On behalf of my office I planned a gorgeous dinner at a terrific new restaurant last week. SD26, which to me, inexplicably received only 1 star from the NY Times as I believe it deserves more stars. To me the single most important criteria of a restaurant is its food-if the food is fantastic then I don't care all that much for any of the rest. That said, I will also remind you of how snobby I really am by saying that fancy expensive restaurants with beautiful decor, excellent service, perfect food are by far my favorite restaurant experiences though, again, I will put up with poor service and decor if the food is encroyable!
The restaurant is really very beautiful and very dressed up-another point in its favor for me, there is a crystal curtain as soon as you walk in the door, like jewelry, immediately starting your experience off in a festive way then add the charmingly professional maitre d and you are indeed golden. You walk through a runway of art through the bar to the restaurant or the private dining rooms. There is a rustic wine room downstairs that seats 15 which I would love to hold an event in one day too.
In the very front of SD26 is the new style of wine bar and even though I don't like wine very much I am fascinated by the concept and would very much like to try it one evening. There is a communal table and a picture window overlooking the very pretty Madison Square Park. There is a specially built hermetically sealed refrigeration unit in one wall which holds large bottles of wine, each in it's own special compartment refrigerating it to the perfect temperature for taste and storage. A little digital gauge tells you the temperature and you can see the bottles through the glass. This allows the restaurant to offer wines by the glass of some very special or unusual wines that could not ordinarily be served that way for what air does to the wine. It also offers tastings in your choice of ounces sizes! While I admit to not liking wine, I DO like to taste everything and was surprised that no one was sitting there, though the bar area was full. The runway that the NYT's mentions and doesn't like is quite wide so it makes the bar look less full though also makes it more comfortable. There are pros and cons to this that I think I can safely leave you to realize alone.
The menu can be as safe or as adventurous as you want to make it, especially if you are doing a private party which offers a larger menu from which to start. The restaurant's signature dish is a ouvo raviolo (normally I hate rhyming food but it so works that I'm overlooking it) which comes as an appetizer but for cocktail receptions they make it tiny! It's a single ravioli with a nicely seasoned bit of herbed cheese filling but inside the pasta shell is a soft egg!!!! Somehow, in a way that I have yet to figure out they get an egg inside and then boil it so when it comes to you it's a soft boiled egg (chicken egg for the appetizer and a quail egg for cocktail reception) and when you break into it you get the warm runny goodness of it to soak up your ravioli!!! Again, fascinating! The food is that of fashionable Italy as interpreted by Tony May of San Domenico fame-he and his daughter opened this restaurant perhaps to appeal to a younger more modern crowd, which they do. But the space is filled with a blend of young and old but all beautifully dressed. Of course, many Chanel bags per square inch.
I stayed a bit on the safe side for this menu as this dinner was for very senior execs from all over the world, some of whom I had never met before. As I do when planning menus at home, I wanted to make sure everyone had something to eat. The negative point I have to mention is the restaurant gave me a very hard time when pre-planning the menu about having choices for each diner at each course. (Since this is unacceptable to me as was the restaurant's attempt to force me into their way of thinking, well, let's just say I have won this battle and will shortly win the war. I would like to do more events here and no matter how good, I will not if I have to have this argument each time. A) I am the customer and B) there are many marvelous restaurants in Manhattan.).
We had 2 salad choices a baby spinach pear Parmesansalad artfully presented with the pear in a dice and fanned out over the greens with the cheese balanced on top and a watercress frisee, carrots, pomegranate salad with the pomegranates sprinkled upon the greens like jewels. Then a choice of grilled salmon with roasted carrots/zucchini or a rib eye with grilled winter vegetables. I'm a vegetarian so had the caponata which was divine- silky rich and flavorful. Dessert was a chocolate tartlet with a chocolate mousse garnish and a palmier triangle to garnish that. Isn't it fun when the garnishes have garnishes???? Or a tiramisu. I thought the chocolate tart could have been taken out of the refrigerator earlier in the meal-the filling was a bit too hard for me, it didn't melt in my mouth, but the flavor was good.
Overall, it was a marvelous evening!
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