“Meet us in Room TwoE at The Pierre,” my friend Susan had said.  “We’ll have small plates.” Like the Road Food Warrior and me, Susan and Bob alternate between delicious excess and small plates.  She didn’t say but I was guessing we would be sipping a Strawberry Ridge red from Bob and Susan’s Connecticut winery, on the hotel’s wine list. Taj Hotels has just started to announce the grand opening of their $100 million redo of The Pierre and the world has not yet arrived. Restaurant Caprice, a seed of the hot London canteen, is a month away from opening. The path from Fifth Avenue to the check-in desk is nearly deserted as we search for TwoE.

        And then yes, we see a bar on the left, framed by a dramatic Georgian entry, down a few steps. Off to the left, seated in Architectural Digest-worthy splendor, are our pals, in a group of six, not quite finished with what might be business or maybe not. A very New York moment. Steven and I pull up heavy side chairs, speaking in sociable twitterings and start sipping Merlot.  Shall we be amusingly intrusive but not too?  And let’s catch up on the bar-lounge’s freebie snacks – super crisp potato chips, olives and nubbins of parmesan.  The house even stocks Kaliber, Steven’s favorite non-alcoholic beer.

        The room is expensive and lush with thick carpets easily tripped on, I’m afraid. Well, if you’re me.  Grey on grey.  The lighting is strangely flat, not unflattering, but rather somber. I feel rich and vaguely upper crust just sitting here as waiters bustle around, pouring, discreetly setting down overflowing chip bowls to replace ravished ones unasked. If olives count as salad and chips as veggies, we could make a meal of this salt and fat for the price of a drink.  No one seems in a hurry to leave.
 
       “Shall we ask for menus and order some small plates?” says Susan, our crowd’s most notable hostess. “And let’s move to fresh tables,” she says, dismissing the disheveled remnants of our cocktail hour covering three small black tabletops. We have a vast choice in the scantily-populated retreat.

 

        Servers scurry about our new bivouac bringing linen napkins, silver, clean goblets, splendid warmed petits pains, pouring water. I’m not expecting much of anything from the abbreviated listing of “Lite Bites” or even from “Plates” (five of them, mostly sandwiches), priced from $14 for yucca and plantain chips with roasted tomato salsa and hummus, to $26 for peppered tuna tataki or “Miniature” seared veal fillet with prosciutto, quail egg, olive tapenade and sauce vièrge. Promises, promises, promises, I’m thinking.

A whole small lobster and many vegetables go into the Pierre salad. Photo: Steven Richter

        Then Steven offers me a taste of his arctic char tartare, dressed up with curling plums of crisp plantain like a Folies Bergère showgirl in a cocktail glass. Big shock. It’s daringly spicy, tart and sweet.  Delicious topped with salmon roe and dosed with green chili pepper, crushed wasabi peas, lime, cilantro, basil and Japanese mayonnaise (with dashi stock and bonito flakes). There’s also an impressive amount of lobster in the Pierre salad – a whole small lobster in fact, with artichoke, carrot, cucumber, French radish, asparagus, hearts of palm, endive and white truffle oil dressing. It has a lusty after kick too.

Vietnamese-style Peekytoe crab rolls are full of crunch and color. Photo: Steven Richter

         Cuts of “Vietnamese-style paper roll” line up decoratively, full of peekytoe crab and crunch from cucumber, carrot and spring onion – to dip into chili-cilantro sauce.  We’re trading a cut for a taste of the ham and mozzarella panini on ciabatta with pesto and another for lamb kibbee on a skewer. My Cobb salad is a quite respectable version with bacon bits, tomato, avocado, hard-boiled egg, poached chicken and Roquefort, a small pitcher of mustard vinaigrette alongside.

         There are more salads at lunch, an additional sandwich – devilled egg on brioche – and cheesecake, chocolate cake and tarte tatin, indvidual desserts unlike the evening menu’s sharing items: $10 samplers of sorbet, panna cotta or crème brûlée baked in Chinese soup spoons, a serious letdown. Sorbets are unremarkable and the brûlée I (try to) taste is glued tight to its spoon.

         Well, this is a five star hotel after all, so you’ll pay plenty if you’re thirsty: $9 for tea or coffee, $7 for a small bottled water, but Bob says $45 for his ‘05 Ascot Reserve Merlot is a deal.

         And if you’re flirting with your next illicit affair, this is the place to play out the denouement. It’s sexy, smashingly good-looking and so far, undiscovered. And after your light but spicy late lunch or tea or evening bite, a newly spiffed up Pierre bedroom is just an elevator ride away.
 
       “Pierre Again,” is the tag of the new ad campaign featuring the mythic Carmen. What could be more glamorous than that?

2 East 61st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. 212 838 8000. Breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner from 7 am until 1 am. (Once Caprice opens, TwoE will open at 11 am)

*** 

After Florent: Gansevoort Café 69

 

Gansevoort Cafe 69 does not try to imitate the late beloved Florent. Photo: Steven Richter

        Our dinner tonight at Gansevoort Café 69 is sauced with nostalgia for Nico and Ava, but not me. Amazingly, in 40 years of reviewing New York restaurants, somehow I never found Florent. Nico and Ava agree it was funky and always jammed. Now its haunted space is almost empty and spanking clean with walls tiled in shiny white and a new tin ceiling. Mindful of its hallowed roots, the menu comes with a mission statement. “To elevate American comfort cuisine to its rightful place as heart and soul of our nation’s culinary identity.”  Whew. It seems to want to be the last bastion of working class comfort food in the desperate chic of the meat packing district. Outside, the crowds checking into Los Dados on the corner seem oblivious.

        “I can’t remember what it looked like,” says Nico.  “I never came to Florent when I wasn’t totally swacked.”  Ava, a generation ahead of Nico, remembers Florent “all by itself in the wilderness” of meatpackers, hookers and trannies. “We’d come after a party at 3 in the morning, for breakfast. The menu was written on the mirror, the food was never great, but it was French. The place was eclectic, very hip and fabulous. You could see stars or nobodies and always had to wait for a table. That’s how we knew how cool it was.”

        Well, these days we’re all shockingly sober.  Yet we struggle to navigate a menu that seems half-gelled – there are no starters, nothing listed as an appetizer - just whimsical categories like “From the Garden,” “From the Farm,” “From the Sea,” and “Between the Bread.”

        “We’ll share all three salads while we decide what to order,” I tell the server.  He brings an acceptable Cobb with two devilled eggs and blue ranch dressing in a big bowl, the orchard platter with apples, pears and roasted grapes I don’t need to see again, and a ridiculously modest and pricey frisee-lardons salad with not enough vinaigrette. We ask for serving spoons and he brings teaspoons.  “That’s all we have,” he apologizes.

         “What about soup spoons?” I ask. She shrugs.

 

        At least there are forks for moist and flavorful herb roasted chicken (I ask for dark meat and get it) “served au jus” over lemon pepper “risotto” with baby peas and purple onions, and for crusty, dark beer-battered fish and chips – marvelous chips – served with battered fried olives but not the advertised fried caperberries. “We’ve run out,” we’re told. The house lists Florence Meat Market as the source of its Prime Newport steak and tonight’s G69 burger is supposedly 8 oz. of Florence brisket and sirloin, $14 with fries, and various $3 add-ons. For Steven, Applewood smoked bacon, thick and crisp, just the way he likes it. A side of macaroni and cheese has more upscale ambition than my Mom’s, who never heard of fontina or Grafton cheddar and never dared béchamel. Still, it’s crusty and not over-sauced. 

 

        But it’s the chef’s mastery of potatoes that has us exclaiming. Splendid yam fries come with the pulled pork shoulder on a bun, along with a little bowl of wilted Swiss chard. Buttery mashed potatoes are virtuoso, better by far than the boring “prime” meatloaf they accompany.

 

        “This chef must be in love with potatoes,” I observe. 

         “She must be Irish,” Ava guesses. 

        “Yes, I am Irish,” says Chef Jacqueline Lombard. That’s her in the bandana stopping by to measure our contentment. She launched her career in pastry, she says. That’s why the page listing “Dessert Is Good for You” runs to 11 items.  “I’m editing out four this weekend and adding dinner items,” she confides, indicating that the menu is very much a work in progress. Later she confesses she has had difficulty finding experienced cooks and is sleeping in the restaurant so she can get up early enough to start breakfast.

        At her suggestion we order the banana cream pie with chocolate black-bottom crust to share, coconut rice pudding for Nico and Indian pudding for Ted. I will testify that I personally am finishing off a third of the chocolate ganache and banana pastry cream while the Indian pudding just sits there, but all of us are shocked by the bill: $16 for the banana confection, $18 for three small pieces of chicken although just $26 for prime steak. If you were sober enough to wade through the mission statement, you might wonder how $16 desserts pay homage to the “working class roots of the neighborhood.” As Gansevoort fiddles with the menu and sharpens its act, I’d urge a little thought go into the erratic pricing. The relentlessly gentrifying neighborhood still needs a haven for comfort.