Must-eat places in New York City
By By Robert St. John / food columnist
Sept. 1, 2004
NEW YORK Some people visit New York City and measure the days by how many meetings they will attend. Others (this would be the group that my wife is in), measure each day by how many department stores and designer boutiques they can visit.
Still others visit and gauge the trip by how many tourist traps they can see. I measure the success or failure of any trip to New York by how many restaurants I can cram into the short time I am here.
New York is the greatest restaurant city on the planet. For me, eating comes first when visiting New York.
Throughout the year I keep a list of New York restaurants I hope to visit in my wallet. It gets modified over the course of the months I am away from the city and gets pulled out of the wallet on the flight North.
The final restaurant list in my wallet on this visit consists of:
Chanterelle: David Waltuck's French restaurant is in TriBeCa. I am a big fan of Waltuck's cookbook "Staff Meals." His restaurant is an elegantly designed and artfully decorated space, and his food is skillfully prepared. His cookbook, however, was not an ego trip of hard-to-prepare French dishes but a compilation of all of the pre-shift staff meals he has served his employees over the years.
Le Bernardin: This is Eric Ripert's shrine to fish. No other restaurant in the world prepares fish dishes better than Le Bernardin.
Union Square Caf: This is consistently voted as one of the most popular restaurants in New York. Danny Meyer is the most competent restaurateur in America. I visited with him at a food and wine event a few years ago and every word out of his mouth was a prophetic jewel of sage restaurant advice. As Michael Jordan is to basketball and Trump is to real estate development, Meyer is to the restaurant business. Chef Michael Romano and Meyer have produced two great cookbooks and the food in the book, like that of the restaurant, is no-fuss, expertly-prepared-from-fresh-ingredients American.
Gramercy Tavern: This is Danny Meyer's second restaurant and one of my favorite casual, comfortable and tasteful restaurant atmospheres in the city. Chef Tom Colicchio's food is good, too. A must for lunch, on every visit.
Veritas: This is a restaurant of which I knew nothing about until I read Anthony Bourdain's book, "Kitchen Confidential." Bourdain knows food and chefs. His overwhelming praise of Chef Scott Bryan and the dishes he prepares at Veritas, prompted me to pull the list out of my wallet and immediately add the restaurant in the middle of reading the chapter.
Nobu: This is Japanese fine dining at its finest. Drew Nieporent is probably the second most capable restaurateur in America and his chef Nobu Matsuhisa is widely considered as the master of upscale, stylized Japanese cuisine.
Bouley: This is my friend Bill Dunlap's favorite New York restaurant.
Babbo: Chef Mario Batali's first restaurant is this one. Batali is, hands down, the most knowledgeable and competent chef on the Food Network. He is the real deal and knows more about Italian food than all of the city's other Italian restaurant chefs combined.
Aureole: Charlie Palmer's first restaurant. Former Purple Parrot Caf chef, Rusty Barlow, worked here after leaving our restaurant and finishing culinary school.
Norma's: This supposedly offers the finest breakfast in the city, and the home of the $1,000 omelet I wrote about a few months ago. Hopefully they also have an omelet in the $10 range.
In addition to those restaurants, I hope to squeeze in an authentic Chinese restaurant in Chinatown and a small, bona fide Italian joint in Little Italy.
Got to go now, it's time to eat. The way I see it, if I keep my wife busy eating, she'll have less time to shop.
Robert St. John is an author, chef, restaurateur and world-class eater. He is the owner/executive chef of the Purple Parrot Caf, Crescent City Grill and Mahogany Bar in Hattiesburg and Meridian. He can be reached at robert@nsrg.com.
