Happy NYC Anniversary to Me!

I’ve celebrated by checking out some iconic restaurants I’ve always wanted to visit and somehow never made it to—until now.

A cosmopolitan at La Grenouille

I recently reached a significant anniversary of my time in New York City.

As seems to be true for anyone interested in restaurants and dining, I’ve maintained, ever since I moved here, a running mental list of iconic restaurants to check out.

I was lucky enough to check off a few of them soon after my arrival in the city, and many of those have remained favorites, which I revisit as often as I’m possibly able. (They include Gramercy Tavern and Le Bernardin.)

Some, I’m happy to have experienced, but am just as happy to leave in my personal past (Per Se, Eleven Madison Park, Babbo) or the city’s actual past (21 Club, The Four Seasons). Others (Balthazar, Katz’s), I’ll simply leave to the tourists.

But with a limited (which is to say, student’s and then editor’s) budget, there were always plenty of restaurants I hoped to visit someday but somehow never seemed to get around to. Why not? Well, there were always newer, hotter places demanding my attention, especially once my budget expanded, since along with that development also came a professional expectation to keep up with the newest, hottest places. Which meant I neglected the old stalwarts lingering on my list.

Until the past 12 months, that is. Somehow, by coincidence or vastly subconscious intent, I finally resumed checking off restaurants that had been on my list from the beginning. For one, it was due to the threat of imminent closure. For another, an unexpected reopening. For still others, something else brought me to the restaurant’s specific area and, well, why not stop in while I’m there?

I’m sure other iconic restaurants I’ve been meaning to visit will continue to come to mind—it’s a mental list, after all, not one I keep written down anywhere, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some important places—but these are my thoughts on some of the New York classics I’ve finally visited in the past year.

Perhaps this will inspire you to go as well, or to keep cracking away at your own list.

The Baked Alaska at Delmonico’s

Delmonico’s

I never made it to the previous, pre-pandemic incarnation of this famed restaurant, an omission I bitterly regretted when it closed during the pandemic and remained closed for several years. But when I heard last autumn that it was reopening, apparently under different-but-somehow-related ownership, I jumped right on its reservations the moment they went live and ended up dining during the restaurant’s soft-reopening phase.

It was a very strange experience. The lighting was turned up disconcertingly bright. The service was well-intentioned but amateurish. My fellow diners clearly were all tourists, dressed either in old-prom-dress black tie or in mildly offensive graphic t-shirts and backwards baseball caps, and who, I presume, were all sent there by their hotels’ concierges. The cocktails were unbalanced and overdiluted; after one round we switched to wine.

And yet the food was undeniably great.

Delmonico’s is said to have contributed a number of dishes to the culinary canon, all of them created far earlier in the restaurant’s nearly 200-year history: eggs Benedict, the wedge salad, chicken a la Keene, lobster Newburg, and baked Alaska among them, and many of these dishes have returned to the current menu. We ordered as many as we could (which is to say, the last four dishes named here), plus a few newer creations and some sides.

Given the service foibles and generally bizarre atmosphere, I’d been expecting lackluster food as well. But it was all, somewhat shockingly, delicious. The textures, the sauces, the very Frenchness: all excellent.  

I’m curious, if not quite eager, to return now that the restaurant has presumably settled into its groove.

I wish I could have experienced the restaurant’s pre-pandemic incarnation. But if on a return visit I find that the other aspects of the dining experience have improved to match the quality of the food, I’ll continue returning frequently enough to make up for lost time.

La Grenouille

The final vestige of the half-dozen classic French restaurants that defined elegant dining in New York City from the 1960s onward, this restaurant closed for several months last winter and was rumored to have shuttered for good before it reopened in early spring.

Its past decade or two hadn’t been particularly terrific, either. Reviews were constantly mixed, with reports fluctuating every year or two between great and terrible, depending on who was helming the kitchen, where turnover seemed rapid.

But there are some things that remained consistent over the decades. Not least its clientele: During our visit, most of our fellow diners—titans-of-industry types and their wives—were a good 30 years older than us. And its staff: Our Hermes-tie-clad dining captain was far past retirement age, and I presume he spent his entire career there; the bartender proudly announced he’d been bartending for 40 years, most of them behind that same bar.

Oh, that bartender. We started off with a round of cocktails, a French 75 and a cosmopolitan. The cosmo arrived in a swimming pool-sized glass; the French 75 was…oddly clear. I asked the bartender about it after the meal (“You simply must tell me how you make it!”) and he replied “I put about an inch of gin in it and fill the rest of the glass up with Champagne. Some people put a little lemon juice in there, but that just ruins it.”

We switched to wine.

Which was an interaction that epitomizes the dining experience at La Grenouille. We told our captain we’d like to switch to wine by the glass. He asked what we’d like. “A lighter red, please, perhaps a Burgundy,” I said. No list was offered, no details discussed; the glass materialized in front of me a moment later. If you would like to retain control of any aspect of your dining experience—price, say, or provenance or other details—it’s better that you dine elsewhere. To be at La Grenouille is to place yourself in the captain’s hands and trust he’ll serve you well.

And oh, those prices. The baseline isn’t cheap—$165 for three courses—with upcharges for certain dishes. And those dishes (the Dover sole and the restaurant’s famed souffle among them) are the ones you’ll want. I don’t believe I’ve had better Dover sole anywhere. And there was no end to the souffle possibilities—I stopped the server about 8 flavors into his recitation, and it seemed he was just getting started; we got Grand Marnier, and I wish I could have tried them all.

The entire place is one big anachronism composed of a million smaller anachronisms, many of them barely functioning but charming nonetheless. (Take, for instance, the beautiful table lamps with cords running across the table and plugging in behind my feet, which unplugged each time I shifted slightly.) I loved the weirdly old-school service. I loved the time-machine-to, well, perhaps not the 1960s but certainly the ’80s, preserved-in-plaster-ness of it all. The restaurant’s glory has faded, certainly, but as with the tastefully face-lifted wives of its longtime patrons, its classic beauty is still evident.

I was actually glad I had postponed my visit until this point in my NYC tenure, not least because I apparently visited during an upswing of the food-quality pendulum. I had also finally assembled a wardrobe that got me led to a good table rather than shuttled to the infamous “Siberia” (yes, apparently this restaurant was the originator of that term as applied to restaurants) in the back half of the room. I had hoped to return, and had assumed I would, although the prices placed the restaurant firmly into the “special occasion” category for me.

I was devastated to learn, therefore, a few weeks ago, that it was abruptly shuttering—for good this time, its owner says. Perhaps it will stage yet another surprise reopening. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

The Odeon

I was in the area for a performance—a reimagining of Cats the musical as a drag ball—and in a continuation of the evening’s 1980s theme, I figured it was a great time to finally visit this bastion of ‘80s New York dining and socializing. (I confess I’ve never read Bright Lights, Big City, but from what I understand, the restaurant is the physical embodiment of the finance-bro-doing-lines-in-the-bathroom life.)

The room is grand, in both a French brasserie style and an ’80s over-the-top-is-just-enough sort of way. The people-watching, early on a Saturday evening, allowed for the sorts of guessing games that were (I’m told) also a highlight of dining in the ’80s: “Famous, or just looks like it?” and “Niece or ‘niece’?”

We went for salads and two different burger iterations, which felt ’80s appropriate. The fries could’ve been crispier, but everything else was great. (The wasabi mayo that came with the yellowfin tuna burger should be a more-ubiquitous condiment.) The ice cream sundaes for which the restaurant is apparently renowned are a worthwhile dietary splurge; go whole hog with banana slices and hot fudge.

And the cocktails were actually great. We unintentionally copied our order from La Grenouille to start: a French 75 and a cosmopolitan (it’s supposedly the birthplace of the cosmo, after all), and both were up to modern cocktail standards; we went for house cocktails for our second round, and those were great as well.

The highlight was actually our server, perfectly polite and efficient but kind of “over it” in a diner-waitress sort of way. (“I had them remove the peppers from your burger just to be safe, so I sauced y’all up instead,” she said, depositing a half-dozen ramekins onto our table.)

Would I return? Absolutely. I rarely find myself in Tribeca these days, but the Odeon will be close to the top of my list whenever I am.

Keens

I’d had a fairly good reason for not having visited Keens previously: It’s a steakhouse, and I don’t eat beef (with the exception of my usual once-a-year burger, always a game of gastrointestinal Russian roulette). But it’s a favorite spot of so many people whose tastes I respect that I finally stopped in for a meal. 

I skipped the dark dining room(s) for a seat at the bar. It’s the type of place where there’s no cocktail menu, but as long as you stick to the classics and keep your expectations low, the bartenders can deliver approximately what you want. (They’ll also plop a neon-red cherry into your old fashioned whether you request it or not.) The drinks are also enormous, which means that once you’ve downed your first martini and are onto your second cocktail, it no longer matters whether it was made with precision.

Does the bar’s dark wood have a special glow, and the room an unusual cosiness, or was it the soul-warming effects of the martini? Was it particularly hilarious that the post-work bros at the other end of the bar were loudly cheering at the game of golf on the TV, or did the massive drinks fuel my mirth as well as theirs? Was the burger truly epic, or would just about any burger seem that way after this many ounces of martini? (I’ll confess it was not the best burger I’ve had this year, a year in which I’m making up for all the annual burgers I hadn’t consumed since 2019, but my year has also included burgers from 4 Charles and the Polo Bar, so the bar is high.) The crab salad I started with, early enough into my first martini that I remember it fairly clearly, was fairly impressive. The carrot cake I ended with (when was the last time you saw that on a dessert menu?) was not something I’m sure I’d order again.

Would I return? It’s one of the best options in an otherwise-hellish section of Midtown, so yes. I’ll be sticking to just one martini, though.