Cafe Tallulah

I’ve never built or run a restaurant, but I’m gonna go out on a limb, and give some advice: don’t tell the press that you’re building a new Balthazar or Elaine’s. Those two places are too iconic – too legendary –to be copied. The attempt is bound to seem pale by comparison.

That’s exactly what Greg Hunt, owner of Cafe Tallulah on the Upper West Side, did. Florence Fabricant of The Times duly reported it. Hunt hired Roxanne Spruance, a sous chef from Blue Hill Stone Barns (and previously WD~50) to run the kitchen. An Employees Only alumnus was in charge of the cocktails. With that background, the critics were sure to turn up, right?

Except: five weeks later, Spruance was gone, replaced by one Patrick Farrell, who promptly got slammed by The Post’s Steve Cuozzo. According to the folks at Immaculate Infatuation, the place is now on its third chef in ten months.

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Andanada 141

If at first you don’t succeed…you know how the saying goes.

Andanada 141 is the third attempt to create a destination Spanish restaurant at a particularly cursed address, following on the heels of Graffit and Gastroarte. The graffiti-inspired décor remains largely intact, despite the new name, which refers to the top tier of seats at a bullfighting ring.

Chef Jesús Núñez, the chef behind the first two attempts, is gone. Replacing him is Manuel Berganza, who earned two Michelin stars at two different Madrid restaurants. You’d think those chops would be worth at least a look, but after seven months, the Daily News has supplied the only pro review, awarding four stars out of five.

I guess modern Spanish cuisine is a tough sell in this neighborhood. On a Friday evening, before the ballet, the restaurant was not half full. That’s a pity. Andanada 141 is the best of the three Spanish restaurants that have tried to make a go of it in this space.

The cuisine is more conservative than Jesús Núñez’s sometimes baffling creations—which we mostly liked, but not everyone did. We had time to try only a few items. I look forward to trying a lot more.

The menu offers tapas in a wide price range ($6–25), entrées ($28–32), paellas ($24–25 per person, minimum two guests), and desserts ($9).

 

In Pulpo a la Gallega ($16; above left), tender chunks of octopus were in a potato purée, seasoned with olive oil and pimienton de vera, or what tasted to us like chives and paprika. This was one of the best appetizers we’e had all year, rich and satisfying.

We were also fond of the Migas al Pastor ($13; above right), a crockpot of chistorra (Basque sausage) with breadcrumbs and grapes, topped with a poached egg. Good as it was, it would have made a far better impression had it not been served at the same time as our entrée, the paella, which deserved the stage all to itself.

Four paellas are offered: seafood, meat, vegetarian, and mixed. The carne ($25; above), which we ordered, was one of the best paellas I’ve had in a while, a happy brew of pork belly, rabbit, chicken, carrots, chorizo, red peppers, and yellow rice. For one week only, the restaurant was offering a free pitcher of sangria (very good) to go with the paella, so we didn’t explore the wine list. That’ll be for next time.

We dined at the bar, where it was sometimes a challenge to get the server’s attention, despite the restaurant not being full. That, coupled with the late delivery of our second tapa, took the edge slightly off what was otherwise an excellent showing. It’ll take a few more visits to establish if Andanada 141 lives up to the promise of the three dishes we tried. We are certainly looking forward to it.

Andanada 141 (141 W. 69th Street, east of Broadway, Upper West Side)

Food: Modern Spanish, but fairly conservative, and very well prepared
Service: Earnest and friendly, but needs polishing
Ambaince: A comfortable UWS townhouse, artfully decorated

Rating: ★★

Nougatine

Nougatine is the casual front room at Jean-Georges, the analogue of such companion places as the Bar & Lounge at Daniel, the Lounge at Le Bernardin, the Bar Room at The Modern, or the Salon at Per Se.

These companion rooms vary widely: some are separately reservable, others are not. Some are far more casual than the multi-star restaurants they’re attached to; others don’t vary much at all. Some serve a completely different menu; others serve an à la carte version of the main dining room menu.

Nougatine is separately reservable, has a completely different menu, and is much more casual than its four-star companion. Of course, the word casual must be taken in perspective, on a menu where a $19 cheesburger shares the stage with $72 Dover sole. Most of the entrées, though, are in the $24–38 range that defines New York’s “upper middle,” while appetizers range from $12–23.

The space, originally a lounge for the adjoing Trump International Hotel, was long an afterthought, seldom professionally reviewed. Nougatine received its first New York Times review in late 2012 (Pete Wells, two stars), a mere fifteen years after the flagship next door received four stars from Ruth Reichl right out of the gate.

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The Smith (Lincoln Center)

When The Smith opened in the East Village in 2007, I never imagined it would become a mini-chain. It seemed to us, at the time, an average neighborhood spot and NYU student cafeteria. But a Smith clone opened in East Midtown in late 2011, and a year later across from Lincoln Center, in the old Josephina space. I’m sure it’s not the last one.

The concept here is similar to the East Village: a boistrous, casual space, with subway tile walls and leaded glass windows. It looks like Keith McNally could have designed it, right down to the communal washrooms outside the loo. They take reservations, and the hostess checks coats, which I don’t remember them doing downtown.

menus are similar, but most of the entrées uptown are a couple of dollars more, and at Lincoln Center they serve some extra items: a $75 porterhouse for two, a raw bar. But the core of the menu is the same, and one of the best items, a burger, is $15 at either establishment.

 

Trout Milanese ($25; above right) is an appealing entrée, served breaded in a mustard crust on a bed of lentils. I didn’t really taste the bacon or pear compote alleged to be in the dish, but it was fine for what it was. I would have liked a bit more kick from the mustard. My girlfriend loved the lobster roll ($29; above left; served only on Fridays), which comes with irresistible house-made chips, as it did when we had it in the East Village two years ago.

There are about fifteen well-thought-out cocktails ($13), and about two dozen over-priced wines by the bottle. But there’s another twenty wines by the glass, caraffe, or large caraffe. These are the way to go. We had the Pinotage ($25, the caraffe), which was the right amount of alcohol before an opera. Bur really, are they that hard up that they can only afford juice glasses to serve it in? C’mon guys!

I’d forgotten how much space there was at Josephina, the restaurant that was here before. The front room would make for a good size restaurant all by itself, but you pass through a corridor and there’s another dining room in back, which is a bit more sedate. This was pre-show, so the crowd was all ages—unlike downtown, which skews young. They did a brisk business, but weren’t full. The noise level was energetic, but not punishing.

My impression here was a bit more favorable than our visit to the original Smith two years ago. Downtown, there’s many more restaurants to charm you. The Lincoln Center scene has improved, but it’s no East Village. There isn’t really any other good spot quite like this one, serving elevated pub food, and doing it pretty well. We’ll be back.

The Smith (1900 Broadway between 63rd & 64th Streets, Upper West Side)

Food: Elevated American pub food
Service: Good for this sort of place
Ambiance: McNally Lite

Rating: ★
Why? Lincoln Center needed a restaurant like this 

The Purple Fig

Note: After a brief late-summer closure in late August 2012, the Purple Fig re-opened in September with a “more simple” menu. We liked our visit (when the original menu was still available), but the consensus of most other reviewers was negative.

By December 2012, the space had reverted back to its former name, P. D. O’Hurley’s. That experiement lasted less than three months, before the restaurant was seized by the marshall, presumably for non-payment of taxes. The space was closed as of June 2013, but the 70-year-old Emerald Inn is expected to relocate there.

*

You’ve got to give credit to the team behind The Purple Fig, the cute new French bistro on the Upper West Side. Nothing they’re serving, nor the style in which they are serving it, is remotely fashionable. So they’ve opened this new restaurant for the best possible reason: because they believe in it.

But one must ask where the customers will come from. It’s too fancy to bring the kids, not quite good enough to be a destination, not edgy enough to attract a younger crowd, a tad too far from Lincoln Center to be an obvious pre-theater place, and too expensive to be a neighborhood standby.

After you subtract all the potential guests I’ve just excluded, are there enough remaining to make a go of it? I hope so. The Purple Fig, though not yet great, is promising. In a town where new French restaurants are scarce, you want to root for every one.

Prices, for this location, are a bit dear, with appetizers $9.95–20.95, entrées $23.95–36.95, and side dishes $5.95. Every price ends in “.95,” an outdated and unendearing conceit.

The chef, Conrad Gallagher, was last seen in New York at the now-closed Peacock Alley. A rendition of the Purple Fig in Dublin won him a Michelin star.

Calling it a “modern bistro,” he serves an eccentric menu, with concoctions like: Deep Fried Soft Duck Egg with Polenta, Soft Blood Pudding, Frisée Salad with Prosciutto, Lemon Oil Emulsion.

That’s just one dish. Most others feature similar long lists of ingredients. And you wonder: How’s that going to work?

One might begin with that old standby, the “Goats [sic] Cheese Salad,” served here with wild rocket, confit tomatoes, toasted garlic, pumpkin seeds and marinated figs ($9.95; above right).

Here, the goat cheese sits atop a tiny puff pastry, instead of being integrated into the salad. I don’t consider that an improvement, though I must report: my girlfriend loved the dish.

 

I much admired a Goose Liver Parfait ($12.95; above left), with fig marmalade, spinach salad, apricot compote, and hazelnut aioli, served with perhaps the best brioche I’ve ever been served with this type of dish (above right), so thick and hearty it could have been French toast.

 

My girlfriend and I had the same entrée, the Roasted Muscovy Duck Breast ($26.95; above left), with poached figs, butternut purée, lentils, a quail egg, and green apple salad. She liked it far better than I did. The duck was fine enough, but the lentils tasted bitter, and the dish felt like a pile of unintegrated ingredients. I wasn’t fond (and have never been fond) of the blob of baby food shaped like the point of a spear.

The chef has a fondness for figs: quite inadvertently, they figured in all three dishes we ordered. I guess the place has “fig” in the name for a reason.

The kitchen sent out a plate of the French Fries with Truffle Aioli (normally $5.95; above right). I assumed they came with the duck or were comped, until they appeared on the bill—removed, in all fairness, after I pointed out the error. I’m glad I didn’t pay for them, as they were soggy and not warm enough.

The wine list, as at many new restaurants, doesn’t have much personality. Running to just a page, it’s a list of safe, unremarkable bottles, with no geographic or thematic unity. It isn’t even majority-French. I suspect a consultant put it together.

The space is smartly decorated, in a purple motif that isn’t at all obtrusive, but with its white tablecloths and dim lighting, the space feels fancier than it needs to be. The dining room was about half full on a Friday evening. A handsome long bar wasn’t occupied at all.

Some early message board reports complained about the service, but two months in those issues have been rectified. The staff (most speak with French accents) now seem on top of their game. Aside from the one dish billed in error, we had no complaints. The restaurant is a work in progress, but good enough to be worth a second visit a few months from now.

The Purple Fig (250 W. 72nd St., west of Broadway, Upper West Side)

Food: Modern “eccentric” French
Wine: A generic unfocused list; adequate, but could be better
Service: Mostly very good
Ambiance: An upscale spot that feels fancier than it needs to be

Rating: ★
Why? Not destination cuisine, but worth keeping an eye on

Loi

Note: Loi closed in July 2014, supposedly because the restaurant’s owners could not reach a lease agreement with the landlord. I found the very large space nearly empty on both of my visits, and most of the city’s main critics never reviewed it. A meatery called Lincoln Square Steak replaced it.

*

Compass was the restaurant with more lives than a cat. Between 2002 and 2011, it chewed up and spitted out at least six executive chefs. Most of them were pretty good, but the place never developed a following.

Finally, the owners gave up on the name, and brought in Maria Loi as a partner to run the place. Known as the “Greek Martha Stewart,” she has written several cookbooks and, until recently, hosted a cooking show in Greece. She also owns a restaurant on one of the islands, produces a weekly magazine and a series of DVDs, designs a line of appliances and dinnerware, partners in a clothing business, and has also lobbied on behalf of firms like Texaco and Nokia.

I’ve no doubt that Ms. Loi has a talent for breaking down Greek cooking to a series of easy steps comprehensible to the amateur—like a Rachael Ray, Giada DeLaurentiis, or yes, Martha Stewart. None of this implies a talent for running a restaurant.

Hardly anyone believes that chefs like Daniel Boulud or Jean-Georges Vongerichten actually cook the food at the restaurants named for them. But they are, at least, full-time professional chefs, and have been for their entire adult lives. Ms. Loi isn’t even that. She’s the front for an operation that will be run (mostly) by others.

The restaurant—called Loi, naturally—re-opened in late October after a two-month renovation. The floor layout is pretty much the same as it was at Compass, but it’s clad in a handsome Aegean skin, with comfortable seats, crisp white tablecloths, and a regimented, well-dressed staff.

Five weeks in, Ms. Loi is an active presence in the restaurant, highly visible on both of my visits. (She told The Times she intends to be here “24/7.”) She spends most of her time making rounds in the dining room, saying hello at least briefly to all her guests, and chatting at some length with those she recognizes.

Not that the rounds are at all demanding. This restaurant may have the same problem Compass did: staying full. The space is huge. The main dining room seats 125. There is also a spacious bar and lounge, and three private dining rooms seat up to 300.

On two weeknights, a week apart, Loi was about 10 or 20 percent full at 6:45 p.m., before I headed over to Lincoln Center. If it does not attract a significant pre-theater following, which it hasn’t so far, I cannot imagine how it will fill up, especially with the more modestly-priced and far better-known Kefi nearby.

Not that Loi is terribly expensive, especially for such an attractive space. Appetizers, soups, and salads are mostly in the mid-teens, entrées mostly in the mid-to-high $20s. Still, diners won’t forgive sloppy execution, and there is some of that.

I’ve no complaint with the ample bread service (above left), but Loi’s version of a Greek Salad, the Horiatiki Loi ($14; above right) was marred by a chalky brick of feta that tasted like it has been cut hours earlier, and left to sit in the fridge. I had hardly blinked before it came out, which makes me suspect they have a bunch of these pre-made.

On my second visit, the kitchen sent out a quartet of stuffed grape leaves (above left) as an amuse-bouche. My girlfriend and I shared the Tirokeftedes ($15; above right), cheese croquettes with baked goat and manouri cheese, with a fig and apricot compote. This was a decent enough appetizer, but like the salad on my prior visit, came out within moments and didn’t seem quite as fresh as it should be.

I wasn’t at all fond of Loi’s Moussaka ($19; above left). The traditional minced mean filling had been ground to where you could almost have sipped it through a straw, and the Bechamel sauce tasted a bit sour.

On my second visit, the entrées were more successful. An ample hunk of salmon ($26; above right) had a rich, smokey flavor. I also liked the Seared Diver Scallops ($28; below left), served in a bright dill sauce with asparagus.

Desserts (above right) were comped, as it appears they are at every table. (We were not given a dessert menu to inspect; they just appeared.) The explanation was a bit difficult to follow. One was a traditional baklava, and I am not sure about the other. Anyhow, they were both very good—perhaps the best part of the meal.

The service was attentive and solicitous, especially in the dining room; less so at the bar. They are a shade over-eager to take your order and get you out the door to a show.

Any neighborhood can use an authentic Greek restaurant that is not as mass-produced as Kefi, but not as outrageously priced as midtown’s Estiatoria Milos. The menu at Koi is a work in progress (there are various recited specials), and so is its execution. Here’s hoping it becomes dependable.

My girlfriend, who did not suffer through my less impressive first visit, enjoyed Loi and would happily go back, and so we will.

Loi (208 W. 70th Street, west of Amsterdam Avenue, Upper West Side)

Food: ★
Service: ★½
Ambiance: ★★½
Overall: ★

Lincoln Ristorante

I’ve dined at Lincoln Ristorante several times since it opened a year ago. It is not my favorite Lincoln Center restaurant, but it is certainly the most convenient, and it is very good.

I just wish I liked it better. I want to like it better. People I respect like it better. But it usually leaves me wanting more.

Lincoln opened with the proverbial thud, getting lukewarm reviews from most of the city’s critics. I had a long list of complaints in my original review, and I stand by most of them. Lincoln is too corporate: it screams of design by committee. The room and the building are unattractive. These things are unfixable.

What Chef Jonathan Benno and Restaurant Director Paolo Novello have done, is to fix what they can. Lincoln is not bargain dining, but prices now are a shade lower. An expensive tasting menu and an absurd $130 ribeye are no longer offered. Portion sizes, which for some dishes were insultingly small, have been increased.

Benno has found his inside voice. Though I am not fond of the open kitchen, at least you no longer hear a drill sergeant commanding the Normandy invasion. We sat right next to the glass partition at dinner a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t think we heard him once. What a relief!

Service, which was already excellent, has continued to improve. The staff know they need to get you to your show on time—all of my visits have been pre-concert or pre-opera—and they do it well, without ever seeming to be in a rush. Ask about any item, and a clear, patient, encyclopedic explanation will follow.

On the current menu, antipasti are $17–25, pastas $20–28, entrées $30–45, side dishes $10–15, and desserts $10–12. A traditional four-course Italian meal will thus set you back around $90 to $100 a head before wine, but I seldom eat that much before a show, and I am probably not alone. Indeed, the staff actively suggest that pasta dishes be ordered as mains or in half-portions.

We shared the Reginette Verdi al Ragú Bolognese ($24; above left), which the kitchen divided and served in separate bowls. This was one of the more enjoyable pastas I’ve had in quite a while. The reginette is a fascinating noodle, shaped like a long, thin, green zipper. The ragú was a rich mix of veal, pork, and beef, topped with just the right kick from parmigiano-reggiano.

But Halibut ($36; above right) was on the dry side. It was served over excessively salty lentils baked in chicken stock and pig trotters, but I couldn’t taste those ingredients. This seems to be my fate at Lincoln, where the wonderful dishes are offset by the less successful ones.

With the petits fours (right) there’s no argument. They may not be the fanciest, but they are more than sufficient.

So that’s the status of Lincoln circa late 2011. The professional reviews have started to improve. Esquire’s John Marianai called it one of the best new restaurants of the year. Gael Greene in Crain’s recently gave it “three hats” out of four, noting, “It is thrilling to watch a shy, insecure adolescent grow into a magnetic, irresistible beauty.”

But even allowing a year for Lincoln to improve, the Post’s Steve Cuozzo could only give it two stars recently, just slightly better than his 1½ stars a year ago.

I’m with Cuozzo. I very much want to like it better, but still cannot.

Lincoln (142 West 65th Street at Lincoln Center)

Food: **
Service: ***
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

Gastroarte

Note: Gastroarte “closed for renovations” in September 2012. The chef, Jesús Núñez, had already left the restaurant to open a similar place in the West Village called Barraca. The space, still under the same owners, and still Spanish, is now called Andanada 141.

*

I wrote last week about the Spanish moment we’re in: Gastroarte, Salinas, Tertulia, and the extravagant Romera, all open within the last year, and all with ambitious—or in Romera’s case, stratospheric—intentions.

They probably won’t all succeed, but it’s progress in a town that has too many Italian and New Brooklyn restaurants, and not enough of practically everything else.

Gastroarte opened in January 2011 as Graffit, named for the graffiti-clad walls and the chef Jesús Núñez’s artful platings. But a google search on Graffit most often returned another Manhattan restaurant, chef Jehangir Mehta’s Graffiti.

Mehta sued for copyright infringement and Núñez relented, renaming his restaurant Gastroarte. Good move. Even if the suit was baseless (as it almost certainly was), it was dumb to have two such similar names in one city, and Mehta got there first.

It took some chutzpah to put such a restaurant on the Upper West Side, near Lincoln Center, a neighborhood not known for rewarding culinary risk-takers. Of course, the city’s restaurant critics aren’t known for that either. Sam Sifton, Adam Platt, and Steve Cuozzo all gave it just one star apiece.

Those ratings aren’t irksome in themselves: I gave it 1½ stars early on, and frankly, I am not sure if I would have rounded up or down, had I been using a system without half-stars. What is irksome is the lack of respect for the chef’s art and the recognition of its potential, even if its execution, at first, was not consistently enjoyable.

Menu prices have risen: appetizers are now $14–21 (vs. $10–18 in January), entrées $29–32 (vs. $23–27). That’s a fairly substantial increase of around $8–10 per person (before dessert), in under a year. As before, a tapas menu is served only at the bar and at the front walk-in tables—an inexplicable blunder.

I assume Gastroarte is getting the customers to justify those higher prices. Fortunately, it deserves them. Nine months later, Gastroarte is a much more polished restaurant. The service is more reliable, plates arrive at the right temperature, and the balance of flavors seems more sure-handed.

The vegetable stew under “Not-your-average egg” ($17; above left) changes with the season (compare it to the photo last time I had it). This version is less colorful than before, but it remains a triumph. As it was before, the centerpiece is an egg yolk enclosed somehow, miraculously, inside of a cauliflower sphere. It rests on turnip prepared two ways, and underneath that, yogurt and Serrano ham.

Lamb cheeks ($30; above left) were in a stew of lentils, spiced cheese, and asparagus, with a slice of brioche. A cuboid of black rice ($29; above right) was topped with calamari, sobrasada, and snow peas, with a streaks of Idiazábal cheese and red tobiko as garnishes.

Núñez doesn’t splurge on ingredients, but the assembly of these dishes is impressive, and so are the flavors, which blend beautifully. Both of the central proteins, the lamb cheeks and the calamari, were just right.

The difference from January is that the plates are no longer just entrants in an art exhibit: they’re a pleasure to eat, as well. That’s based on a small sample of the menu (plus amuses bouches and petits fours), but Gastroarte today seems far more promising than Graffit did at the beginning of the year.

Early on a Friday evening, before the opera, the dining room was not quite full. I have no idea if the traffic dies, or picks up, after curtain time; however, the restaurant has managed to impose a rather substantial price increase, without any of the usual signs of desperation, so I assume it is not doing badly.

In the competitive Lincoln Center dining market, it’s difficult to remain relevant (just ask Picholine, now an OpenTable 1,000-point fixture), but perhaps Graffit is on its way to becoming essential.

Gastroarte (141 W. 69th St. between Broadway & Columbus Ave., Upper West Side)

Food: **
Service: **
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

Telepan

Note: Telepan closed in May 2016, leaving the chef, Bill Telepan, without a restuarant. (Telepan Local, his Tribeca restaurant that was supposed to be a casual version of Telepan, failed miserably in 2014.)

Telepan had a respectable ten-year run, but as we noted in the review below, he had to scale back the original concept to stay aligned with what the neighborhood would pay, and even so, the restaurant wasn’t consistently full. He told The Times that, eventually, he reached the point where he couldn’t raise prices enough to keep pace with escalating costs.

In a sense, Telepan fell between two genres. Its Michelin star signaled a level of quality that the chef clearly wanted to maintain, but that doesn’t come cheap. It was too expensive to be an every-day restaurant, but didn’t attract enough guests to be a special-occasion place either.

*

I hated my first visit to Telepan, more than five years ago. For some odd reason, I nevertheless gave it 1½ stars. As I now see them, a star (even just one) is supposed to be a compliment, and there was very little about the meal that I liked.

Nevertheless, other reviews were generally good, and friends continued to recommend it, so Telepan was on my list of restaurants deserving a second chance, which it finally got last week.

The four-course prix fixe, which was $55 in 2006, has risen by just four dollars, to $59. If you order à la carte, the prices seem not to have changed at all: an over-priced restaurant has become a fairly-priced one.

The menu is still divided into three parts—starters ($10.50–15), mid-courses ($21–26), and entrées ($29–35—a format I dislike, but that has become more common, though still by no means prevalent. The use of fifty-cent price increments on some items feels a bit cheesy.

Of course, when prices are basically unchanged after five years, something is usually lost. What was once a flight of three amuses bouches is now one (above left), a plate of pickled radishes in a dipping sauce. But the bread service (three kinds) is excellent.

We weren’t that hungry, so we ordered entrées only. Wild Striped Bass ($33; above left) and Roasted Trout ($29.50; above right) were both presented simply, and very good for what they were.

Perhaps because of the overwhelming trend in favor of more casual dining over the last five years, Telepan’s décor, which once seemed dull, now seems upscale, bordering on elegant (though not quite there). The service is more polished than it was, then. The twenty-five page wine list offers a wide selection and price range, but the lower end (in the mid-$50s) is reasonable for this type of restaurant. If you want to spend three thousand bucks on a 1999 Screaming Eagle, you can.

The restaurant was not crowded on a Wednesday evening, but we dined early—6:00 p.m. for a 7:30 Lincoln Center curtain. When prices are virtually unchanged five years later, one can safely conclude that Telepan isn’t a runaway hit. However, it has hung on and improved, and we are better off for that.

Telepan (72 W. 69th St. btwn Central Park West & Columbus Ave., Upper West Side)

Food: ★★
Service: ★★
Ambiance: ★★
Overall: ★★

The Leopard at des Artistes

Twenty years ago, when I was looking for a restaurant that could play host to a romantic meal, a friend recommended Café des Artistes. I knew nothing about the place, but was instantly transported by the voluptuous décor. Alas, a practically dessicated Duck à l’Orange ruined the meal, and I vowed never to return.

The restaurant had been there, attached to the Hotel des Artistes, since 1917. More than its old-school French cuisine—which had its ups and downs, to put it charitably—the space was known for the nine murals of Rubensesque nudes, “Fantasy Scenes with Naked Beauties,” painted by one of the building’s residents, Howard Chandler Christy, from the late 1920s to 1935.

Jennifer and George Lang took over the restaurant in 1975. Despite the mediocre food, it was a popular haunt for musicians, celebrities, and journalists. (We saw soprano Beverly Sills there on our last visit.) In 2009, the restaurant closed for its usual August vacation and never re-opened. Business was down, as it was for many restaurants then, and as Mr. Lang was 85, the owners felt it was time to let go.

Later on, it came out that the union was partly to blame. Café des Artistes was one of the few non-hotel restaurants in the city with union labor. In a bitter post-mortem, Jennifer Lang noted that the place was hobbled with uncompetitive labor expenses that no other comparable restaurant would have. Several prominent restaurateurs passed on the space, because of its union affiliation.

Finally, about a year later, Gianfranco Sorrentino, owner of the Italian restaurant Il Gattopardo in midtown, inked a 15-year deal to re-open the space without union labor, vowing to invest $1.5 million to refurbish the dining room, including “expert restoration” of the Christy murals.

The restaurant re-opened last month as The Leopard at des Artistes (Gattopardo means “Leopard” in Italian). The cuisine and service style are old-school southern Italian. The renovation is gorgeous, but when you see the menu prices, you won’t forget what you’re paying for, as entrées (other than a $24 meatloaf) are $30–46.

As is often the case at such restaurants, there is a lengthy list of recited specials, from which both of us ordered. Whole Turbot ($46; above left) was expertly filleted tableside, served with braised escarole. House-made Fettucine ($24; above right) was served with a pork ragú.

One may blanche at the prices and quibble that the chef isn’t serving unmentionable pig parts or market vegetables grown on a rooftop in Brooklyn, but both dishes were impeccable. It is hard to imagine anything much better of their kind—especially the wonderful turbot, which I’d order again in a heartbeat.

As we were going to a concert at nearby Lincoln Center, we drank only one glass of wine apiece; but I noted that the medium-length wine list had plenty of options below $50 a bottle, a much lower entry price than one is entitled to expect at a restaurant this expensive.

The restaurant was about half full at 6:45 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, too early (in the evening, and in the week) to draw any conclusions about its prognosis. It is too expensive to justify being a regular here, but for food this good I’ll certainly be back occasionally.

The Leopard at des Artistes (1 W. 67th St. near Central Park West, Upper West Side)

Food: **
Service: **
Ambiance: ***
Overall: **