ADVERTISEMENT

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

(Bloomberg) -- Casual French food isn’t something most New Yorkers bother to cross 14th Street for, thanks to downtown restaurants like Pastis, The OdeonBalthazar, and Mimi.

But the team behind Quality Meats and Quality Italian is working to bring guests with a hankering for escargot to one of the city’s least interesting neighborhoods, Midtown.

The group has a talent for picking a destination dish. At Quality Italian, that menu item is chicken parmesan pizza, an entrée with a fried chicken crust, tomato sauce and a ridiculous amount of gooey cheese.

At Quality Bistro, which officially opens on Jan. 28, the group has a line-up of over-the-top, tweaked French classics competing to be that dish.

A preliminary contender: French onion soup. “The classic is good, but the problem is the construction: a cheese-topped crouton covers a pile of limp onion,” says the group’s chef-partner Craig Koketsu. He and Quality Bistro executive chef Antonio Mora (a Daniel restaurant alum) have devised a version that layers large, duck fat-roasted croutons with a hefty mix of melted cheeses—Comté, Gruyère, and muenster—in a short rib broth with chunks of the braised meat in the bottom of the bowl. It’s an outrageous, fondue-as-soup concoction that goes for $16.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

That would be my vote for signature dish. Another contender is the Detroit Tarte Flambée. Instead of the classic paper-thin squares of onion-topped dough, this one is a long, rectangular slice of puffy focaccia-like bread, baked with cheese to form crusty corners, like a good pan pizza. It’s strewn with pepperoni “cups” and bacon lardons, and the plate is served with a steak knife and a side of herbes de Provence ranch dressing.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

Mora also makes a fine roast chicken, a whole bird he marinates with lemon juice, herbs, lemon zest, and parsley before it’s roasted in a bath of brown butter. As an embellishment for steak tartare, he adds bone marrow brûlée.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

Quality Branded Group always sees the possibility of beef. Among the multiple steak offerings at the new bistro are strip steak frites ($45), a Double R Ranch rib steak ($55), and an entire filet mignon, which can come in the classic style or with chanterelle mushrooms and brioche. There’s also chateaubriand au poivre for two ($59 per person). The French-accented desserts from Cory Colton include a towering profiterole sundae and a large cup of creamy espresso sabayon with cinnamon toast brioche, called Petit Dejeuner.

The restaurant, set in the former Circo space opposite Milos on West 55th Street, was designed by AvroKo to become three dining rooms on separate levels. Monogrammed (QB) white cloth napkins are set on wood tables throughout the 180-seat restaurant. (There will be 50 more seats outside in the spring.)

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

In the front bar room, there are rattan-backed stools and a selection of house cocktails including four on tap, like the Bistro Spritz. Each brass tap is made from a refashioned cane handle in the shape of an animal head. The wine list is exclusively from France and California.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

Restaurateur Michael Stillman has had previous success in Midtown. Besides Quality Italian, he opened the finance-crowd favorite Quality Meats. Stillman grew up in restaurants: His father, Alan, opened the original TGI Fridays on the Upper East Side in 1965 as one of the first singles bars in New York. The younger Stillman wasn’t around when Cocktail was filmed at the Upper East Side TGI Fridays in the late ’80s. (His father claims the Tom Cruise character is modeled after him.)

“We like this ’hood,” says Michael. “Midtown has a negative connotation, but it’s New York. It’s got the museums, Central Park, and now big-time chefs, like Alex Stupak [of Empellon] and Daniel Humm [of the forthcoming 425 Park Ave. restaurant]. Maybe it’s not the sexiest, but it’s buzzing all the time.”

And Quality Bistro isn’t the first French-inspired restaurant in the Stillman empire. Smith & Wollensky, the monumental steakhouse in Midtown East, was inspired in part by a trip to France that Alan took. He recalled seeing brasseries that served French wine and French food and saw the opportunity to do the same thing with steakhouses: American wine to go with American beef.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

Stillman notes the evolution of the restaurant scene at his upcoming restaurant. “When we opened Quality Meats in 2006, we wanted to be experiential. It was a more industrial design than steakhouses had seen—than Midtown had seen. It was exciting to the guys in suits,” he says.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

Now there are hardly any suits, and a dish like vegan cauliflower carpaccio with marcona almonds is no longer a joke for his audience. “Customers geek out on a natural wine that isn’t upwards of $500.” He anticipates check averages at $85 to $90.

Even with the addition of vegetarian dishes and more salads, Quality Bistro isn’t a “healthy” restaurant—Stillman laughs at the idea. It’s hard to find a dish on the menu that isn’t defined by an extravagant amount of dairy fat, starting with an hors d’oeuvre called Butter Service Garni. At $28, it features hand-churned, aged butter with crusty bread and jambon cuit as supporting players.

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

A restaurant in that location has the opportunity to become the de facto delivery service for the neighboring apartments on 57th Street known as Billionaire’s Row. Stillman is doubtful about the prospect. “Never say no, but the experience of Quality Bistro is here,” he says. “Those buildings have a lot of other delivery options; it’s not something I’m going to worry about right now.”

Quality Meats Team Brings Over-the-Top French Classics to Midtown

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gaddy at jgaddy@bloomberg.net

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.