Vareli’s menu is big fat Greek jumble

Amidst the chain restaurants and dingy diners that line Broadway, Westside Market owner George Zoitas and chef Amitzur Mor have fashioned a romantically lit hideaway that falls victim to distraction.

At once German pub and Mediterranean bar, Parents Weekend splurge and pretentious professorial hangout, Vareli (located on Broadway between 111th and 112th streets) simply tries to do too much.

Perhaps extreme fusion cuisine and disjointed menus appeal to chef Mor. A veteran of Food Network’s cooking competition “Chopped,” a show that prompts contestants to create dishes from virtually random collections of ingredients, Mor seems to enjoy leading diners on an agonizing trek over the entire European continent. Ultimately, this confusing restaurant would benefit from a firmer grasp on reality, not the artificial glitz of food television.

The bread appears to be the best part of a meal at Vareli. Perfectly poised between fluffy and chewy, well salted and served with an appealing fruit olive oil, Vareli’s bread establishes high expectations that the actual meal fails to maintain.

Chef Mor employs a shotgun strategy in menu design, shooting out seemingly random ideas and hoping something strikes home. For example, appetizers range from fried cauliflower with tahini to tuna tartare with “Israeli salad” to a homemade sausage plate with warm potato salad. Suddenly shifting from the Middle East to Germany with no particular explanation feels psychologically jolting, a consequence of a menu with no focus or direction.

The fried cauliflower is a sulfurous bomb, a corrosive, acid reflux-inducing disaster. And the tuna tartare with “Israeli salad” tastes hardly better—its vaguely fishy, texturally homogenous composition is drowned in bland “tomato consommé.” Regrettably, chef Mor seems oblivious to this plate’s tragic lack of seasoning, an especially surprising oversight considering his Israeli heritage.

Luckily, the sausage tastes spectacular, possessing a powerful snap and pillowy pork filling. Pickled carrots play bright counterpoint to the heavy meat, but the potato salad comes lukewarm and flavorless. Admittedly, this dish might do without the greasy chunks of dressed potato, as they add absolutely nothing to the sausage links other than an absurd touch of hominess.

On “Chopped,” chef Mor prepared a main course of knockwurst fried in pretzel coating, and he apparently considers that pretzel crust one of his signature culinary creations. Vareli features a pretzel-crusted mahi mahi with gigante beans, swiss chard, roasted peppers, and bouillabaisse. Here, German explicitly meets Mediterranean in a bizarre, palate-jarring creation. In the extraordinarily dim, cave-like dining room, seeing the contrast between white fish flesh and dark pretzel crumbs proves difficult. Tasting the very nearly burnt, insistently saline pretzel flavor is not hard at all though—the rather small fillet suffers from a disagreeable saltiness. The gigante beans feel tender and delicately starchy, but the bouillabaisse sauce probably needs quotation marks. After all, bouillabaisse generally implies the presence of shellfish, which in this preparation are noticeably absent.

For dessert, Vareli’s pastry department offers a layered white and milk chocolate mousse with macerated berries. Astoundingly creamy but cloyingly sweet, this dessert merely reflects Vareli’s current lack of finesse. More disturbingly, chocolate mousse seems completely disconnected from the emerging German-Mediterranean theme chef Mor so discretely cultivates.

Considering that Vareli just opened, dinner service runs relatively smoothly. Still, water glasses remain unfilled for awkward spans of time that extend across courses, and waiters noisily bump into tables while trying to navigate the exceedingly narrow space. Forgiving these failures is difficult even on opening night when the staff appears wholly unconcerned with diners’ welfare.

Over the proceeding months, Vareli will directly compete with other pricier, more ambitious dining options in the neighborhood like Community Food and Juice and Le Monde. If, however, chef Mor refuses to focus his menu and tighten his execution, Vareli will give way to yet another vegetarian falafel chain. For the sake of Morningside Heights, chef Mor will have to eliminate the extraneous and make Vareli work.