Alex Ureña turned his cutting-edge Spanish restaurant into the simpler Pamplona, which looks much the same. But don’t for a minute think there’s anything dumbed down about his superb food.
At Anthos in midtown, Michael Psilakis has raised Greek cooking to haute cuisine, and at Ilili, a vast new wood-paneled restaurant in the Flatiron district, Philippe Massoud is achieving similar feats with Lebanese.
Sam Mason’s Tailor in Tribeca is weird but fun (duck with eel in chocolate consommé, anyone?), with odd cocktails such as the Bazooka, a bubble-gum-flavored vodka martini. The Monday Room, a hidden annex behind the hostess’ desk at Public in Nolita, feels like a Victorian gentlemen’s club and serves light dishes and a tasting menu with wine pairings that aren’t excessively marked up.
A sleepy section of the West Village was transformed with the invasion of Morandi, Cafe Cluny and The Waverly Inn. Morandi is not a great space like Balthazar (where this year I had some wonderful meals), but Jody Williams’ Italian food can be very good. The nearby bistro Cluny is noisy, but it’s pleasant to eat at the wide marble bar. It’s the place to go if you get fed up waiting for a table at the Waverly, Graydon Carter’s semiprivate club, where the food is not at all bad, although the mac and cheese (with black truffles) will set you back $55. But of course, that’s not what you go for, is it? Not unless you are the sort of person who would pay, say, $45 for a pint of water.
Speaking of expensive, Alain Ducasse is back: He’ll be opening at the St. Regis Hotel at the end of the month. Perhaps the New York press will be kinder to him this time around. Remember the outraged headlines in The New York Post about the $500 dinner? That sounds almost like a bargain now.
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