Seasoned pros:
Local culinary veterans show the benefits of experience at highly pleasing Daley’s on Yates
Experience of team behind Daley’s on Yates ensures enjoyable dining experience.
What’s most evident about Daley’s on Yates is how well conceived, designed and managed it is. The place just works, whether you’re there for a bar nosh and glass of wine, dinner with family or group festivities on the expansive patio.
This expert execution is surely attributable to the fact that the owners have collective combined experience of more than a century with the Daley restaurant name. Gene Colletti, who with family members took over his father’s former Lansingburgh restaurant to open The Old Daley Inn in 1975, remains patriarch of the company, and his business partners have been with the brand for more than 30 years each; two of the partners’ wives are also involved in executive positions. The adage about many chefs spoiling the soup doesn’t seem to apply here to an abundance of owners and relatives, several of whom you’re apt to see on any given night at their latest venture, Daley’s on Yates in Schenectady.
Given the financial security of a long-established, successful company — its catering wing is the second-largest in the area — the Daley’s team was in a position to take however long with its first full-time, a-la-carte restaurant since The Old Daley Inn closed in 2001. With the company’s on-premises catering venue for the past eight years, Old Daley on Crooked Lake (formerly Crooked Lake House), available during the winter as an outlet for weekend dining as well as private events, the Daley’s team could research, practice and polish during the long gestation of Daley’s on Yates. They had plenty of time: Acquisition of the property for Daley’s on Yates, in a former taxi garage between Union Street and City Hall, was announced in spring 2017; original openings, for last fall and New Year’s Eve, passed, with the debut finally happening two and a half months ago, in late June.
Waiting made the reservation book grow fuller: The place has been packed since the beginning, and although Daley’s on Yates seats 156 in its spacious, handsome interior, which blends industrial chic with modern accents, we nabbed the last available table for four at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday. (Given that I was recognized even before we’d been greeted at the door, rejiggering likely was done to accommodate us, as a phone message requesting a table had gotten lost in the electrons.) By the time we left, two hours later, the place swarmed with people inside and out. The 100-pluscapacity patio, in particular, seems a patron favorite. With its shade trees, twinkly-light canopy, fence to obscure the adjacent municipal parking lot and a soon-to-come roof over one end, the patio was occupied even during the worst of the July-august swelter and, with heaters and blankets available, likely will be through late fall as well.
Longtime owners like these know how to hire staff and to put a general manager, Michael J. Anthony, in charge to run things. The bar and floor staff appeared to be savvy, veteran servers like the woman who took care of us and eager youngsters like the one she was training; when a between-course utensil reset was clearly wrong and spotted from afar, the acolyte returned posthaste to adjust. For the kitchen, the Daley’s team went with young guns, bringing aboard as the executive chef for Daley’s on Yates the 30-year-old Elliott Vogel —a2017risingstarchefwiththe Wine & Dine for the Arts festival and alum of Angelo’s 677 Prime and Yono’s, both in Albany — about 15 months before the restaurant eventually opened. He’s backed by Zach Simard, who grew from a young cook in the Daley’s organization to the new restaurant’s sous chef, and Culinary Institute of Americatrained Peter Cerreta as pastry chef and head of garde manger.
Together this team has created a menu for a restaurant that understands its location and audience. It balances being in Schenectady and what that has historically meant — big portions, Italian and American influences — with more progressive nods in flavors and plating. As befitting its parent company’s cross-county presence, Daley’s on Yates has one foot in current Schenectady, the other in threeyears-ahead downtown Troy. This deft blend manifests itself in a menu with apps that go from the stodginess of a “colossal” shrimp cocktail to tuna carpaccio that playfully doffs its inspiration cap to salad Nicoise but remains utterly its own dish. Most popular is the absolutely addicting Peruvian chicken skewers in a tongue-popping herb-lime sauce, which on a recent night was ordered 40 times in 38 minutes, according to Vogel.
Although I prefer grazing on small plates, Vogel’s entrees would have been a shame to miss. (Given their size, they’re also impossible to miss.) A daily feature of halibut arrived as a hard-seared, snowyinterior chunk atop mushroomblack rice pilaf, with elegantly cut summer squash and parsnip crisps adding height and color, and a lemon-brown butter sauce finishing with unctuous piquance. The dish’s final component, a chunk of roasted fennel, was a garnish too far, but another feature, dry-aged, bone-in striploin, proved to be a perfect execution of contemporary steakhouse fare, albeit also too large. (The accompanying sheaf of asparagus and layer of Lyonnaise potatoes made an excellent next-day lunch.)
Our other two entrees were traditional and winning as well. A seemingly bottomless bowl of herbaceous shrimp-and-clam oreganata was pronounced by my mother,
a 70-year veteran of Schenectady Italian restaurants, as the best she’d ever eaten, and a double-decker burger had no business being as flavorful and juicy as it was, given the brownthroughout well-doneness of the meat. (We were told the 4-ounce patties usually arrive medium to slightly pink medium well.) Adding bacon is unnecessary but delicious, though it makes the towering thing even harder to subdue, served as it is on an inadequate, disintegrating bun.
When you’re stuffed after a meal in a Schenectady restaurant with Italian in its soul, you still have to have dessert, so we did, swooning over a Catalanorange creme brulee and expressing surprise at how moist and flavorful a lemon-blueberry cake was despite seeming dense to the fork-touch.
My quibbles with Daley’s on Yates are entirely philosophical. It seems to want to be everything to everyone, grabbing onto hip trends (industrial design, craft cocktails, stylish plating) while offering comfort-food entrees like pot roast, chicken Parm, St. Louis ribs and even beans and rice. And somehow it works, the disparate and sometimes scattered impulses coalescing around a wholly realized vision that starts at the top.
A starter and beer or wine for one would be less than $25 before tip; dinner for two with starters, mains, a shared dessert and one drink apiece, about $125.
sbarnes@timesunion. com • 518-454-5489 • blog.timesunion.com/ tablehopping • @Tablehopping