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| Food & Drink |
| Set Lunches about London |
| Huntley Dent |
July 21, 2008 |
| Lucullus goes to lunch...
In an earlier entry on cheap eats in London I made passing reference to the institution of the set lunch. They are great theatre at their best, when someone with a Sears Roebuck upbringing (raise your hands with me) can mutter French phrases off the menu to someone else who is pretending to be your servant for an hour. Traditionally, the grandest London restaurants were a required stop-off for Parisian waiters, who spent a year here to complete their technique serving proper gentlemen and ladies. Or so I was told a decade ago. Now we’re lucky if the waiters, still mostly French, don’t spit in the soup the way fancy waiters did in Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. 
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Cheap Eats in London: Huntley's Recommendations
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| Huntley Dent |
July 16, 2008 |
| Cheap eats is still good eats. A petite English woman sitting next to me at the ballet looked like Miss Marple and spoke so softly I needed an ear trumpet. . She remarked that London was the dearest city in Europe. She wasn’t being affectionate – she meant the prices. This is a metropolis of perpetual sticker shock. A movie ticket is $21, a can of Coke one dollar each in the grocery store, and a sandwich with orange drink $24 at the Royal Opera’s splendiferous, glass-canopied Floral Hall. I grit my teeth and pay, but the urban strategist in me has outwitted the gouge.
If you want to eat cheap but also feel that you are eating well, the following are tried and true. I’m not giving reviews, just tips, and am leaving location and hours to the reader who is willing to consult Square Meal, the best online restaurant guide to London.
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| Gala Restaurant and Bar at the Orchards Hotel
222 Adams Road, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 01267
Tel: 413.458.9611; 800.225.1517
Fax: 413.458.3273
E-mail: reservations@orchardshotel.com
Rating: 4/5; Price: moderate; main courses $23-$39. Open seven days a week: breakfast served in the Dining Room from 7:00AM to 10:15AM daily; Sunday Brunch from 11:00 AM to 2:15 PM; Lunch 11:30AM to 2:15PM (entrees $6-15); Dinner from 5:30PM to 10:00PM (entrees $16-28); Lighter fare in the Bar from 5:30PM.
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| Michael Miller |
May 21, 2008 |
| As summer visitors converge on Williamstown, beginning with the Williams commencement and continuing on through the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which will conintue through late August, it will hardly occur to many that a refuge is available from whatever mild stresses the largely depopulated college town may offer. The Orchards Hotel, with its recently reinvented and renamed restaurant, Gala (formerly Yasmin’s), has stood on Main Street (Route 2) for some twenty-five years, just at the point where the town proper begins. Hotel, restaurant, parking, and their attractive landscaping are surrounded by a massive wall, which shields the buildings from traffic noise most effectively, but has in the past encouraged among locals a sense of exclusivity—borne out in the past by Yasmin’s ambitious and pricey menu. With new owners and the arrival of Chef Peter Belmonte, a Berkshire native, all that has changed. The new menu, which changes regularly, maintains a neat balance of the familiarity and innovation, and prices are refreshingly accessible. Festival regulars will also be pleased to learn that the popular Cabaret, absent from the Orchards for several years, will return in July and early August. |
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| Café des Artistes
One West 67th Street
New York, New York 10023
(212) 877-3500
Rating 4/5. Moderate to expensive: main courses $23-$39. Prix fixe $35 (Restaurant Week All-Year Round), Open seven days a week, lunch 11 to 3 pm and dinner 5 to 11pm. Jacket recommended but not required.
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| Michael Miller |
March 23, 2008 |
| So much has been said about the current craze for restaurant-going by people who are striving to understand it, either for enlightenment or profit, that it seems a truism to observe that a visit to a restaurant is a kind of travel, not entirely ersatz, but something between dreaming of Capri in an armchair and jumping on the train to Fire Island. The decorator has provided the sets, the chef a motive for going there, the staff a supporting cast; the diners at the table have their relationships, their hierarchy, and their desires, and, if the evening out is going to be any fun, they’re ready to play their roles. Dining out is also a self-generated theater, the ultimate interactive entertainment. It can be a journey in time, as well as a mildly-imagined land travel. Most people will go out for something old just as readily as something new, although the longevity of restaurants is tenuous enough these days to put that in question.
I was recently put in mind of the Café des Artistes, which I used to frequent rather a lot through the 1980’s. In fact some major life-changes germinated there. The collector-artist-developer Ian Woodner lived not in the famous Hotel des Artistes which houses the restaurant, but in an artist’s studio up the street where he had lived since his student days. Like the hotel residents in bygone days, Woodner used the Café as a dining hall. We were organizing an exhibition of Woodner’s drawings, and, either as his guests or on our own, we kept going back to the Café des Artistes. Often we’d go there on the late side, when the dining room and bar were in full swing, always fortissimo.
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| San Domenico, 240 Central Park South, (212.265.5959)
Lunch Mon-Fri 12-2:30 pm; Dinner Mon-Thu 5:30-11pm Fri-Sat 5:30-11:30 pm Sun 5-10 pm. Jacket required. Expensive.
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San Domenicowill close in June for six months. It is said that it will reopen at a midtown address, and that the Mays plan to make it a larger, less formal establishment.
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| Arlene B. Isaacs |
March 11, 2008 |
At the westernmost end of Central Park South, where you find the towering Time Warner Center and Columbus Circle you also find an elegant avenue o f luxury condominiums and world-class hotels. Steps from Columbus’ statue, you will find San Domenico Restaurant. There you will experience dining in the most elegant Italian tradition. The ingredient-driven food is at once simple, flavorful, light, and always very Italian. San Domenico consistently earns its reputation for the top-quality materials supplied by its purveyors and the refinement of chef Odette Fada’s cooking. (Fada, a native of Brescia, is one of the most respected chefs in the United States and has received numerous prizes and honors, including winning the White Truffle Competition in New York in 1999.) Tony May established his internationally renowned restaurant with authentic cuisine and its impeccable service in 1988 and his daughter Marisa has since joined him in the enterprise as Director, General Manager, and Co-owner. |
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