Six-Hour Waits: The West Village Is New York’s Hottest Dining Hood
While the crowds pack Chelsea Market, here are six destination spots that make WeMePa the best place to eat and drink in the city.
(Bloomberg) -- The West Side of Manhattan should be dead to the food world. When the landmark restaurant Barbuto shut its garage doors at the end of May, it seemed to announce the end of real Village dining, where dishes like roast chicken with salsa verde and smashed potatoes had a soul-satisfying simplicity and street views didn’t look like an outdoor mall. It didn’t help that the beloved dell’Anima had also closed, as well as Chelsea’s Red Cat, if your tastes extended northward—this all the while Hudson Yards was becoming its own center of dining gravity.
And yet, here we are where the neighborhood surrounding Barbuto—the intersection of the West Village that includes the Meatpacking District, let’s call it WeMePa—has become the city’s strongest dining destination, shaking off its long hangover of drunken revelers crashing around the cobblestones post-club and Instagram “influencers” stopping traffic to get the shot.
Pastis is back, for instance, a block away from its original setting. Founder Keith McNally, who reopened the place with restaurateur Stephen Starr, said he considered a new location after it closed in 2014. “For two seconds I thought about moving it to Brooklyn,” he says.
He chose to stay, even as (or because) the neighborhood got more crowded with tourists. An estimated 7 million visitors meandered along the nearby High Line last year, with even more heading to Chelsea Market—it had 9.2 million visitors in 2018. “Proof that people who come here want to eat,” says Jeffrey LeFrancois, executive director of the Meatpacking District.
While the crowds pack Chelsea Market, here are six destination spots that make WeMePa the best place to eat and drink in the city.
“The new Pastis is larger and airier than the first and has an extra room,” says McNally. “And the bathrooms are shabbier, I’m glad to say.” The dining room provides an instant flashback to the heyday of Sex and the City although with newer faces, like Andy Cohen and Antoni Porowski, filling its multitude of red leather banquettes.
Although McNally characterized the food as “lighter,” the greatest hits of brasserie fare are on offer: escargot swimming in a sea of garlic and parsley butter, salade nicoise with a brisk red wine vinaigrette, and multiple versions of steak frites, including entrecote with bearnaise ($54). New dishes such as skate moutard appear, but the bestsellers are classics, namely the steak sandwich, stocked with caramelized onions and melted Gruyere on a sturdy Balthazar roll. Among the house cocktails are Mon Amer (gin, Aperol, grapefruit, and Champagne). Prepare for a jam at the host stand.
52 Gansevoort St.
There was a minor freakout around New York with the news that the storied West Village bar had been taken over by restaurateur Eytan Sugarman, whose other properties include the much-maligned Hunt & Fish Club. (His partner there, Anthony Scaramucci, tweeted that despite rumors he would not be involved in the White Horse.) Pints of beer used to dominate the bar; now the beverage program has cocktails with fresh juices and housemade bitters. “We didn’t touch the aesthetics—the clocks, the mirrors—but the food, that’s dramatically different,” says Sugarman. He tapped chef Ed Szymanski, a veteran of neighboring Spotted Pig, to run the kitchen.
The young British chef has installed a pub menu with Scotch eggs that Szymanski makes with braised pig’s head, packed around a bright yellow-yolked soft-boiled egg. His burger is made with a blend of brisket and short rib, topped with a slice of cheese that the chef makes himself, from the broken wheels of another Village institution, Murray’s Cheese. In the fall, he’ll add more cheesy dishes such as Welsh rarebit. “Dylan Thomas was Welsh,” says Szymanski, in reference to one of the White Horse’s best-known regulars. “That’s one way we’re leaning into the history of the place.”
567 Hudson St.
Rooftop dining in the Meatpacking District is not a concept that augurs well for culinarily minded people—especially if that restaurant is part of a chain. Yet, Brendan Sodikoff of Au Cheval has created a very good and very popular experience at RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) outposts across North America.
On the site of the original Pastis on a stretch of Ninth Avenue now sits the fortress-styled $50 million, 90,000-square-foot flagship. The rooftop restaurant could be a fancy greenhouse with glass walls and ceilings, a line of glittering chandeliers, and big views. The menu is a crowd-pleasing one: kale Caesar with garlic croutons; honey-glazed broiled salmon with confit lemon; and market-priced truffle pasta. There’s a burger, of course: two cheese-topped patties with lettuce, tomato, and Dijonnaise. The roof also has a landscaped bar with a park’s worth of jasmine bushes and banquettes that make a good escape when the streets below get overcrowded.
9 Ninth Ave.
On a recent summer Saturday evening, a hopeful customer was told that the wait for a table of four at Via Carota would be six hours. That outrageous estimate is matched only by the reality that many people will grab that place on the waiting list.
The no-reservations restaurant represents an idealized form of casual Italian dining, with an oversize, illustrated menu stocked with dishes like carciofi alla griglia (grilled artichokes with aioli), trippa alla Fiorentina (braised tripe with pecorino), svizzerina (hand-chopped steak), and one of the country’s very best renditions of cacio e pepe, made with thick, chewy tonnarelli noodles. James Beard Award-winning chef/owners Jody Williams and Rita Sodi also offer an idiosyncratic all-Italian wine list, by the glass carafe and bottle, which is good. Because there’s going to be a wait.
51 Grove St.
Also by Williams and Sodi, this picture-perfect aperitivo bar sits directly across the street from Via Carota. It’s a charming spot to become a spritz expert: Behind the marble bar, a brigade of servers in buttoned-up ivory jackets dispense vibrantly colored spritzes from the tap and mix drinks that invariably include amari and vermouth. To eat, there’s a selection of snacks ranging from a saucer of housemade cacio e pepe potato chips, breadsticks with a little pile of prosciutto, mini panini stuffed with chicken Milanese, and delightful bombolini (doughnuts) that might have raspberry jam or Nutella inside. There are a few seats inside and some highly coveted outside, but standing is encouraged—and, indeed, part of the fun of the place.
Meanwhile, the pair have offered yet another reason to bet on the West Village; they’ve announced the opening of a restaurant devoted to Shaker food, a few blocks west on Commerce Street.
52 Grove St.
Gabe Stulman has been a West Village booster for a decade, with an empire that includes the Midwestern-evoking, pocket-size Joseph Leonard on Waverly Place. Fairfax is decked out like someone’s stylish living room, an eclectic mix of deep sofas, rattan chairs, floor lamps, and bookshelves. The all-day cafe has a menu that flows from yogurt and house granola bowls and hearty plates of gravlax with scallion cream cheese and soft-boiled eggs to later in the day, when white bean hummus, steak tartare with cured egg yolks, and branzino with lemon tahini and pickled jalapeños start hitting tables.
But you could just come and drink. Besides a wine list with over 100 bottles—much larger than the small space would suggest—there are exceptional cocktails from Brian Bartels. The White Lines is a mix of whiskey and Carpano Bianco vermouth that’s easy to drink and served on tap.
234 W. 4th St.
Looking Ahead
The Riddler NYC
This September, the delightful San Francisco Champagne bar will open an East Coast clubhouse on the corner of Bank and West 4th streets. The 700-square-foot space will stock over 100 sparkling wines. Owner Jen Pelka favors a high-low approach to the menu: There will be the signature tater tot waffles topped with smoked salmon, caviar, and chicken fingers coated with Ritz crackers, and a Grand Marnier-spiked dark chocolate pot de crème served in a caviar tin with a topping of Rice Krispies. New to New York will be a brass-rimmed raw bar. Pelka says she knew she wanted to open her highly anticipated place in the West Village: “It’s so classic New York with small, windy streets that take you off the busy grid. It’s my ‘silver tuna,’ as they would say in Home Alone.”
51 Bank St.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net
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