The Waldorf-Astoria’s Fresh Bid for Dining Relevance

Waldorf has brought in Michael Anthony, the longtime executive chef of Gramercy Tavern (where he remains), to create the menu. A hotel restaurant—especially a high-end one, especially a high-end one that wants to bring in diners beyond hotel guests—is a tough trick to pull off. The kitchen needs to turn out three meals a day that are creative enough to draw in finicky locals, anodyne enough to satisfy an international clientele, and sturdy enough to survive the room-service gauntlet. Anthony’s established way of cooking at Gramercy, with ever-changing seasonal elements and painstaking attention to detail, seemed to me incompatible with the higher-volume demands of a hotel kitchen—though, in one sense, Gramercy Tavern’s simplicity-perfected cuisine already is the ideal of hotel dining, minus the nuisances of a hotel, plus the exquisitely lavished attentions of a top-flight kitchen and world-class servers. Where do you even go from there?

In some ways, happily, Anthony hasn’t gone anywhere. The menu at Lex Yard is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, the selection attuned to the seasons in a way that feels real, not just like empty words in a server spiel. The offerings in August were abundant in tomatoes, peppers, stone fruits, and summer squashes. But, unlike the clarity of approach at Gramercy, where the star of a dish is given space to really shine, at Lex Yard there’s an awful lot of fussing over these low-fuss ingredients—preparations, as a whole, tended to be over-considered, overwrought, over-garnished. A peak-of-summer tomato salad was needlessly complexified with both a swoop of creamy cheese and a watery tomato broth, along with vinegar-soaked red cherries whose thunderous tartness outcompeted all of the tomatoes’ vibrance. Green beans, snappy and garden-fresh, were an ingenious pairing for fluke in a tartare, but their subtle sweetness was nearly imperceptible against an onslaught of seemingly random garnishes: pelagic bits of nori, toasty sesame seeds, fuzzy bits of flowering oregano, some kind of bright-green herb oil, a citrusy broth, and, for some reason, halved cherry tomatoes.

This maximalism, in one form or another, seems to be the hallmark of every dish at Lex Yard, sometimes to the point of absurdity. A lobster roll, already inherently precious, becomes a pile of rich-person nonsense with the addition of caviar—two types, inky, pricey baerii sturgeon, and orange, relatively inexpensive trout roe—as well as shreds of grated black truffle. (And such small portions! The sandwich is appetizer-petite.) I began to suspect that this more-is-more approach was Anthony’s way of differentiating his Waldorf menu from Gramercy Tavern’s, but the Lex Yard dishes that I loved most were also, notably, the most Gramercy-like. A carrot-coconut soup, soft as sunshine and gently sweet, 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 until tender and satiny, was a brilliant shock of white in an elegant magenta consommé of dashi and beetroot. There was a hint of fall in both of those dishes, and I wonder if Lex Yard might become a stronger restaurant once cooler temperatures set in and Anthony can outfit his greenmarket hauls with more texture and heft. One of the best dishes on the current menu makes about as much sense in the swelter of summer as fur-lined boots on the beach in Tulum: a portion of tagliatelle sensuously draped in mushroom-infused cream, with batons of bacon and oodles of cracked black pepper. Come November, however, it just might end up being one of the most talked-about pastas in town.

Despite the restaurant’s flaws, you will have a perfectly pleasant time if you find yourself at Lex Yard for a meal. Service is attentive and warm. The drinks (created by Jeff Bell, of the downtown cocktail bar PDT) are note-perfect. The desserts are as over-accessorized as the savory side of the menu but wear their complexity well, especially in a creamy chocolate budino (vegan, it turns out) topped with a crackly tuile, a tumble of crushed nuts, and, to hell with it, a few wisps of gold leaf. Moreover, I’d outright recommend the restaurant for breakfast, if you have to eat your morning meal in that particular stretch of Manhattan. There are silken omelettes, a nicely over-the-top “bagel service for two,” and a fruit plate that’s quite lovely, even if it is, inexplicably, dusted with bee pollen. The eggs Benedict, zhuzhed up with jammy leeks, are a welcome nod to the hotel’s history, and perhaps a better past-honoring choice than the Walford salad—a layered composition incorporating grapes, walnuts, and a generous portion of sharp, creamy white cheddar cheese—which, for all Anthony’s chefly ministrations, does not manage to meaningfully transcend its fundamental apples-with-mayonnaise bizarreness.