Working on their dining mojo
Can these NYC classics get their groove back?
Ilove Atmospheric Old Restaurants That Don’t Entirely Suck. Few survive in New York, and there are fewer each year. So what’s going on at two of our most atmospheric places has us nostalgialovers reaching for Zantac.
A version of the Grand Central Oyster Bar will pop up in Park Slope later this year. Will food-crazed Brooklyn stand for an invasion by some of the city’s worst overpriced seafood? Meanwhile, wornout steakhouse Gallagher’s just closed until fall for “improvements” that might lift the menu but could sink our hearts.
We need both places for all their flaws. They channel the social and culinary life of the city before our time and sustain an increasingly fragile continuity with our past. For too many New Yorkers, young and/ or newly arrived, “old” restaurants mean Gotham Bar & Grill and Nobu, which arrived in the ancient 1980s and ’90s.
In fact the real Oyster Bar “news” isn’t the Brooklyn outpost, which will be a franchise run by different people and possibly won’t suck, but the abysmal reality of the Grand Central original.
Never exactly in Oceana’s or Aquagrill’s league, it took a plunge after former owner Marlene Brody sold it a few years ago to an employees’ association that licenses the name and “core recipes.” For sure: The menu’s rotten to the core.
Sure, we all love the sprawling rooms’ vaulted arches, Guastavino ceiling tile and woodpaneled “Saloon” which evoke an early20thcentury, lost world of trans continental rail travel.
But, except for the daily catch at the oyster counter — which itself sometimes drifts in a town awash in great bivalves — most of the innumerable dishes would stink up a salad bar, where they’d cost twothirds less. I’m still cringing from “Cajun catfish” tasting mainly of burnt skin and fried Ipswich clams that were great until we got through the batter to 100 percent rubber meat.
The guys behind the new edition on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue seem aware of Grand Central’s limitations. Coowner Jonathan Young, a Park Slope resident, told me their 150seater (compared to 450) will “focus mostly on shellfish,” the old joint’s strength, and a few classics like creamy oyster stew. “We might have three or four different fish a day, not 30 or 40,” he said.
The magnificent setting keeps the original place busy; it’s hard to fail in a station with 750,000 people passing through every day. The Park Slope outpost will nod to its grandeur with a few arches and other details, but locals might be skeptical if they’ve eaten at Grand Central in the 21st century.
Gallagher’s, meanwhile, is dark while new owner Dean Poll, who also runs the sparkling Central Park Boathouse, modernizes its prehistoric systems and “tweaks” its menu. (It too was previously owned by Brody.) I trust Poll to improve the Eisenhowerera dishes, but I worry about the qualities that made the place special.
Although not as awful as the Oyster Bar’s, Gallagher’s food needed work — even housepride, USDA, dryaged steaks often tasted like neither. But its basic look needs no work: It’s been one of the city’s most gloriously anach ronistic — and that overworked word, iconic — dining venues for over a halfcentury.
Poll promises it will “still be Gallagher’s” when it reopens this fall, including the meat locker, handsome foursided bar and paneled dining rooms festooned with vintage photos of show business legends, politicians, baseball greats and racehorses.
Let’s hope so. Gallagher’s needed new furniture and fixtures, but it won’t survive a desecration like the one of the Algonquin Hotel lobby by the idiots who now run it. Poll can learn from Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern, which kept the old saloon looking much like it did in the 1920s.
Keep the atmosphere, boys, and we’ll forgive a meal we don’t totally love — as long as we don’t totally hate it either.