The restaurant opened contained in the Cherry Lane Theatre in October.
Picture: Gentl + Hyers
The Cherry Lane Theatre, which opened as such in 1924 and claims to be Off Broadway’s longest-continuously-running theater, has hosted loads of eminences — Edna St. Vincent Millay was a founder and a 16-year-old Barbra Streisand a type of intern — however, till the age of 101, so far as anybody can keep in mind, by no means a restaurant. (A café, perhaps. A speakeasy, rumored.) Wild Cherry, from Frenchette’s Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, is the primary. And like Le Veau d’Or, one other of their outdated haunts, established in 1937, Wild Cherry has opened with few tables and a blaze of fanfare.
Carved right into a former black-box theater behind the concession stand and never seen to the (outrageously charming) West Village avenue, Wild Cherry is much less dinner theater than backstage hangout, lit by a proscenium arch studded with makeup-mirror bulbs and inaccessible to all however a only a few hoi polloi. (The night I went, reservations once more being unavailable, I lined up on Commerce Road to strive my luck as a 5 p.m. walk-in; someday mid-meal, Sabrina Carpenter strolled in to take her place at a desk within the again.) Supposed as a type of supper-and-a-show venue, Wild Cherry up to now is maintaining a fairly parallel existence to the theater it shares the constructing with, and tickets to a efficiency — at the moment Natalie Palamides’s neo-clown present, Weer — don’t really purchase any preferential remedy on the restaurant, except you occur to be on good phrases with A24, the indie-darling manufacturing firm that purchased the theater in 2023 and introduced in Nasr and Hanson.
Nonetheless, I used to be curious what eating for the theater, or theatrical eating, may imply at New York’s good outdated new child Cherry Lane, so I invited one among New York’s theater critics, Jackson McHenry, to return with me final week. Usually, he instructed me, pre- and post-dinner meals are the stuff of comfort, not artwork. “I am going to performs and musicals so many occasions every week I’m normally making an attempt to eat shortly and for sustenance, which suggests I’m obsessive about locations just like the lately mysteriously shuttered Inexperienced Symphony on forty third, a grain-bowl-and-smoothie place that was coated with signed images of former Phantoms of the Opera and normally stuffed with theater individuals,” he mentioned. “I have to discover a new slop place quick.”
He immediately noticed the theater bones within the gussied-up eating room, dominated by a U-shaped bar with quite a lot of cubicles on two ranges radiating out round it. “The size of the room nonetheless very a lot resemble the cramped area of a black-box theater it was once,” he mentioned, noting the foreshortened dimensions, within the fashion of a stage or movie set pretending to be a restaurant. “At any second, I did fear {that a} director was going to shout ‘Reduce!’ or an ensemble member was going to return over and attempt to lure me into one other room, Sleep No Extra fashion.”
There was no immersive theater, fortunately, only a menu that steered a type of kitschy selection present. “Supper membership” units the tone — there’s a steak dinner for 2, full with a baked potato, practically extinct on New York Metropolis menus nowadays — however with excursions to Little Italy clam homes and hoity-toity French spots. The oysters-and-chipolata-sausage platters are a calling card of Nasr-Hanson eating places uptown and down and right here, too, although we have been extra tempted by an Italo-American scungilli salad: tender bits of thinly sliced conch tossed with onion and celery and served in its personal horn-of-plenty shell. I most popular that to the Dungeness crab — à la russe, because the menu had it — which was confettied with sieved egg and capers and never fairly attention-grabbing sufficient to justify a $60 price ticket.
Throughout the board, it’s simple to want that the costs have been rather less Broadway and a bit extra Off Broadway, although there’s barely a discount available anyplace on the island anymore, and nowadays a $28 cheeseburger, particularly from the architects of Minetta Tavern’s Black Label Burger, most likely counts as a very good deal. Slicked with marrow within the grind and served drippingly medium-rare, this one is a worthy successor, dressed merely with a slice of cheddar, uncooked onion, and a Frenchman’s “particular sauce” (sauce Choron, a tomato-laced béarnaise). Jackson most popular the midwestern-style kielbasa and kraut, a bouncy, fats home sausage on a mattress of sauerkraut, although he famous it’s an incongruous theater-restaurant dish. “I can’t think about consuming that after which sitting down to observe Natalie Palamides do clowning and feeling snug,” he mentioned. “Normally, these locations really feel subservient to the massive occasion of your night time, however Wild Cherry elbows its approach right into a starring function by itself phrases.”
For me, the true star of the night was a kickline of “Frog Legs Kiev,” little drumsticks swaddled in garlicky, parsleyed butter and fried in Frenchette Bakery baguette crumbs, a genius flourish. Having already revived frogs’ legs at Le Veau d’Or, the place they have been served in a scorching cocotte, the cooks are confirming their standing as frogs’ public enemies Nos. 1 and a couple of. Whereas the uptown model (now obtainable solely as a particular) was fabulously restaurant-y, these are deep-fried, lollipopped finger meals — not less than till they’re dribbling garlic butter and bits of fried parsley down your chin. Did they make sense on a menu that additionally consists of pasta Alfredo, purple beans and rice, and a frozen-custard machine pumping out dessert? I feel not. Does it matter?
That’s the theater: one night time, comedy; the following, drama. That’s A24, which introduced you Moonlight and The Brutalist in addition to Ramy, Ziwe, and At Residence With Amy Sedaris. We laughed, we cried, we ate a frog. “That is the place Dakota Johnson would ship a shopper on a date in Materialists,” Jackson opined as we cut up a large slice of pineapple-compote-laced coconut cake. If that’s not vertical integration, what’s?
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