Waldorf has introduced in Michael Anthony, the longtime govt chef of Gramercy Tavern (the place he stays), to create the menu. A lodge restaurant—particularly a high-end one, particularly a high-end one that wishes to herald diners past lodge friends—is a tricky trick to tug off. The kitchen must end up three meals a day which can be inventive sufficient to attract in finicky locals, anodyne sufficient to fulfill a global clientele, and durable sufficient to outlive the room-service gauntlet. Anthony’s established method of cooking at Gramercy, with ever-changing seasonal components and painstaking consideration to element, appeared to me incompatible with the higher-volume calls for of a lodge kitchen—although, in a single sense, Gramercy Tavern’s simplicity-perfected delicacies already is the best of lodge eating, minus the nuisances of a lodge, plus the exquisitely lavished attentions of a top-flight kitchen and world-class servers. The place do you even go from there?
In some methods, fortunately, Anthony hasn’t gone anyplace. The menu at Lex Yard is a cornucopia of vegatables and fruits, the choice attuned to the seasons in a method that feels actual, not similar to empty phrases in a server spiel. The choices in August have been considerable in tomatoes, peppers, stone fruits, and summer season squashes. However, in contrast to the readability of strategy at Gramercy, the place the star of a dish is given area to actually shine, at Lex Yard there’s an terrible lot of fussing over these low-fuss substances—preparations, as a complete, tended to be over-considered, overwrought, over-garnished. A peak-of-summer tomato salad was needlessly complexified with each a swoop of creamy cheese and a watery tomato broth, together with vinegar-soaked crimson cherries whose thunderous tartness outcompeted all the tomatoes’ vibrance. Inexperienced beans, snappy and garden-fresh, have been an ingenious pairing for fluke in a tartare, however their refined sweetness was practically imperceptible in opposition to an onslaught of seemingly random garnishes: pelagic bits of nori, toasty sesame seeds, fuzzy bits of flowering oregano, some form of bright-green herb oil, a citrusy broth, and, for some motive, halved cherry tomatoes.
The halibut swims in a magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot.
This maximalism, in a single type or one other, appears to be the hallmark of each dish at Lex Yard, generally to the purpose of absurdity. A lobster roll, already inherently valuable, turns into a pile of rich-person nonsense with the addition of caviar—two varieties, inky, expensive baerii sturgeon, and orange, comparatively cheap trout roe—in addition to shreds of grated black truffle. (And such small parts! The sandwich is appetizer-petite.) I started to suspect that this more-is-more strategy was Anthony’s method of differentiating his Waldorf menu from Gramercy Tavern’s, however the Lex Yard dishes that I liked most have been additionally, notably, essentially the most Gramercy-like. A carrot-coconut soup, smooth as sunshine and gently candy, 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 till tender and satiny, was a superb shock of white in a sublime magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot. There was a touch of fall in each of these dishes, and I ponder if Lex Yard would possibly grow to be a stronger restaurant as soon as cooler temperatures set in and Anthony can outfit his greenmarket hauls with extra texture and heft. Top-of-the-line dishes on the present menu makes about as a lot sense within the swelter of summer season as fur-lined boots on the seaside in Tulum: a portion of tagliatelle sensuously draped in mushroom-infused cream, with batons of bacon and oodles of cracked black pepper. Come November, nonetheless, it simply would possibly find yourself being some of the talked-about pastas on the town.
Regardless of the restaurant’s flaws, you’ll have a wonderfully nice time if you end up at Lex Yard for a meal. Service is attentive and heat. The drinks (created by Jeff Bell, of the downtown cocktail bar PDT) are note-perfect. The desserts are as over-accessorized because the savory facet of the menu however put on their complexity effectively, particularly in a creamy chocolate budino (vegan, it seems) topped with a crackly tuile, a tumble of crushed nuts, and, to hell with it, just a few wisps of gold leaf. Furthermore, I’d outright suggest the restaurant for breakfast, if you must eat your morning meal in that specific stretch of Manhattan. There are silken omelettes, a properly over-the-top “bagel service for 2,” and a fruit plate that’s fairly beautiful, even whether it is, inexplicably, dusted with bee pollen. The eggs Benedict, zhuzhed up with jammy leeks, are a welcome nod to the lodge’s historical past, and maybe a greater past-honoring alternative than the Walford salad—a layered composition incorporating grapes, walnuts, and a beneficiant portion of sharp, creamy white cheddar cheese—which, for all Anthony’s chefly ministrations, doesn’t handle to meaningfully transcend its elementary apples-with-mayonnaise bizarreness.
