, milky water.

If you like the East Village, and wide open spaces in which to eat, and cool decor, and oysters, there's enough good stuff on the menu to make ike worth a trip. Afterward you can step onto the sidewalk and be swept up in the masses of pretty people eating in chic restaurants, making the avenue pulse with motion. Boys in black tanktops cling to each other. Waiters stand in the doorway of ike, wishing departing customers an insistent goodnight.

ike, 103 2nd Ave. (corner of 6th St.), 388-0388.