Waldorf has introduced in Michael Anthony, the longtime government chef of Gramercy Tavern (the place he rest), to manufacture the menu. A resort eating place—particularly a high-end one, particularly a high-end one that wishes to deliver in diners past resort visitors—is a tricky trick to drag off. The kitchen must prove 3 foods a week which might be inventive enough quantity to attract in finicky locals, anodyne enough quantity to fulfill a global clientele, and durable enough quantity to live to tell the tale the room-service gauntlet. Anthony’s established approach of cooking at Gramercy, with ever-changing seasonal components and painstaking consideration to component, appeared to me incompatible with the higher-volume calls for of a resort kitchen—regardless that, in a single sense, Gramercy Tavern’s simplicity-perfected delicacies already is the best of resort eating, minus the nuisances of a resort, plus the exquisitely lavished attentions of a top-flight kitchen and world-class servers. The place do you even exit from there?
In many ways, thankfully, Anthony hasn’t long past any place. The menu at Lex Backyard is a cornucopia of vegatables and fruits, the choice attuned to the seasons in some way that feels actual, now not identical to unoccupied phrases in a server spiel. The choices in August have been considerable in tomatoes, peppers, stone culmination, and summer time squashes. However, in contrast to the readability of method at Gramercy, the place the big name of a dish is given range to truly radiance, at Lex Backyard there’s an disastrous batch of fussing over those low-fuss components—arrangements, as a complete, tended to be over-considered, overwrought, over-garnished. A peak-of-summer tomato salad used to be needlessly complexified with each a swoop of creamy cheese and a watery tomato broth, together with vinegar-soaked crimson cherries whose thunderous tartness outcompeted the entire tomatoes’ vibrance. Inexperienced beans, snappy and garden-fresh, have been an smart pairing for fluke in a tartare, however their roguish sweetness used to be just about imperceptible towards an onslaught of apparently random garnishes: pelagic bits of nori, toasty sesame seeds, fuzzy bits of flowering oregano, some more or less bright-green herb oil, a citrusy broth, and, for some reason why, halved cherry tomatoes.
The halibut swims in a magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot.
This maximalism, in a single method or every other, appears to be the hallmark of each dish at Lex Backyard, once in a while to the purpose of absurdity. A lobster roll, already inherently valuable, turns into a cluster of rich-person nonsense with the addition of caviar—two varieties, inky, expensive baerii sturgeon, and orange, rather affordable trout roe—in addition to shreds of grated unlit truffle. (And such miniature parts! The sandwich is appetizer-petite.) I started to suspect that this more-is-more method used to be Anthony’s approach of differentiating his Waldorf menu from Gramercy Tavern’s, however the Lex Backyard dishes that I beloved maximum have been additionally, particularly, essentially the most Gramercy-like. A carrot-coconut soup, comfortable as sunshine and gently candy, poured tableside over ribbonlike curls of carrot and turnip, shaved to semi-transperant thinness, made me sigh with diversion. A plump fillet of halibut, pan-roasted in olive oil till affectionate and satiny, used to be a magnificent trauma of white in an brilliant magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot. There used to be a touch of fall in either one of the ones dishes, and I marvel if Lex Backyard may turn out to be a more potent eating place as soon as cooler temperatures prepared in and Anthony can outfit his greenmarket hauls with extra texture and heft. Probably the most highest dishes at the tide menu makes about as a lot sense within the swelter of summer time as fur-lined boots at the seaside in Tulum: a portion of tagliatelle sensuously draped in mushroom-infused cream, with batons of bacon and oodles of cracked unlit pepper. Come November, on the other hand, it simply may finally end up being probably the most talked-about pastas on the town.
In spite of the eating place’s flaws, you are going to have a superbly delightful presen when you’re at Lex Backyard for a meal. Provider is attentive and heat. The beverages (created via Jeff Bell, of the downtown cocktail bar PDT) are note-perfect. The truffles are as over-accessorized because the savory facet of the menu however put on their complexity neatly, particularly in a creamy chocolate budino (vegan, it seems) crowned with a crackly tuile, a overturn of beaten nuts, and, to hell with it, a couple of wisps of gold leaf. Additionally, I’d outright counsel the eating place for breakfast, if you need to consume your morning meal in that individual stretch of Big apple. There are silken omelettes, a effectively over-the-top “bagel service for two,” and a fruit plate that’s reasonably nice-looking, despite the fact that it’s, inexplicably, dusted with bee pollen. The eggs Benedict, zhuzhed up with jammy leeks, are a welcome nod to the resort’s historical past, and most likely a greater past-honoring selection than the Walford salad—a layered composition incorporating grapes, walnuts, and a beneficiant portion of bright, creamy white cheddar cheese—which, for all Anthony’s chefly ministrations, does now not supremacy to meaningfully go beyond its elementary apples-with-mayonnaise bizarreness.