The Boathouse Restaurant East 72nd St. & Park Drive North
(within Central Park, west of the Metropolitan Museum)
212.517.2233
Mon thru Fri: Lunch noon-4:00p; Dinner (Apr-Nov) 5:30-9:30 (last seating)
Sat and Sun: Brunch 9:30a-4:00p; Dinner (Apr-Nov) 6:00p-9:30 (last seating)
Located at the northeastern tip of the Lake, the Loeb Boathouse houses the Boathouse Restaurant, a famous icon of Central Park. Overlooking the lake, it is a charming place to have lunch on a pleasant afternoon (or dinner April through November). Many diners prefer the deck, where they can watch the rowboats and occasional gondola drift by.
Year-round, a complimentary trolley picks up patrons from a stop at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street and drops them off directly at the boathouse (between Nov. 4 and Apr. 14, the trolley runs only Sat., Sun., and holidays). Weekdays from 3pm to 7pm (when vehicles are permitted in the park) patrons can use the restaurant parking lot. At all other times, diners may use the Metropolitan Museum garage at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue and taking the free Boathouse Trolley to and from the restaurant. The garage is open 24 hours.
Note: Vehicles are permitted in Central Park only Monday through Friday from 7-10am and from 3-7pm. Whether by car or by foot, enter the park at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street and follow the traffic road to the right. It is a very pleasant walk to the restaurant and takes approximately 5-6 minutes.
Gemma Restaurant 212-505-9100; breakfast, lunch and dinner 335 Bowery at E. 3rd Street (the Bowery Hotel)
The best thing about this over-the-top trattoria is the decor. The worst thing is that you can’t make a reservation unless you’re a hotel guest. It’s noisy, packed with trendies and serves great pizza and roast chicken (be sure to order the zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta). And not too expensive. Check out the adjacent hotel lobby, described by a fellow blogger as "the phantom of the opera retires to a Tuscan villa." With a grain of salt, indeed.
The Breslin, inside the Ace Hotel, is a veritable pork festival.
Corner of Broadway & 29th Street 212-685-9600; reservations not accepted 100-seat restaurant serves breakfast (from 7:00a), lunch and dinner (until midnight); closed 4:00-5:30 pm daily Bar (seats 40 or so) open until 4 a.m. daily www.thebreslin.com
This is the place to go if you weigh about a hundred pounds and just can’t seem to gain weight. Cure guaranteed. From the same folks who brought us the famed and trend-setting Spotted Pig, the Breslin, named after the hotel that occupied this location for many years, is an extravagant gastro-pub that opened last December. The menu is a paean to pork (vegetarians will run screaming), but the hottest item seems to be the lamb burger with feta cheese and red onions, served on a cutting board with a side of thrice-fried french fries (chips, as listed on the very Brit menu) and cumin mayo.
Housed in a 12-story corner building (c. 1904), the restaurant echoes a British pub, with tavern green walls, dark tufted leather banquettes and unfinished wood floors. Coveted booths sport plaid curtains and red cubbies to charge phones and computers. Those who need a touch more privacy can close the curtains and press a button to request a server (a light goes on outside your booth to signal the wait staff). How cool is that?
From the bar, try a “pickle back” – a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser. I swear I’m not making this up. If the weather is truly frightful, try the egg nog with rum on the bottom, calories be damned. A popular main dish? Pig’s foot for two. Bar snacks? Semi-shelled boiled peanuts fried in pork fat. I swear to God.
Tip: Come VERY early if you don’t want to wait hours and hours for a table. This place is beyond hip and so full of buzz you’ll need insect repellent.
Direct from Portland, and also off the lobby of the Ace Hotel, is the east coast’s only Stumptown Coffee. Check out the hats on the servers and admire the street-facing floor to ceiling windows trimmed in black lattice. Is this place handsome, or what? Doesn’t hurt that they roast their own beans in Brooklyn. As if you needed added enticement to come to the corner of Broadway and 29th Street, the popular lobby of the Ace Hotel, stuffed with leather Chesterfields and tartan plaid wing chairs, is a destination in and of itself. At last midtown is waking up from its decades-old doldrums.
On May 8, Danny Kane and Rod Surut reopened one of the city’s storied and ultra-lavish spaces, the former luxury dining spot known as the Biltmore Room (the marble walls alone have been valued at $2.4 million). The venue is a super luxury restaurant/bar/lounge, called The Gates.
The marble and bronze interior was transported from the former Biltmore Hotel’s location adjacent to Grand Central Terminal to a townhouse in Chelsea (prior to the Biltmore Room restaurant, it served as a gay male club known as Rome, with staff dressed as centurions, so let’s hope the third time’s the charm!).
The hotel's iron gates and ornate, mirrored bronze door doubled as the grand entrance to the luxurious and chic Biltmore Room restaurant, which opened in 2003 with a month-long waiting list for reservations to sample the Asian fusion cuisine. In mid-2006 the restaurant closed when owner-chef Gary Robins decamped for the uptown Russian Tearoom next to Carnegie Hall.
Still intact, however, are the exquisite bronze detailing, marble floors and a ceiling glittering with crystal teardrop chandeliers. Separated from the more cavernous dining room/lounge by a pair of bronze French doors, the front bar feels intimate and inviting. Another carry-over is the former dumb-waiter that was retrofitted as a booth for cell phone calls – for those times when conversations must remain private.
Cross your fingers and stay tuned.
A corner of the restaurant/lounge shows the many types of marble used in the midtown Biltmore Hotel construction.
The New York Biltmore Hotel (1913-1981, nearly 1,000 rooms) was a landmark luxury hotel designed by the architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore, who also designed the adjoining Grand Central Terminal. Both buildings opened on the same day, February 2, 1913. The hotel was located between 43rd and 44th Streets from Vanderbilt Ave. to Madison Ave., and was one of several hotels built as part of the Terminal City project, a vast complex that included the train station, hotels, a post office and many commercial office buildings, all designed by Warren and Wetmore. The other hotels were the Commodore (now the Grand Hyatt New York) and the Roosevelt (still in operation).
Warren was a cousin of the Vanderbilts, owners of the New York Central Railway and builders of Grand Central Terminal. Warren’s partner, Charles Wetmore, was a lawyer by training. Their society connections led to commissions for clubs, private estates, hotels and terminal buildings, including the New York Central office building (now known as the Helmsley Building), The New York Yacht Club, the Chelsea docks and the Ritz-Carlton, Biltmore, Commodore, and Ambassador Hotels. The legendary Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, is their work, as well.
Unfortunately, the landmark Biltmore Hotel building was gutted in 1981, and The Bank of America Plaza Building, at 335 Madison Avenue, was built from the hotel's steel skeleton. The owner asked in extreme haste, before the Landmarks Preservation Commission could take action to stop him. With no warning the hotel shut its doors on August 14, 1981, and teams of demolition workers arrived the next day. Even so, the owner/developer established a $500,000 scholarship for the Landmarks Commission, chiefly to stave off any further action against him. The bank’s offices, which opened in 1984, still retain the hotel's piano and famous lobby clock. During that time a collector purchased the hotel’s lavish marble and bronze lobby fixtures and reinstalled them in a Chelsea residence, which later housed a restaurant called The Biltmore Room (2003-2006) and now operates as a restaurant/lounge called The Gates (290 Eighth Ave. between 24th and 25th Sts.; 212-206-8646).
For decades the Biltmore Hotel appealed to lovers. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald honeymooned there so boisterously that they were asked to leave, and the Biltmore’s solid bronze clock was a popular meeting place for amorous couples. Fitzgerald wrote a short story titled “Myra Meets His Family,” which is set at the Biltmore. An American Playhouse TV production of this story, which aired in 1986 on PBS, was called “Under the Biltmore Clock.”
The railroad arrival room under the hotel was called the kissing room, and was the meeting place of many couples who then would proceed to the Biltmore Palm Court for lunch or a drink. On the nineteenth floor the Biltmore had a restaurant with a hand-cranked sliding roof called “The Cascades,” which allowed diners the opportunity to gaze at the stars while having dinner. The circa 1920 advertisement below illustrates the placement of the live orchestra and tango dancers on the floor of the rooftop "Cascades" venue:
An innovation at the time it was built, the hotel was designed in an “H” shape, thus giving every one of its 900+ rooms an outside exposure. As well, The Biltmore boasted one of the first hotel indoor swimming pools and saunas. The Italian Garden between the Biltmore East and West Towers was an open air escape in the summer and served as an ice skating rink in winter. In the 1920s and early 1930s it had its own resident orchestra.
In J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” when Holden Caulfield showed up in the Biltmore lobby for a date, he was struck by the crowd of young women. “I was way early when I got there,” he recounted, “so I just sat down on one of those leather couches right near the clock in the lobby and watched the girls. A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls.”
Trivia:
Located immediately west of Grand Central, the Biltmore Hotel had a convenient direct elevator and stairway to the terminal.
In 1970 feminists demonstrated to "liberate" the men's bar at New York's Biltmore Hotel. On August 10 Mayor John Lindsay signed a bill prohibiting sexual discrimination in public places.
Bert Lown’s orchestra enjoyed a long booking at the hotel. In this YouTube video his band performs “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” The accompanying slide show includes several interior and exterior images of the New York Biltmore Hotel. In a glaring error, however, the photograph of the lobby is actually an interior of the Los Angeles Millennium Biltmore, not the New York Biltmore.
Café des Artistes
1 West 67th Street; 212-877-3500
Open seven days a week, lunch 11 to 3 pm and dinner 5 to 11pm.
$35 three-course prix-fixe dinner offered year round.
Business casual attire (jackets not required for men).
This legendary café, built in 1917, has been a long-time New York favorite, lauded over the years as enchanting, romantic, and transforming. It invokes old world elegance, in part attributable to the famous 1934 murals of female nudes frolicking in the woods and a location in a prewar hotel just off Central Park. This gothic building was created to house artists' studios, and luminaries such as Noel Coward, Norman Rockwell, Isadora Duncan, and Gary Oldman have all resided here. The café functioned as a dining room and kitchen for residents.
The six murals are the work of Howard Chandler Christy, an illustrator and portrait painter who was a resident of the hotel in which the café was housed. His fame spanned the entire first half of the twentieth century. The Café celebrates the murals with cocktails named after them. Two are "The Fountain of Youth" (Poire William scented champagne with spiced pear) and "Swing Girl" (Corazón Tequila, orange liquor and pineapple juice).
The restaurant caters to a mature clientele in a location convenient to Lincoln Center.
Keens Chop House (est. 1885) 72 W. 36th St. (between 5th & 6th Aves.) 212.947.3636 Open daily except Christmas. M-F 11:45a-10:30p; Sat 5:00p-10:30p; Sun 5:00p-9:00p http://www.keens.com/
Not much has changed at Keens since it opened in 1885, except the name change from "Chop House" to "Steakhouse" in 1995. Nevertheless, to satisfy the traditionalists, they kept the "Chop House" sign intact. Keens is the antithesis of most New York City restaurants. It's a dark, low-ceiling place near Herald Square, Madison Square Garden and Penn Station that serves artery-clogging meats with abandon. Their signature "mutton chop" (actually saddle of lamb) keeps cardiologists in business, yet Keens has remained a runaway success for generations.
The menu touts the Mutton Chop as a specialty – but it’s a ruse. That was all in the past. Since not long after the end of WWII Keens has served lamb chops, not mutton, in spite of what the menu says. The lamb comes from an animal 10 months old, which is older that most lamb served in restaurants, but not old enough to be called mutton. The restaurant does serve a cut that resembles mutton on the plate (you’ll understand why side whiskers are called “mutton chops” at first glance). Stick with the aged beef and lamb dishes (the lunch menu fried chicken salad being an exception), and apple crisp (other desserts are blah). Instead of dessert, however, why not enjoy a flight of single malt scotches (200 varieties on offer) at the end of the meal?
Today, Keens is the only survivor of the once-famous Herald Square Theatre District. In an age which tears down so much of the past, it is comforting to find one landmark that continues.
Yet Keens is known for more than its food. They own the largest collection of churchwarden clay pipes in the world. Keens displays thousands of these pipes on the ceilings of their dining rooms, which ramble over two floors of three connecting town houses. The tradition of checking one’s pipe at an inn had its origins in 17th century England where travelers kept their clay at their favorite inn – the thin stemmed pipe being too fragile to be carried in purse or saddlebag. Pipe smoking was known since Elizabethan times to be beneficial for dissipating “evil humours of the brain.”
The Keens pipe tradition began in the early 20th century. The hard clay churchwarden pipes were brought from the Netherlands, and as many as 50,000 were ordered every three years. A staff pipe warden registered and stored the pipes, while pipe boys returned the pipes from storage to the patrons. The membership roster of the Pipe Club contained over ninety thousand names, including those of Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Billy Rose, Grace Moore, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, General Douglas MacArthur and “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Today, most of these pipes are displayed on the ceiling (click on the photo below).
A Keens specialty: a flight of after-dinner scotches.
Tips: 1. The prices are gentler in the pub, where a more casual menu offers sandwiches, burgers and salads. 2. The clubby, masculine bar is not to be missed (first photo of this post). 3. The Bullmoose Room is considerably quieter than the noisy Lambs Room.
Restaurant of the French Culinary Institute 462 Broadway (at Grand St. – SoHo); 212.219.3300 Lunch Mon-Fri 12:30-2:00, Dinner Mon-Sat 5:30-9:00 A la carte dining available only at lunch. Reservations required. www.frenchculinary.com/lecole.htm
Bargain gourmet meals are prepared by advanced students of the Institute. The prix fixe menu changes every six-eight weeks.
Sea bass with shrimp
Frozen lemon mousse
$42: 5-course Prix Fixe (dinner) appetizer, fish course, meat course, salad, dessert.
$28: 3-course Prix Fixe (lunch) appetizer, entrée, dessert.
Wine pairings are bargain priced, as well.
Before dinner service at L'Ecole, a culinary Chef-Instructor meets with his students before their kitchen shift begins. Students of Classic Culinary Arts and Classic Pastry Arts get real-world experience cooking in a restaurant for paying customers. Recently L'Ecole received a 25 score for food from Zagat, the same rating as the acclaimed NYC restaurant, Le Cirque.
The Red Cat 227 Tenth Ave. (between 23rd & 24th Sts.) 212-242-1122 (dinner from 5:30 pm) http://www.theredcat.com
The Red Cat purrs with informal bonhomie and good, unpretentious food. Its interior is clad in rescued wood from a falling-down barn, and butcher paper covers the tabletops. A casual crowd fills the restaurant to capacity early on; the bar also accommodates diners. Good-natured waiters proudly trot out owner Jimmy Bradley's flavorful dishes. Tempura green beans go great with drinks. Mushroom and chicory is paired with bacon and egg, and crispy fried oysters accompany truffle creamed baby spinach. Several vegetable appetizers get a cheese counterpoint and well-battered sweetbread schnitzel even comes with spätzle. The kitchen may not be flashy, but it isn't timid about intriguing flavor combinations. Paprika-roasted cod, for instance, sharing a plate with spicy escarole and anchovy-almond sauce, is another prime example of the slightly edgy yet still familiar dishes on offer here.
La Boîte en Bois
212.874.2705 75 West 68th Street (just east of Columbus Ave.) www.laboitenyc.com Prix-fixe pre-theatre menu from 5 pm (starter – main – dessert); or à la carte
Tables are at a premium in this snug 45-seat step-down bistro, decorated to resemble a French country inn. The dark wooden ceiling beams, walls textured with horizontal strips of straw-like material, and antique prints and implements provide a calming effect on often rushed pre-theatre diners (Lincoln Center is in the immediate vicinity). Brick and barn-board, antique farm tools and copper pieces convey a rustic look (the name means “wooden box”), and simple, uncontrived dishes are the substance of the menu. Chef Gino Barbuti hails from Parma, Italy, so expect French Mediterranean cuisine incorporating black olives, anchovies and olive oil. Reservations are a must - if a table is available, this is always my first choice for a pre-theatre meal for performances at Lincoln Center. Check web site for Prix-fixe pre-theatre menu. www.laboitenyc.com
Café Sabarsky (inside Neue Galerie) 1048 5th Ave., corner of 86th St. Mon/Wed 9-6; Thu/Fri/Sat/Sun 9-9; closed Tue
The Café, which bears the name of Neue Galerie co-founder Serge Sabarsky, draws its inspiration from the great Viennese cafés that served as important centers of intellectual and artistic life at the turn of the twentieth century. It is outfitted with period objects, including lighting fixtures by Josef Hoffmann, furniture by Adolf Loos, and banquettes that are upholstered with a 1912 Otto Wagner fabric. A grand piano, which graces one corner of the Café, is used for cabaret, chamber, and classical music performances.
It’s the real deal, where patrons down Stiegl beer (from Salzburg) while perusing the pages of Die Presse and Der Standard. Others tackle a slice of Sachertorte with a melange on the side (all coffee orders are served authentically with a beaker of water). Heartier appetites are satisfied by goulash and spätzle.
Photo: Sachertorte mit Schlag The building that houses the Neue Galerie museum and Café Sabarsky was completed in 1914 by Carrère & Hastings, also architects of the New York Public Library. It has been designated a landmark by the New York Landmarks Commission and is generally considered one of the most distinguished buildings ever erected on Fifth Avenue. Commissioned by industrialist William Starr Miller, it was later occupied by society doyenne Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III (Grace Graham Wilson). The family of Cornelius Vanderbilt III (universally known as Neily) was so against their marriage, that his father punished him with a paltry $500,000 inheritance, which his brother helped rectify by tossing in another $6 million after their father's death in 1899. This mansion was so much smaller than Grace and Neily's former mid-town 5th Avenue residence (77 rooms at 640 Fifth Ave., since demolished), that Grace referred to it as "the gardener's cottage." She lived in this "cottage" until her death in 1953. It was later purchased by Ronald S. Lauder (son of Estée Lauder) and Serge Sabarsky in 1994.
The glory of the museum’s collection of Austrian and German fine and decorative arts is Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) oil, silver and gold on canvas. In 2006, Lauder purchased Klimt's painting from Maria Altmann on behalf of the Neue Galerie for $135 million, at the time the most expensive painting ever sold. It has been on display at the museum since July 2006. The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist’s masterpieces. For years, it was the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer, who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis during World War II. In January, 2006, all five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, then 90, who was living in Los Angeles at the time.
Neue Galerie – 212.628.6200 Hours: 11-6; Fridays until 9; Closed Tue/Wed Museum admission: $15 incl. audio guide (students and seniors $10)
In the drawing room of her Fifth Ave. mansion at 52nd St., Grace (Mrs. Cornelius) Vanderbilt entertained en masse while her estranged husband sailed the world on his yacht; one year she hosted 30,000 guests. By the 1940s, however, the big house at 640 5th Ave. was sold, and Mrs. Vanderbilt moved to what she referred to as “the gardener’s cottage,” a 28-room mansion at 1048 Fifth at 86th Street (now the Neue Galerie/Café Sabarsky). With a staff of 18, she continued to entertain in large numbers until her death in 1953. Interesting and attractive men were, in her opinion, the key to a successful party. She kept a list of 138 eligible men broken up into categories like: “men who will dance,” “men who can lunch,” and “men who will go to the theatre but not the opera.”
Photo below: The Vanderbilt mansion photographed back in its heyday, when it served as the residence of William Starr Miller, years before Mrs. Vanderbilt lived here. The house was sold subsequently sold to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which completed important studies on the Yiddish language. Cash strapped, this organization sold the air rights above the mansion to the Adams Hotel next door on 86th Street, which was being redeveloped as a residential property, assuring some of the future owners an unobstructed view of Central Park. Ron Lauder and Serge Sabarsky bought the building in 1994.
Below: An archive photo of the room facing Fifth Avenue that now serves as the Café Sabarsky. Note the card catalog on the rear wall to the right of the fireplace and the library tables, a clear indication of the research that went on here during its days as home to the YIVO Institute.
Seppi’s Restaurant (near Carnegie Hall) 123 W. 56th Street (between 6th & 7th Aves.) 212.708.7444; open daily until 2 a.m. www.seppisny.com $36 three-course pre-theatre menu 5-7 pm $25 Sunday brunch from 10:30 am, incl. all-you-can-eat chocolate dessert buffet. Frequented by Carnegie Hall performers. Bar can get noisy. Clarinetist Rick Bogart and his trio (piano, bass) perform swing style sets from 8:30 pm; Sundays noon to 3 pm.
