Snacks Fifth Avenue
Chic Parisian eater y L’Avenue has landed at Saks, ser ving tasty fare to celebs and shoppers alike
EN garde, Polo Bar and Armani Ristorante! Parisian glamourpit L’Avenue has joined the battle to be Fifth Avenue’s flagship for global fashionista-feasting.
The great news is that L’Avenue, at Saks Fifth Avenue, is nothing like the snooty French original. Although it’s drawn the starry likes of Karolína Kurková and Odell Beckham Jr., it’s a fun, appealing and welcoming eatery with surprisingly good food.
The secret? It’s managed not by distant Parisians, but by Restaurant Associates — the storied New York company that launched the original Four Seasons restaurant more than a half-century ago, and which today runs dining rooms at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library.
The two-level L’Avenue, designed by Philippe Starck, occupies the eighth and ninth floors of the department store. Elevators take you to the reservations-only ninth-floor dining room, a brown-on-brown, clubby and comfy spread with Moorishstyle arched windows and cozy booths. A grand circular staircase leads downstairs to Le Chalet lounge, which features a gorgeous circular bar, redwood paneling, faux animal heads and romantic nooks overlooking Rockefeller Center.
Forget “dress code” — fat guys with shirts out of their pants shared the floor with Fashion Week glamourpusses. Two blond sisters in leopard-print blouses at the next table giggled their way through romantic fiascos. (“I told him I couldn’t think of him in a date-ish-type way,” lamented one.)
Street-savvy gatekeepers ensure that the place won’t be another out-oftouch disaster like Le Caprice, the London import, where hosts wouldn’t have known the Yankees had the team bus pulled up. L’Avenue general manager Alessio de Sensi previously worked at the boldface-infested Polo Bar, where an iPad-bearing sentry checks guests in at the door. At L’Avenue, “We’re much more open,” he says.
The menu’s reassuringly familiar despite names like “vapeurs de cre- vettes” (shrimp dumplings). Delicate, steamed sea bass with coconutmilk sauce and curry; “tigre qui pleure” (marinated, sliced beef with spicy Thai sauce); and vegetables in spicy curry sauce are fully realized, Asian-tinted crowd-pleasers. It’s affordable, too, with main dishes in the $18-to-mid-$30 range.
But a “classic” club sandwich available in the Le Chalet lounge ($26) doesn’t stack up against Ralph’s Corned Beef Sandwich ($28) at the Polo a few blocks north — a nearer rival to L’Avenue than another in-store canteen, Freds at Barneys. Polo regulars such as Andy Cohen, Scarlett Johansson, Ryan Seacrest, Kelly Ripa, Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Seinfeld and Alex Rodriguez won’t likely switch allegiances overnight.
But L’Avenue’s already drawing its share of the notable and the notorious — e.g., prison-bound Michael Cohen, whom I saw with his wife living it up last Saturday night. Also spotted: supermodels Joan Smalls and Grace Elizabeth, actress-producer Jessica Chastain, Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton and actors Kyle MacLachlan and Jean Reno.
The media went over L’Avenue’s French pedigree including pastry chef Pierre Hermé, who has a retail shop off the Fifth Avenue dining room. But none mentioned that it’s a three-way deal between Saks, L’Avenue and Restaurant Associates with RA as the operator.
Saks likely didn’t want to dilute L’Avenue’s “French” image. They needn’t have worried. Most of us will take Fifth Avenue over Avenue Montaigne any day.