Culture

Gotham’s Ladies Who Lunch, Three Decades In 


One recent afternoon at the restaurant formerly known as Gotham Bar & Grill, a host led me and a friend to a sort of dais at the back of the gargantuan restaurant, which was nearly empty. Each of the two other tables on our little stage was also occupied by a pair of women, all of whom were wearing beige and sporting haircuts that you might describe—and my friend did—as Park Avenue helmets. We had quipped, on the way, about being “ladies who lunch,” but suddenly it didn’t seem like a joke. The next thing I knew, I was ordering a dish called Chicken Supreme.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected different from a restaurant that opened in Greenwich Village more than three decades ago, with the goal of translating uptown-calibre fine dining for a downtown address. In the eighties and nineties, Gotham’s owners sought to class up the neighborhood with white tablecloths and the chef Alfred Portale’s tuna tartare. But they also aimed to minimize stuffiness, to better integrate into the hipper environs. The loftlike dining room felt relatively edgy at the time; Portale’s plating style was architectural and avant-garde.

Gotham got a new executive chef last spring, the first since Portale, who left to start a restaurant of his own, was hired, in 1984. Victoria Blamey, a forty-year-old native of Chile, made a name for herself by bringing Chumley’s, another vaunted New York institution, into the new millennium. Under Blamey, Gotham’s menu is peppered with exciting and eclectic ingredients that convey an of-the-moment worldliness, including obscure and highly specific strains of fruits and vegetables—Castelfranco, ceci neri, celtuce, curry leaf, calamansi.

Yet the context in which they’re presented doesn’t seem to have changed at all, which is a shame, especially given that the bar for stuffiness has moved significantly lower in the past thirty years. “Bar & Grill” has been dropped from the name, but the dining room, with its yellowed parchment-colored walls and pleated-parachute light fixtures, looks exactly the same, except quite a bit worse for wear. The service is formal and sometimes stiff; more than one dish is finished with a tiny pitcher of sauce or broth, poured tableside for dramatic flourish.

It’s clear that Blamey has interesting ideas, but they feel, for the most part, choked, at odds with the restaurant’s long-held and now outdated identity. The Chicken Supreme may be garnished with makrut lime, but it’s still a boring breast, seared, sliced, and served over a sweet squash purée and beluga lentils. The appealing flavor combination of Brussels sprouts, dates, and tamarind was wasted, one Friday evening, on a prissy cut of pork called a “porcelet,” a bone-in chop from a milk-fed piglet, which was not particularly flavorful (and, worse, overcooked).

I absolutely loved a small bowl of caraflex cabbage, a cone-shaped variety: the ruffled leaves were at once meltingly tender and crisp-edged, buttery and sweet, crisscrossed with a salty, garlicky seaweed gremolata and hiding pearls of fregola glazed in a tart, fruity burned-onion broth. But I longed to free this down-to-earth dish—priced, astonishingly, at thirty-two dollars—from a menu with its head stuck in clouds of caviar, foie gras (for now) with truffle gelée, and rib eye for two.

I get the sense that Blamey might reach the height of her powers in a more relaxed, unfettered setting, serving her humble, homey pea dal and her shiny-crusted whole-wheat sourdough, flecked with brined pumpkin seeds and black quinoa, to a different kind of crowd. At dinner, the dining room was populated mostly by large parties that seemed to be composed of junior analysts at investment banks, bonding on the company card, or wealthy septuagenarian couples, bragging loudly about how long they’d been eating there and complaining about slow service. (“We want. Our FOOD,” I heard a stately gentleman growl at a hapless busser.) I suppose Gotham has always been, and remains, a place for ladies who lunch. A toast, as Sondheim archly put it, to that invincible bunch. (Dishes $18-$55.) ♦



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