when you want, where you want.
The Big-Money, Big-Macher Restaurant Is Back
Photo: Landon Nordeman
On a warm night in October, a red carpet ran down a length of East 26th Street. A step-and-repeat was mounted on one side, a velvet rope on the other. The opening of Time and Tide, a restaurant from Kent Hospitality Group helmed by chef Danny Garcia, felt like both a portal to a past era of high-ceilinged, high-priced restaurant excess and a glimpse of a future filled with establishments where abundance — of wealth, wine, Wagyu — is the whole point.
In a city starved for elbow room, the scale can be spectacular. Daniel Boulud’s cavernous steakhouse, La Tête d’Or, has landed just blocks away from the 150-plus-seat Time and Tide. These decadent battleships join Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Jonathan Benno’s Four Twenty Five, a 14,000-square-foot oasis of carpeted luxury. On the West Side, Jeff Katz and chef Melissa Rodriguez have partnered with the club conglomerate Tao Group to transform what was Al Coro into an equally massive restaurant called Crane Club. And the newest arrival in Flatiron is Aqua, a London import that is the size of a Barnes & Noble and serves both Italian and Japanese food.
Yes, like everything else these days — rhetoric, jeans, threats to democracy — restaurants have gotten supersize. And while this trend appears particularly salient at a time when Cybertrucks patrol the city’s avenues, these projects tend to be years in the making. With the gradual consolidation of space into the hands of real-estate developers who build shimmering, billion-dollar Xanadus to which they must attract what remains of the office population, restaurants become lures, amenities for the tower dwellers, as much marketing as anything else. No one bats an eye over a 15,000-square-foot gym as a means to lure bodies in; why would they for a similarly giant restaurant?
To actually realize these restaurants, many of the biggest ventures aren’t set up with the sort of traditional tenant-landlord relationship that burdens other New York restaurants. At Four Twenty Five, on the second floor of a Sir Norman Foster–designed skyscraper, Vongerichten has partnered with L&L Holdings, the company that redeveloped the tower. And Boulud, who excels at deal-making as much as he does at duck pressing, partnered with SL Green, owner of both One Vanderbilt (home of Boulud’s Le Pavillon and Jōji) and One Madison, the 1.4 -million-square-foot office tower in which La Tête d’Or occupies the ground floor. “We run it like an independent business, but we’re partnered with them,” says the chef. “They do the heavy lifting of investment. There’s not a meeting about planning that SL isn’t involved in.”
These places combine conspicuous consumption with comfort food in ways unseen since Jeffrey Chodorow’s prime. Dinners in these restaurants are meant to be splashy and the splash meant to be seen — at least by some.
At Time and Tide, guests can order a single, giant cheddar goldfish with a $57 caviar supplement (which can be applied to anything else on the menu as well). At La Tête d’Or, the prime-rib trolley offers ten-ounce slices of American Wagyu for $115. That’s the same price Crane Club asks for a bone-in, wood-grilled filet mignon. And if Crane Club’s main room — its windows curtained off, its entrance guarded by a pair of formidable hostesses — isn’t exclusive enough, there’s a separate private club for members in the basement.
This post has been updated to correct the description of Vongerichten’s partnership.
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