October 7, 2008 |
Short Order
Will there be another palace where Frank Valenza’s dazzling doomed Palace used to be? Valenza, whose love’s labours was lost more than 25 years ago to the rage of an angry wife and a knot of legal problems, was feeling high last week after I choose The Palace for “my best meal ever” in New York’s 40th anniversary issue. He wandered to 429 East 59th Street to look at the scene of his youthful exuberance and found the current tenant, Savarona, closed. An ambitious attempt to recreate upscale Turkish cooking with an imported star chef from Istanbul, Savarona stumbled when its owner Temel Arcukmac became ill and left the place to minions who may or may not have played loose with the place. “You need me,” said Valenza, who restaurant-consults and reps Waygu beef these days. He enchanted Arcukmac with his idea for a contemporary Turkish-Mediterranean concept. It might even become a new Turkish Palace, the two men agree.
Valenza admits he’s never been to Turkey and all he knows of Turkish food is what he ate at Beyoglu and what he’s read browsing in the cookbook department at Barnes & Noble in the cookbook department. But he currently deals in caviar, truffle oil and kobe pastrami. Salmon kebabs, truffled hummus and kobe moussaka must not be written off. Having invested a small fortune from a Queens market to transform what was last chef Antoine Bouterin’s grandmotherly parlor crammed with flea market treasures into what looked like a canteen at a Turkish airport and with a twenty year lease “at very favorable terms” as he describes it, Arcukmac is thinking Valenza’s ideas might work. But first one or both of them have to find a transfusion of cash to reopen.
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