Brunch in New York

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Opened in 2001, db Bistro Moderne is a relaxed and fast-paced Manhattan restaurant, located in the City Club Hotel, at the Midtown crossroads of fashion and theater. This is Chef Daniel Boulud’s contemporary interpretation of the Parisian classic, and a restaurant where traditional French cuisine meets the flavors of the American market.

The restaurant is comprised of two dining rooms linked by a panel wine bar, which also connects the restaurant to the adjacent hotel lobby. When stepping in, eyes are drawn to a series of sensual, larger than life, floral photographs by Christopher Beane. Read the rest of this entry »

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First things first : The Park takes some very serious looking to find. There’s virtually no chance this is “on the way” to anywhere else you’re ever going to need to be, and—what do you know?—there isn’t actually a park anywhere near this place. Go figure.

On the other hand, you could argue they’ve brought the park indoors, right into the restaurant. So there is that. And if it’s greenhouse-style (!) brunching you’re after, this is one of your best choices in the entire city—if you’re willing to hike all the way west to Tenth Avenue, and then ignore the West Side Highway traffic whizzing right by your ear. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Flatiron Pan-Asian has been catering to a largely European nightlife crowd since its opening in 2009. While its well-heeled clientele has paid the rent on the sprawling space, Pranna has not quite generated the necessary buzz to land on every New Yorker’s must list. Pranna aims to expand its base with a Saturday brunch party, and in late May hosted a press brunch to help get the word out. Given that the event had been planned for weeks, there is no explanation – and no excuse – for the mind-bogglingly slow service and staff disorganization at the brunch.

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Were the interior of Nougatine at Jean-Georges a musical composition, it might be called The Gracious Living Symphony.  Designer Adam Tihany has waved a magic baton with blonde woods, ceiling-height windows, space around the tables – (and being as this is New York, let us repeat that)  – space around the tables, and a terrazzo tile and white marble hand-laid floor with a nougat-like appearance that inspired the café’s name.  When the weather cooperates, brunch is also served on the Mistral Terrace, which has unforgettably scrumptious “We are here and you are not” views of Central Park. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chinatown Brasserie might be one of the five most happening dim sum brunches in the whole city right now. (But check back with us in six months. You know how quickly these things can change.) Everyone from Paris to Kanye is rumored to have slipped in for a taste. Situated in a white-hot ‘hood bordering the Bowery—yes, the same Bowery that was once home to punk clubs and peep shows, and that’s now a hot address for boutique hotels and hip apartments—the Brasserie is the brainchild of John McDonald and Josh Pickard, who have previously taken (successful) high-stakes gambles on Lever House and Lure. Read the rest of this entry »

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From the outside, Bar Breton doesn’t look like the kind of place you want to check out. There are a million (maybe a trillion) diners ‘n dives in Manhattan, and this looks like just another one of them. The location, sandwiched between a drab section of perpetually noisy East 34^th and an equally drab section of Lexington, isn’t going to inspire you to get our your walking shoes, either. But this place is a sleeper, in some ways. For one thing, this is authentic French food in a way that 90 percent of ‘French’ places in the city just don’t get. Owner-chef Cyril Renaud, a Breton (natch), once ran Fleur de Sel—which was only one of the city’s very best-kept upscale prix fixe secrets for years ‘til it closed down in 2009, a victim of a bad economic moment. At Bar Breton, Renaud’s menu makes it clear that he has gone back to his country roots. And it works. Read the rest of this entry »

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For such a great neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights has always been curiously devoid of truly great places in which to dine. Subtract the Grimaldi’s pizza joint under the bridge and the River Café and ice cream place on the river—probably those all belong to DUMBO geographically, anyway—and what do you have left? Jack the Horse Tavern? Okay. We’ll give you that one. A bakery or two? But that’s about it. That’s what makes Colonie, new as of February 2011, such an interesting and daring entry in the Great Brooklyn Resto Sweepstakes. They’ve gone all-in with brunch offerings like foie gras (!) doughnuts, Long Island white wine on tap, and oysters on the half-shell. Hard to tell if this place will survive the brutally competitive BK dining scene, but it’s certainly not gun-shy. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is it a bar? Or is it a marché? They don’t seem quite sure, but there’s no doubt this entry in the Nolita brunch sweepstakes is trying to set itself apart. It does—with the eye candy, not the food. The narrow space (with windows wide open to the street in good weather) is either extremely comforting or extremely off-putting when you first wander in: you’re immediately faced/confronted with a pair of bubbly servers and a grinning barman, both eager to get your buck. Read the rest of this entry »

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There’s nothing quite as pleasing to the psyche on a weekend morning in spring as a casual outdoor brunch. And Benchmark in Park Slope — with its spacious outdoor dining area, a menu of hearty but tastefully prepared twists on American classics, and welcoming service — is a perfect choice for such an experience. This restaurant is tucked around the corner from Park Slope’s busy Fifth Avenue. Open for just over a year, the restaurant offers a creative New American menu, with a focus on locally-grown produce and pasture-raised animals.  Read the rest of this entry »

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If you’ve ever wanted to ride in a time machine back to the 1980s, the Art Deco-style The Odeon is the place in which to do it. The huge red neon capital letters across the outside of this upscale iconic corner ‘diner’ have 1980s written all over them. So does the former-client list (just ask—names like Warhol get dropped). Heck, the menu probably hasn’t changed since the ‘80s, either. Indeed, during that seminal decade—when Manhattan was aboom with real estate bubbles, stock market swindles, and a tight underlying grittiness that’s long since left the island for Brooklyn—this place was packed to the rails. You can almost hear Bret Easton Ellis crowding around the next table with his Brat Pack, scheming another epic-shocking book/movie. Soho stud Keith McNally once owned the place. Read the rest of this entry »

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Felix has been a mainstay of high-impact New York City brunching for well over a decade. The French bistro with a devoted European-leaning crowd can get a little chaotic on the weekends, but at this point all but the truly green New Yorkers know what to expect. The primary draw at Felix is the upbeat, cosmopolitan vibe and the open-air setting – not necessarily the food, and definitely not the service.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Casa Lever, the restaurant, is on Park Avenue at 53^rd Street, within the landmarked Lever House, New York City’s first curtain-wall skyscraper, later imitated in Paris and Berlin.  A gracious Isamu Noguchi sculpture garden is situated within the Lever House courtyard.  The restaurant interior, meanwhile, beckons with opulent, 1960s retro-chic.  Andy Warhol prints of Dennis Hopper, Giorgio Armani, Jerry Hall, Sly Stallone and Alfred Hitchcock enliven the space. Before Casa Lever even officially opened, Madonna threw a party in it for her friend Penelope Cruz. You can picture Warhol himself, nonchalantly sitting in one of the parallelogram-framed booths, looking out and up at a Venini glass chandelier to quip “I was just joshing about those fifteen minutes.” Read the rest of this entry »

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The recently opened Graffit restaurant feels a bit out of place in the Lincoln Center area of the Upper West Side – and this is a compliment. The restaurant’s website defines its name as “an unconventional fusion of art and food”, and that is exactly what you will find. Chef Jesus Núñez was a graffiti artist in his native Spain, and the walls of the dining room feature murals that fuse graffiti and fine art to showstopping effect.  The restaurant’s design is truly breathtaking and transportive. Read the rest of this entry »