The upstairs eating room at Chateau Royale.
Photograph: Landon Nordeman
The pendulum swings from low cost to swank and again once more. I’ll depart it to the economists to tie the development to jobs numbers or inflation information, the bread-and-butter equal of the hemline index (they’re shorter in booms, longer throughout busts). All I do know is that the rough-and-ready consolation delicacies that dominated the crawl out of the pandemic a couple of years in the past, a banquet-orgy of steaks, shrimp cocktails, and Caesar salads served in shouty canteens and new bistros manicured with the scabs of outdated ones, has given strategy to a brand new age of gloss. Fancy fancy? You’re in luck. Now ascendant: the swankstaurant.
Spots such because the minuscule clubhouse 4 Charles Prime Rib and Jon Neidich’s the Nines, with its burgundy velvet and caviar-topped baked potatoes, helped to ascertain the template for a correct swankstaurant. The previous few months have seen a rush of them — from the gaslight glow of Chez Fifi uptown to the newest Chumley’s reboot, referred to as the Eighty Six, downtown — typically coming from cooks and restaurateurs who had initially adopted a extra informal path. In uncommon circumstances, it’s doable to see that swing in a single house. At Chateau Royale, which opened this previous summer time from the homeowners of the West Village bistro Libertine, the restaurant is split into two distinct ranges, every with its personal menu. Within the ground-floor barroom, all darkish cherry-wood and oxblood leather-based, the vibe is clubby, not fairly low cost however all the way down to earth. “Le Burger” balances out its bleu cheese with particular sauce; a winky “chien chaud” is floor Wagyu with fermented kohlrabi slaw. I’ll take street-cart sauerkraut over its Greenmarket imitator any day, and I wouldn’t waste beef this pedigreed on a sausage grinder, however at $20, this Wagyu’s about as reasonably priced as you’ll discover it exterior a sushi roll.
Upstairs, the place the motion is, Chateau Royale goes deluxe. The room is vivid white and crown-molded; the home windows right here, unmuffled by downstairs’ thick curtains, open onto the road under. The banquettes (virtually all the seating includes banquettes) are swathed in velvet. Martinis tinkle your means (traditional or soiled, gin or vodka) on a rolling bar cart piloted, throughout one in all my dinners, by a smiling, white-jacketed man with a mini drink tattooed below his eye, a graduate, maybe, of the Faculty of Laborious Shakes. Any such shakes have lengthy been stilled: Right here, the ambiance is sumptuously genteel, and the one whiff of the demimonde comes from the tiny beggar’s purses — spoon-size satchels, $39 every, crammed with crème fraîche and caviar — borrowed from the historic swankstaurant the Quilted Giraffe, the place chef Brian Younger used to prepare dinner.
Homage appears the order of the day. The menu is generally French classics, principally capably ready: good, garlicky escargots; duck breast a l’orange, served in a mode just a little too paying homage to hen cutlet; au poivre’d steak. There are many locations, new and outdated, that do as a lot. It’s the vibes that rule the day right here. On a current night, I overheard a supervisor rhapsodizing a couple of return to Paris-in-Manhattan grandeur, even when he himself “wasn’t alive for lots of it — La Grenouille when it was La Grenouille.” Alas, the latter days of La Grenouille left one thing to be desired, but it surely might make you’re feeling fabulous.
A extra profitable scrub-up is occurring a couple of blocks away. Bartolo, a brand new Spanish restaurant from Ryan Bartlow, is a high-key counterpart to his scrappier Ernesto’s, tiny the place Ernesto’s is spacious, Spanish to its Basque. Of the 2, I discover myself preferring the brand new spot. For structure and décor, there’s no competitors: Bartolo is made up of three interconnecting rooms in a comfy labyrinth, low-ceilinged and leathery however with out the chummy claustrophobia of Chateau Royale’s barroom. Set on the parlor stage of two adjoining storefronts, on heat nights Bartolo throws open the doorways to the road, and with the view filtered via large pots of blooming rosemary and iron gating, you can even mistake West 4th Road for a misplaced avenida of Madrid. Just a few Ernesto’s-esque tapas have made their means throughout city — beautiful, eggplant-colored “anchoas” on grilled Spanish bread with chilly slabs of butter reduce thick sufficient to be cheese and the Bartlowian gildas that kick-started the gilda development — however new-swank calls for foie gras, port-wine reductions, and truffle shavings. These are all proper at residence right here.
Even nonetheless, I’ll confess that I most well-liked the extra rustic, much less elevated of Bartlow’s newest recipes. An enormous platter of French fries (thick and garlicky, pale dominoes within the Madrileño fashion), shrimp, and fried eggs, reduce collectively tableside by a server like a breakfast scramble till their marigold yolks soak the entire: I’m undecided I’ve had a less complicated, extra pleasurable dish in weeks. A plate of tripe, tender and springy like an animal chow enjoyable, with just a little plug of darkish morcilla for good measure: Bartlow tailored the recipe from his time cooking on the three-star Akelarre in San Sebastián, but it surely’s the kind of dish you’d be simply as prone to discover on the native tavern he lived above. It was the dressier dishes that extra typically let me down or would profit from additional tinkering. Cannelloni full of long-braised beef, in mentioned port-wine discount, with mentioned truffle and a liver sauce: heavy on heavy, unrelenting. Cuttlefish meunière with a bit an excessive amount of bounce for me. However select properly and the room, the temper, and the booze will do the remainder. Begin, just like the Spaniards do, with a “ginitonic” or a “vermut,” and proceed from there. The all-Spanish wine record contains some good, sensible surprises from lesser-known areas — Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Aragón, the Balearic islands — and Rioja for the Riojeros. And like all Spanish restaurant price its sal right here in historic Little Spain (as soon as upon a time, this a part of the West Village was residence to a big Galician inhabitants, and the eating places catering to them), there’s a full complement of the fortified stuff. Take it from these everlasting advocates of swank, the brothers Crane: Have a sherry.
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In case you want to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the October 20, 2025, situation of
New York Journal.
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In case you want to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the October 20, 2025, situation of
New York Journal.
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