Restos need to change their tunes
A T city restaurants, there is one indignity that both connected regulars and firsttime nobodies suffer. They must all face the music — which is not only often too loud, but usually guilty of corrupting the mood.
Take 1960s rock and Motown. The “classic” tracks that are practically hard-wired into your brain work fine at Sadelle’s in Soho, a casual spot that’s made for nostalgia. But the same tunes grate on nerves like an emery wheel at American Cut Midtown, Marc Forgione’s pricey new steakhouse on East 56th Street.
While the food, service and ambience are swell, the soundtrack’s hell. Really, Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” for the 14,353rd time — at lunch? And, in a Midtown setting where most of the clientele are lawyers and financiers trying to talk deals?
In Harlem, a birthplace of jazz, I expect a restaurant — even one with a buzzy scene — to offer some type of music that respects history. But the only blemish on a grand meal recently at Red Rooster was unidentifiable funk-thump that made Miles Davis’ notorious “Bitches Brew” sound melodic by comparison.
When actual jazz does turn up around the city, it tends to be in its weirdest form and in the least appropriate venue. My ears cringed at the Library at the Public, the cozy, bookish retreat on Lafayette Street. We were seated under a speaker blaring Eric Dolphy’s 1964 “Hat and Beard,” which suggests a horse tortured with a power drill.
My colleague, Post music critic Hardeep Phull, loves hearing oldschool rappers like Notorious B.I.G. at Meatball Shop, where owner Michael Chernow personally picks the tracks. For me, though, the lyrics — which are the whole point of rap — are inaudible behind the sound system’s relentless bass, which serves only to make boozing meatball eaters pump up their own volume.
It’s amazing to me that music seems like such an afterthought at places where so much care is put into the food, service and design.
When elegant boîte Chevalier opened last year in the new Baccarat Hotel, flaunting a $96 prix-fixe menu and Baccarat crystal on tables, a friend was horrified by the obscure pop-rock screech blaring across the dining room.
“What is that?” she asked the host. His embarrassed answer: “Madame, I do not choose the music.”
But somebody should who knows we’re there to eat, not to suffer the beat.