So many New York children have had their heights marked off on the wall by Pietro’s front door that it looks as if it belongs in the house of the world’s most fertile grandmother. Pietro’s has been on East 43rd Street since 1984, and in the neighborhood since 1932. For that, I go to Pietro’s, where tomatoes, cheese, bread crumbs and a thin cutlet - pounded until it covers the oval serving platter like a quilt on a featherbed - fuses into one sublime entity that could be eaten with a spoon, like pudding.
I wouldn’t say this if Sinatra were around, but Patsy’s does not make my favorite veal Parm in Midtown. Decades of shortcuts, cheap-outs, infidelities and distortions gave red-sauce cuisine a reputation as a debased, degraded creature. It’s that kind of place.Įven without an inside tip, you can put together a meal at Patsy’s - rigatoni fra diavolo, say, or fennel sausages in marinara with a heap of sweet peppers - that reminds you just how good Southern Italian food refracted through a New York lens can be. So he asked his father, who named two dishes that aren’t on the menu. He had no idea his father, who goes once a week, always does the ordering. The Grill, the Lobster Club and Empellón waited until this month.īefore showing up for dinner at Patsy’s, the Neapolitan restaurant that gave Frank Sinatra not just his own table but his own entrance, I asked somebody who has eaten there all his life what to get. The Grand Central Oyster Bar didn’t reopen for good until last month. A few landmarks, like the “21” Club and Shun Lee Palace, are still dark. When the outdoor dining program turned most of the city into a street party in the summer of 2020, Midtown was apocalyptically quiet. This may be easier to see now that the area is finally getting some relief from a pandemic pummeling that hit its restaurants harder and longer than those in just about any other part of town. In their eyes, Midtown was business and downtown was pleasure.īut Midtown has pleasures of its own, no less real for being widely overlooked. People who worked there before the age of Zoom meetings tended to see it as a necessary evil to be endured only until the end of the business day. One of their complaints used to be that it was full of tourists. Tourists understand this better than locals, who love to complain about Midtown. There are many New Yorks, but Midtown is the place to go when you want to eat and drink in New York, New York. He had just one night, and he wanted to see the city. After hemming and hawing, he admitted that he had been hoping for a martini at the King Cole Bar in Midtown Manhattan. Once, when a friend who lives in a small town had an overnight layover at Kennedy International Airport, I came up with what I thought was a cool idea: I would pick him up and drive 20 minutes or so to a waterfront bar in the Rockaways for cold beer.
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