Claudette Herring and Lauren Phillips at their Broad Street restaurant last September. (Photo by Jim Willis. Click to enlarge)

A food critic at the New York Times gave Red Bank’s Via45 a laudatory review in Sunday’s edition.

En route to a “very good” rating, reviewer David Kocieniewski highlights Via45’s commitment to the slow-food movement and ponders the “audacious” inclusion of watermelon in a late-winter salad.

From the review:

Via45 is a proponent of the slow-food movement, which advocates using regional produce whenever possible. In winter, when the routine at many farm-to-table restaurants involves a FedEx delivery between farm and table, it can be a risky proposition.

But one bite of that watermelon — served in a salad of feta, mint, red onion and white balsamic vinaigrette — proved it was a gamble that paid off. Summer-breeze sweetness. Unlike so many off-season melons, it tasted like a mid-August watermelon rather than a cucumber or a Jolly Rancher candy. (The owners would not disclose their sources for produce.)

Kocieniewski called the service “warm and attentive.”