Restaurant Review: Lex Yard at the Waldorf-Astoria

Waldorf has introduced in Michael Anthony, the longtime government chef of Gramercy Tavern (the place he stays), to create the menu. A lodge restaurant—particularly a high-end one, particularly a high-end one that wishes to usher in diners past lodge friends—is a tricky trick to drag off. The kitchen must end up three meals a day which might be artistic sufficient to attract in finicky locals, anodyne sufficient to fulfill a world clientele, and durable sufficient to outlive the room-service gauntlet. Anthony’s established method of cooking at Gramercy, with ever-changing seasonal components and painstaking consideration to element, appeared to me incompatible with the higher-volume calls for of a lodge kitchen—although, in a single sense, Gramercy Tavern’s simplicity-perfected delicacies already is the best of lodge eating, minus the nuisances of a lodge, plus the exquisitely lavished attentions of a top-flight kitchen and world-class servers. The place do you even go from there?In some methods, fortunately, Anthony hasn’t gone anyplace. The menu at Lex Yard is a cornucopia of fruit and veggies, the choice attuned to the seasons in a method that feels actual, not identical to empty phrases in a server spiel. The choices in August have been plentiful in tomatoes, peppers, stone fruits, and summer time squashes. However, in contrast to the readability of strategy at Gramercy, the place the star of a dish is given area to actually shine, at Lex Yard there’s an terrible lot of fussing over these low-fuss elements—preparations, as an entire, tended to be over-considered, overwrought, over-garnished. A peak-of-summer tomato salad was needlessly complexified with each a swoop of creamy cheese and a watery tomato broth, together with vinegar-soaked pink cherries whose thunderous tartness outcompeted the entire tomatoes’ vibrance. Inexperienced beans, snappy and garden-fresh, have been an ingenious pairing for fluke in a tartare, however their delicate sweetness was almost imperceptible towards an onslaught of seemingly random garnishes: pelagic bits of nori, toasty sesame seeds, fuzzy bits of flowering oregano, some type of bright-green herb oil, a citrusy broth, and, for some purpose, halved cherry tomatoes.The halibut swims in a magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot.This maximalism, in a single kind or one other, appears to be the hallmark of each dish at Lex Yard, generally to the purpose of absurdity. A lobster roll, already inherently valuable, turns into a pile of rich-person nonsense with the addition of caviar—two varieties, inky, expensive baerii sturgeon, and orange, comparatively cheap trout roe—in addition to shreds of grated black truffle. (And such small parts! The sandwich is appetizer-petite.) I started to suspect that this more-is-more strategy was Anthony’s method of differentiating his Waldorf menu from Gramercy Tavern’s, however the Lex Yard dishes that I beloved most have been additionally, notably, probably the most Gramercy-like. A carrot-coconut soup, gentle as sunshine and gently candy, poured tableside over ribbonlike curls of carrot and turnip, shaved to translucent thinness, made me sigh with pleasure. A plump fillet of halibut, pan-roasted in olive oil till tender and satiny, was a superb shock of white in a sublime magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot. There was a touch of fall in each of these dishes, and I’m wondering if Lex Yard may turn out to be a stronger restaurant as soon as cooler temperatures set in and Anthony can outfit his greenmarket hauls with extra texture and heft. Among the finest dishes on the present menu makes about as a lot sense within the swelter of summer time as fur-lined boots on the seashore in Tulum: a portion of tagliatelle sensuously draped in mushroom-infused cream, with batons of bacon and oodles of cracked black pepper. Come November, nevertheless, it simply may find yourself being one of the crucial talked-about pastas on the town.Regardless of the restaurant’s flaws, you should have a wonderfully nice time if you end up at Lex Yard for a meal. Service is attentive and heat. The drinks (created by Jeff Bell, of the downtown cocktail bar PDT) are note-perfect. The desserts are as over-accessorized because the savory facet of the menu however put on their complexity nicely, particularly in a creamy chocolate budino (vegan, it seems) topped with a crackly tuile, a tumble of crushed nuts, and, to hell with it, a couple of wisps of gold leaf. Furthermore, I’d outright suggest the restaurant for breakfast, if it’s a must to eat your morning meal in that exact stretch of Manhattan. There are silken omelettes, a properly over-the-top “bagel service for 2,” and a fruit plate that’s fairly beautiful, even whether it is, inexplicably, dusted with bee pollen. The eggs Benedict, zhuzhed up with jammy leeks, are a welcome nod to the lodge’s historical past, and maybe a greater past-honoring alternative than the Walford salad—a layered composition incorporating grapes, walnuts, and a beneficiant portion of sharp, creamy white cheddar cheese—which, for all Anthony’s chefly ministrations, doesn’t handle to meaningfully transcend its basic apples-with-mayonnaise bizarreness.