NY Restaurants Returning
This past week, we went to two spots that have brought in older chefs with experience to take over the kitchen. The first is Babbo, where Mark Ladner, who was brilliant at Del Posto, worked for Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich—the days when restaurateurs and chefs were catapulted to fame. The other spot was Lex Yards, at the newly renovated Waldorf Astoria, where Michael Anthony, the original chef at Gramercy Tavern, spent twenty years.
Mario had a fall from grace, but he still lives on at Babbo. The rooms have not changed, and neither has the menu. Certainly, Ladner is the perfect choice to head the kitchen because he was around back in the day, but the food lacked that moment when flavors explode in your mouth, and your eyes pop out of your head because the dish is so spectacular.
What is wild is nothing has changed, even the cluster fuck when you check in remains the same. I can’t count the times we had dinner at Babbo, so returning was a strange, nostalgic feeling. I kept imagining David Lynch, the sommelier at Babbo, coming over to our table. Michael Glickman was always at the front checking in the patrons.
I do wonder about the deal that was made with Stephen Starr, who is now the proud owner of Babbo and an excellent restaurateur. Batali and Bastianich owned the building and sold it to Starr. Did they also make a deal to keep it the same, give them the recipes, and share the playlists? Will we ever know? I am not sure we are running back, but I would sit in those rooms or at the bar at any time of the day. It is a beautiful spot where, if you close your eyes, you can see the orange clogs peeking out of the kitchen.
As for the Waldorf Astoria, they brought in Michael Anthony. Granted, it is a hotel restaurant, and in Europe, hotel restaurants tend to have more cred than ones in NYC, but I was inspired to have a holiday dinner there after going for a drink this fall to see the hotel after reopening from a five year renovation this past summer.
The Lex Yard room is not that inspiring, considering it is the holiday season. I expected a lot more glitter. Who else still spends money on that? The entire experience from start to finish was insanely disappointing, and the food was a giant meh. The concept is to serve a fixed menu upstairs at Lex Yard, and if you want, you can also order from the bar menu downstairs. The bar menu is superior, though we finally got a few things off it, and they weren’t outstanding either. All in all, a huge disappointment.
As we see the rise of new spots with young, creative chefs, including the surge in cocktails, these old spots might be better off thinking outside the box rather than sticking to an old-school approach. Or perhaps, I am not the audience they are hoping to feed