Bad news for Valentine’s Day: Romantic dining is dead, victim to 747-size restaurants, communal tables and excruciating noise levels. It perished, too, with dress codes. How special can a night out feel when everyone is in low-cut jeans and T-shirts?
La Caravelle and Cote Basque, glamorous French restaurants that breathed romance, are gone. So is Nirvana, which had the city’s worst Indian food but its most seductive atmosphere. Brooklyn’s gas-lit Gage & Tollner turned into T.G.I. Friday’s.
On Valentine’s Day, no restaurant feels romantic, no matter how many cooing couples share icky-poo desserts. Overbooked places cram in extra tables just as they do on Mother’s Day and New Year’s Eve – a rowdy scene better suited to breaking up than hooking up.
Some eateries’ reputations are based mainly on their alleged power to melt hearts. Take Café des Artistes where, according to Zagat, “Romance is very much alive” and the “French” food is “excellent.” I dropped by, looking forward to the Howard Christy Chandler murals of cavorting nymphs I hadn’t seen in years.
They were even prettier than I remembered. I had an outstanding view of topless blondes giving each other rides on a swing.
But “seared” tuna was so flabby and flavorless, it might have been boiled;, sautéed lobster and crayfish, inedibly tough; and “salmon five ways,” at least three ways too many – $255 for a coach-class dinner with a half-bottle of wine for two.
What makes a restaurant romantic? When I was in my early 20s and single, cheeseburgers with my inamorata in the dim light of a long-gone tavern on West 72nd Street were hormone fuel.
Small touches make the difference if they’re done with style. My wife and I fondly remember a French place on East 58th where, on our first date, champagne was served out of a wine bucket in the shape of a top hat.
Last year, I saw the same bliss in the faces of young couples at subterranean, moat-encircled Suba on Ludlow Street. So what if the food was a joke?
But allowing that tastes change with age, certain values remain constant. Beyond having food that doesn’t insult your palate, a romantic restaurant must make couples feel welcome – rare at venues with mostly huge tables for the party crowd.
A romantic place must confer on you and your beloved a sense of togetherness. That means elbow room and a sound level conducive to murmured sweet nothings.
And, of course, it needs an extra something in the way of setting to put you in the mood for intimacy – whether for the night or for a lifetime.
My No. 1 romantic restaurant in New York is David Bouley’s Danube, a 19th-century Viennese fantasy with velour draperies, maroon ultrasuede banquettes, and green and gold walls. The dining room’s near-triangular shape deepens the mystique.
Chef Mario Lohninger’s lightened-up, Austro-Hungarian-inspired menu wittily plays off the shrewdly overwrought opulence. And suave and friendly service makes everyone feel privileged.
La Grenouille is the city’s most beautiful French dining room, hands-down. Everyone’s skin glows in the amber light reflected off burnished wood. Omnipresent flowers perfume the air. If you can’t afford the $87.50 prix-fixe dinner, the $37.50/$49 lunch will bring out your Inner Cupid just as well.
Once known for a geriatric crowd, La Grenouille now enjoys a younger audience, thanks to some tweaking by owner Charles Masson and chef Ian Scollay’s updated classic menu.
The River Café’s heart-stopping view of Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn is even more poignant since 9/11. Largely unchanged in 25 years, Buzzy O’Keeffe’s best-loved restaurant is a showcase, too, for chef Brad Steelman’s highly focused, modern-American cuisine.
As a Valentine’s Day bonus, here are alternatives to some destinations widely regarded as “romantic,” but where the passion stops short of the plate.
BORING CHOICE (exotic): Suba, Chez es Saada and other erratic subterranean downtown venues more seductive in theory than in fact.
BETTER ALTERNATIVE: Casa La Femme North. This colorful, giggle-inducing Egyptian fantasy has intermittently fine food, especially the mezze and other starters.
Lovers gravitate to private white tents that seem airlifted in from the burning sands. Just beware of the belly dancer who might pop in at an inopportune moment.
BORING CHOICE (French): Café Des Artistes. (See above).
BETTER ALTERNATIVE: JoJo. Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s JoJo was once as bland as its cooking was vivid. But since a redesign, it’s the sexiest bistro around, with two levels of sumptuous velvet, plum upholstery and dim lighting.
And unlike the hotel-quality fare at Café Des Artistes, JoJo’s dishes – with entrees as low as $18 – from chef Alex Powell have true French élan.
BORING CHOICE (Italian): Barbetta. Pricey, “northern” Italian food and cranky service in old townhouse setting less awe-inducing than its publicity wants you to believe.
BETTER ALTERNATIVE: L’Impero. My review called it a “hallucinatory realm between Manhattan and the Mediterranean.” Unless you happen to live in Tudor City, L’Impero’s offbeat location is exotic enough. The room by night is a transporting, candlelit cocoon of white linen and turquoise upholstery.
Chef Scott Conant’s herbally attuned, pan-Italian menu is sensuously rich, and a first-rate wine list will provide any intoxication still lacking.
BORING CHOICE (American): One if By Land. The bilevel setting inside Aaron Burr’s 18th-cCentury carriage house is atmospheric, but the expensive American menu isn’t in the same class.
BETTER ALTERNATIVE: Bayard’s. Enchanting, nautically attuned dining room in a 19th-century mock-Florentine palazzo. Part of the fun is finding it at night amidst Wall Street’s deserted blocks.
Inside it’s all warmth, from the greeting to a persuasive evocation of the glory days of New York Harbor. Chef Eberhard Muller’s seasonal American menu beats anything nearby. Just be sure, on a bitter winter night, that you have a ride home.
