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Printemps Is Full of Shoppers, But How’s the Food?
Photo: Lanna Apisukh
My lunch date dabbed at her mouth, and we signaled for the check. We’d have stayed longer, lingering over the last leaves of a petite salade (nicely dressed with nuoc chom vinaigrette and tiles of lightly pickled rhubarb) and a remnant scrap of gingery crab rémoulade, but she had places to be. She was off to a consultation with her new cosmetic dermatologist.
I didn’t plan it this way, but I would’ve if I could’ve. We were seated in Le Salon Vert, the second floor raw bar–slash–café tucked into a corner of Printemps, the Parisian department store newly landed on Wall Street, still within sight of decoratively caged installations of crystal-studded Simone Rocha jeans but recessed enough to feel safely secluded from the wetwork of commerce. I’m an on-the-record appreciator of what I’ve called department-store dining, the genteel, mostly lunch-y style of cooking that flourished in the tearooms of Bergdorf Goodman’s and Bloomingdale’s and was perfected at the old Fred’s at Barneys: salads and light sandwiches for ladies on their way from, or their way to, their next splurge, sartorial or medical. Fred’s had its famous Palm Beach salad, with shrimp, avocado, and hearts of palm. The Salon Vert has oysters, crab rémoulade, and shrimp flamed with not only horseradish but habañero.
Printemps, whose Paris original dates to 1865, arrived in New York last month with ambitions just short of Napoleonic. The new store is 55,000 square feet, not huge by city standards (Nordstrom’s New York flagship on West 57th Street is 320,000) but angling to occupy — not only space but time. Its website lists itineraries for those hoping to drop in for an hour, a few hours, or a full day. It may back onto more sober temples of capitalism — the New York Stock Exchange sits directly behind — but Printemps itself is a disorientingly Wonderland-ish place, complete with giant flowers blooming over the shoe section and a giant Big Apple lazing by the escalators. Since any trip to Wonderland involves — even requires — the “Eat Me” and “Drink Me” treats Alice nibbled, Printemps provides.
Wander through the store, as I did this week, and commissaries appear. All of the food at Printemps — which is overseen by chef Gregory Gourdet and Kent Hospitality, the Fidi-based restaurant group founded by the late Jamal James Kent — has a Caribbean slant, and all of it is better than it really needs to be. At Cafe Jalu, on the ground floor, a coffee-and-breakfast counter beneath a green tented canopy, all of the baking is done in-house daily, from the guava danish to the pain au chocolat, with a thick layer of vanilla cream and Haitian dark chocolate, and all of the coffee drinks can be taken throughout the store. “Oh, yeah,” the barista told me when I expressed surprise that I could wander through eveningwear displays with a sweating iced coffee in hand, “They sell Champagne up there, so …”
That they do. At several turns, Champagne is available: at the Salon Vert, naturally, but then also at a spiky bar in the cosmetics section, where you can spritz your way through Victoria Beckham’s line of perfumes or book a ten-minute LED-light facial treatment in a padded recliner in a curtained cubby. There’s also the Red Room Bar on the first floor, which is effectively the waiting area for the just-opened fine-dining restaurant, Maison Passerelle, which I’ll get around to trying once it’s really gotten going, and if all of that wasn’t enough, I noticed a pushcart of Champagne had been set up to bring bubbles anywhere a shopper might be.
I’ll say this: Somebody there has good taste in the stuff. I was happily surprised to see my new (to me) favorite grower-Champagne, J-M Sélèque, hard enough to find by the bottle let alone by the glass. (Less happily, that glass costs $42.) We held off at lunch, but after a stop at the office and the gym, I wandered back to the Red Room Bar for a glass, the culmination of a daylong Printempian rite of spring.
Photo: Lanna Apisukh
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