BIG NAMES AND $38 SALADS

Staking claim to a ‘real’ New York eatery means a bossy visit to Fred’s

Drilling a flagpole into the artificialbirch-wood floor of the dining room at Freds, the 22-year-old restaurant in the Barneys New York flagship store on Madison Avenue, and staking out the space as essential territory in any evocation of The Real New York, would certainly leave you advancing a controversial position. And yet, there is a case to be made.

I was reminded of this on a recent visit for lunch one rainy Monday afternoon. My friend had arrived early and, displaying the healthy sense of self-importance necessary to psychological survival in Manhattan, demanded a table better than the dark one in a corner we were going to be given.

Ordinarily we might have enjoyed the privacy of something quieter, but we wanted an unobstructed view in the event that Michael Cohen showed up. A few days earlier, Mr Cohen, the 45th president’s embattled lawyer, had eaten at Freds with Donny Deutsch, the advertising executive and television commentator who last year, during a segment on “Morning Joe,” invited President Donald Trump to a round of physical combat (“Donald, if you’re watching, we’re from Queens. I’ll meet you in the schoolyard, brother”). Later, Page Six reported that Deutsch was dating the president’s second former wife, Marla Maples.

Deutsch is a long-standing patron of Freds, which is not short on affection for boys from Queens who have done well enough to make a habit of $38 (1,200 baht) salads, or lacking in tolerance for those from the Five Towns whose offices have just been raided by federal law enforcement officials. There, but for the grace of the RICO statute, go so many of us.

Freds is the creation of another boy from Queens, chef Mark Strausman, who grew up in Flushing, as he recounts in The Freds at Barneys New York Cookbook, which he wrote with Susan Littlefield and which has just been published by Grand Central Life & Style.

Strausman flunked out of various colleges before rising to prominence in the late 1980s, serving Tuscan food to East Side plutocrats. The Pressman family, which had established Barneys as a menswear outlet in downtown Manhattan in the 1920s before eventually turning it into something far more ambitious, brought him in to develop a restaurant similar to those at Harrods or Harvey Nichols in London where, with great novelty at the time, you could have sushi served to you from a conveyor belt.

The result, which opened in 1996, was a restaurant in a department store rather than a department-store restaurant, which carries a meaningful distinction. Freds, which eventually spawned branches downtown, in Chicago and in Beverly Hills, California, was in its own way revolutionary because it extended itself to both sexes, to the enterprising and busy, refusing to encode female indolence. “I have always hated the term ‘ladies who lunch,’ ” Strausman told me.

The food is the food of people who relish consistency (the trainer every morning at 5.30, dinner every Tuesday at Nello): Caprese salad, pizza margherita, tuna tartare, Belgian pommes frites, chicken Milanese, chicken paillard, chicken soup.

Freds’ chopped chicken salad — a tumble of avocado, bibb lettuce, pears, string beans and meat — has, for years, been the most popular item on the menu.