CHURCH & DEY

ZERO STARS

55 CHURCH ST. MILLENIUM HILTON HOTEL (AT GROUND ZERO)

(212) 312-2000

THIS restaurant is simply unacceptable, even in a Hilton. Church & Dey, with a knockout third-floor view over Ground Zero, would be a disgrace anywhere.

But at a site indelibly scored by horror and heroism, it borders on scandal. Here is the most harrowing hotel fare since my last rubber chicken uptown – and at least the rubber chicken didn’t try to be fancy.

Church & Dey’s disregard for even minimal standards demeans all who have given their best at the World Trade Center site – from the 9/11 rescuers to those striving to create something new and inspiring there.

It is a blemish on the Millenium Hilton, whose owners and staff are due all credit for the hotel’s rebirth. It’s an insult to the restaurant’s own hard-working employees, some of whom worked there on 9/11 and whose return was fraught with anguished memories.

Two years after the attack, Church & Dey ought to be the spot from which to witness all the spectacular rebuilding now being planned and debated. What a shame if it were to remain an indifferent food-and-beverage operation with no possible appeal except to clueless hotel guests.

Church & Dey is a bland space with pastel yellow walls accented by a banal Americana mural. But what grabs your gut is the view of Ground Zero across the street. Tall windows directly face where the south tower once stood.

Best seen from tables set in window nooks, the panorama takes in the 16-acre site and its re-emerging surroundings – the World Financial Center and Winter Garden, shrouded 130 Liberty St., the slurry wall, the steel cross, PATH tracks where trains will roll again soon, the rising new 7 World Trade Center and a heartbreaking expanse of open sky.

Some people may feel that wining and dining at Ground Zero is inappropriate no matter what is served; others will regard the experience as reaffirming life. The debate will go on. What’s beyond debate is that if you run a restaurant there, it had better have some dignity.

Nobody expects high culinary art in a Hilton, but we have a right, at least, to basic respect for the craft of cooking. The menu billed as “A Taste of America” insults the national bounty with flavorless “Kansas City” beefsteak drowned in short-order grease.

A few appetizers like crab cakes are tolerable at lunch; at night, dishes taste reheated.

Entrees are hideous around the clock. Two particularly seared themselves into memory: striped bass in a dark and stormy goo called “wild mushroom compote” and “Louisiana jambalaya” – gluey rice that should be served out of a trough, heaped with strips of arid chicken and Andouille sausage.

“Hotel dining room” is no excuse. Many of New York’s best places to eat are in hotels. The Regent Wall Street and the Embassy Suites nearby have good American restaurants, and even Church & Dey’s pre-9/11 predecessor, Taliessen, was half-respectable.

It isn’t too late for Hilton to show some class.

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