Hotel restaurants that don’t have their own entrances on the street — that are tucked inside the hotels they inhabit, accessible only through the lobbies — have it tough.
They’re sometimes far enough from the nearest source of natural light to seem like culinary catacombs of a sort, and they can have the atmosphere of afterthoughts, of add-on’s: mess halls necessary for the feeding of guests, not dining destinations with enough merit and panache to lure discerning locals who are choosing from a whole city’s worth of options.
Brasserie 44, the new restaurant in the newly renovated Royalton Hotel, is a case in point. You walk a long way from the hotel’s entrance on West 44th Street to reach the restaurant, buried deep inside, and by the time you get to the host station, you’re likely to feel that you’ve passed all of the action, not that you’re joining it.
When I went a few weeks ago the restaurant was nearly empty early in the evening and maybe half full later on. That probably contributed to my sense that I’d landed in a dubiously hip nether zone.
The Royalton, as you may have heard, has had a dramatic makeover. Nothing stays in vogue forever, not even a Philippe Starck lobby, and so his design has been consigned to memory, replaced by a darker, more masculine, more den-like setting, segmented and rendered somewhat cozy by an enormous (and decidedly modern) two-story fireplace.
The makeover meant a new restaurant was in order, and the restaurateur John McDonald — whose other establishments include Lever House and Lure Fishbar — was brought on board to provide it. I’ll come back to a few specifics on the restaurant in a second.
In the meantime, some further meditations on hotel restaurants:
As Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite recently noted in a short squib in New York magazine, several of them have opened recently in midtown, and these restaurants clearly intend to transcend their hotels.
There’s BLT Market, inside the Ritz-Carlton. It has its own big windows and entrance facing Sixth Avenue, so in some ways a diner could completely ignore the hotel. In one way, though, a diner can’t. If he or she is waiting for a table, the place to do so is a bar beyond the restaurant, where the restaurant meets and defers to what is unmistakably the hotel. The change in mood is jarring and not entirely appealing.
There’s also the new Blue Ribbon inside the 6 Columbus hotel on West 58th Street near Eighth Avenue. It has that unfortunate catacombs aspect, along with a large scale that sets it apart from other links in the Blue Ribbon chain, giving it a chillier temperature.
But while these establishments belong to a fresh wave of hotel restaurants aiming for attention from customers who could care less about the hotel, they’re hardly a new phenomenon. Just last year, for example, we saw Joel Rubuchon tuck his only New York restaurant inside a hotel, the Four Seasons in Midtown.
Brasserie 44 looks like a Scandinavian, not a French, take on a brasserie, with its light wood tones and the dark blonde leather with which some seats are upholstered.
A few dishes on the menu explore the oxymoronic (and enduringly popular) realm of haute comfort food. And they prompt questions about this genre, specifically: when does a dish drift so far toward haute that its initial mooring isn’t really in evidence any longer? And are these reinterpretations as gastronomically satisfying as they are intellectually intriguing?
To wit: the “brasserie Cobb salad.” Here we have a confit of chicken leg in place of chicken breast, and we have little quail eggs similar in size to the Lilliputian tomatoes that are also present, and we have a swish of Roquefort-Banyuls emulsion to the side of a sort of column into which the salad is molded, and by the time you’ve sized all of that up, the Cobb DNA isn’t even on the fringes of your consciousness.
More bluntly comforting is an appetizer of a “slow poached farmhouse egg” — the poaching of eggs is all the upscale restaurant rage these days — that’s served with a potato pancake under foot and pancetta. If that sounds a lot like breakfast, that’s how it tastes too: breakfast-y, maybe too much so, and somewhat on the leaden side for an appetizer.
My friends and I also tried a jumbo lump crab cake that wasn’t so much a big crunchy puck as a multi-tiered production in which the celeriac remoulade sometimes eclipsed the crab.
For entrees, salmon poached in olive oil, with a caviar dressing, was a supple, silky treat, at least for anyone who likes his or her salmon on the very rare side, as I often do.
Less impressive were a pan-roasted veal chop which, at $46, didn’t have the heft you might expect, and an overcooked skate wing stuffed with foie gras, which had turned chalky.
Some of the other entrees on a recent menu: black bass “en papillotte,” a rib-eye, milk-fed poularde, short rib pot au feu. Some other appetizers: a sweet onion tart, roasted chestnut soup, acorn squash risotto.
There seemed to be a careful distribution of lighter and heavier, fishier and meatier. Whether it’s distinctive enough to lure people through that deep lobby remains to be seen.
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