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The grand restoration of the Waldorf-Astoria, a nearly decadelong undertaking that was completed earlier this year, has resulted in hundreds of plush rooms and nicely appointed residences. Far more important to me, though—and to anyone else unlikely to stay upstairs—are the hotel’s public spaces. The Waldorf-Astoria is built as much out of decorative marvels as it is of brick and rebar. There is Louis Rigal’s otherworldly “Wheel of Life” floor mosaic, eighteen feet in diameter, set into the floor of the lobby on Park Avenue and restored to a gleaming shine. There is the absurdly ornate Waldorf clock, originally commissioned by Queen Victoria, towering over the reopened Peacock Alley bar with all the self-possession of a socialite in a rococo Easter hat. There are the shimmering, silver-leafed balcony boxes that create a scalloped collar around the upper level of the grand ballroom in which anyone who was anyone once waltzed or sang or partied hard.
Like many of the grand hotels of its era, the Waldorf-Astoria was a gastronomic trend-maker. Its kitchens claim, somewhat contentiously, to have popularized lobster Newburg, red-velvet cake, and eggs Benedict. Its namesake Waldorf salad—a crisp mixture of apples and celery tossed in creamy mayonnaise, created in the late nineteenth century by Oscar Tschirky, the original maître d’hôtel—became a staple of innumerable luncheons, a pillar of countless Junior League cookbooks. By the time the Waldorf closed for the renovations, though, the restaurant situation had long capitulated to forgettable Midtown banality—a stock-market-themed steak house, really? The recent reopening provides the hotel an opportunity to make a fresh bid for culinary relevance. In addition to Peacock Alley, there are two new dining venues: a tiny kaiseki-esque restaurant called Yoshoku and the flagship, Lex Yard, an all-day restaurant occupying a large, dramatic two-story space with its own entrance off Lexington Avenue. (Hence the first part of the name; “Yard” refers to the train tracks running underneath.)
Cured sea trout with trout roe.
From the top: halibut, beef-fat fries, and roasted chicken.
Waldorf has brought in Michael Anthony, the longtime executive chef of Gramercy Tavern (where he remains), to create the menu. A hotel restaurant—especially a high-end one, especially a high-end one that wants to bring in diners beyond hotel guests—is a tough trick to pull off. The kitchen needs to turn out three meals a day that are creative enough to draw in finicky locals, anodyne enough to satisfy an international clientele, and sturdy enough to survive the room-service gauntlet. Anthony’s established way of cooking at Gramercy, with ever-changing seasonal elements and painstaking attention to detail, seemed to me incompatible with the higher-volume demands of a hotel kitchen—though, in one sense, Gramercy Tavern’s simplicity-perfected cuisine already is the ideal of hotel dining, minus the nuisances of a hotel, plus the exquisitely lavished attentions of a top-flight kitchen and world-class servers. Where do you even go from there?
In some ways, happily, Anthony hasn’t gone anywhere. The menu at Lex Yard is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, the selection attuned to the seasons in a way that feels real, not just like empty words in a server spiel. The offerings in August were abundant in tomatoes, peppers, stone fruits, and summer squashes. But, unlike the clarity of approach at Gramercy, where the star of a dish is given space to really shine, at Lex Yard there’s an awful lot of fussing over these low-fuss ingredients—preparations, as a whole, tended to be over-considered, overwrought, over-garnished. A peak-of-summer tomato salad was needlessly complexified with both a swoop of creamy cheese and a watery tomato broth, along with vinegar-soaked red cherries whose thunderous tartness outcompeted all of the tomatoes’ vibrance. Green beans, snappy and garden-fresh, were an ingenious pairing for fluke in a tartare, but their subtle sweetness was nearly imperceptible against an onslaught of seemingly random garnishes: pelagic bits of nori, toasty sesame seeds, fuzzy bits of flowering oregano, some kind of bright-green herb oil, a citrusy broth, and, for some reason, halved cherry tomatoes.
The halibut swims in a magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot.
This maximalism, in one form or another, seems to be the hallmark of every dish at Lex Yard, sometimes to the point of absurdity. A lobster roll, already inherently precious, becomes a pile of rich-person nonsense with the addition of caviar—two types, inky, pricey baerii sturgeon, and orange, relatively inexpensive trout roe—as well as shreds of grated black truffle. (And such small portions! The sandwich is appetizer-petite.) I began to suspect that this more-is-more approach was Anthony’s way of differentiating his Waldorf menu from Gramercy Tavern’s, but the Lex Yard dishes that I loved most were also, notably, the most Gramercy-like. A carrot-coconut soup, soft as sunshine and gently sweet, poured tableside over ribbonlike curls of carrot and turnip, shaved to translucent thinness, made me sigh with pleasure. A plump fillet of halibut, pan-roasted in olive oil until tender and satiny, was a brilliant shock of white in an elegant magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot. There was a hint of fall in both of those dishes, and I wonder if Lex Yard might become a stronger restaurant once cooler temperatures set in and Anthony can outfit his greenmarket hauls with more texture and heft. One of the best dishes on the current menu makes about as much sense in the swelter of summer as fur-lined boots on the beach in Tulum: a portion of tagliatelle sensuously draped in mushroom-infused cream, with batons of bacon and oodles of cracked black pepper. Come November, however, it just might end up being one of the most talked-about pastas in town.
Despite the restaurant’s flaws, you will have a perfectly pleasant time if you find yourself at Lex Yard for a meal. Service is attentive and warm. The drinks (created by Jeff Bell, of the downtown cocktail bar PDT) are note-perfect. The desserts are as over-accessorized as the savory side of the menu but wear their complexity well, especially in a creamy chocolate budino (vegan, it turns out) topped with a crackly tuile, a tumble of crushed nuts, and, to hell with it, a few wisps of gold leaf. Moreover, I’d outright recommend the restaurant for breakfast, if you have to eat your morning meal in that particular stretch of Manhattan. There are silken omelettes, a nicely over-the-top “bagel service for two,” and a fruit plate that’s quite lovely, even if it is, inexplicably, dusted with bee pollen. The eggs Benedict, zhuzhed up with jammy leeks, are a welcome nod to the hotel’s history, and perhaps a better past-honoring choice than the Walford salad—a layered composition incorporating grapes, walnuts, and a generous portion of sharp, creamy white cheddar cheese—which, for all Anthony’s chefly ministrations, does not manage to meaningfully transcend its fundamental apples-with-mayonnaise bizarreness.
The restaurant’s AvroKO-designed interiors go for Art Deco-inflected glamour.
Helen, Help Me!
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If you enter Lex Yard directly, from Lexington Avenue, you’ll feel embraced by the Art Deco-inflected glamour of the restaurant’s AvroKO-designed interiors: jewel tones in the street-level barroom, muted neutrals in the dining-only space upstairs. But if you happen to step into the building via Park Avenue—past the murals, the mosaics, the famous lobbies as beautiful and grand as ever they’ve been—the restaurant’s geometric color-blocking might feel a bit anticlimactic, or blandly, placelessly contemporary. This, more than anything, is the most hotel-like thing about Lex Yard: it’s driven by function rather than artistry. It’s for the senior manager who needs to impress a client without having to navigate the power-lunch thunderdomes of the Grill or Four Twenty Five; for out-of-town parents to host their adult children for dinner without having to cross any bridges or shout to be heard; for the jet-lagged jet-setter who just wants to order in a nicely cooked meal without thinking too hard. The burger is good, not great. If I were staying upstairs, I might get Shake Shack delivered instead. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
