8/1/2023 0 Comments Journal intime new yorkAt those prices, Aureole won’t be my first choice for a bar dinner. I have my doubts about the bar room, where most of the dinner entrées are above $30, and a burger is $19. Soft fabric wallpaper absorbs sound, even when the room is nearly full, as it was last Saturday evening As there’s nothing to see on 42nd Street, Tihany gave dining room patrons a view of the bar room, dominated by a towering wine wall that puts most others to shame. The new Aureole, like so many luxury restaurants these days, is a bifurcated space, with a spacious, bustling bar room and a quiet dining room. If Tihany’s work is unoriginal, at least it’s effective. He’s on an ugly block, but the space has an $8 million makeover by Adam Tihany, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the last half-dozen projects Tihany has done. He hopes that his loyal Upper East Side regulars will folow him there, while he picks up business clients and theatergoers who wouldn’t venture to the old location. Last year, Palmer decided to move to the Bank of America building at Bryant Park. I’m a gadget guy, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. What sticks in my mind is not the utterly forgettable food, but an irritating electronic wine list that resembled an Amazon Kindle (before such things existed). ![]() My only visit was perhaps a year or two later. The tony Upper East Side townhouse on East 61st Street, for which Palmer paid $3 million in 1987, got a facelift in 1999, prompting a re-visit by William Grimes, who promptly knocked the restaurant back down to two stars. At Aureole, Miller gave him two stars in 1989 and upgraded him to three in 1991. At River Café, he got two stars from Marian Burros in 1984, then three from Bryan Miller in 1986. His relationship with the critics has been up and down. The list of chefs who’ve worked for him is like a Who’s Who of the restaurant industry. He hasn’t actually run the kitchen at Aureole since 2001. He has at least sixteen restaurants to his name-opening, it seems, about one per year, in a career long enough to have weathered the economy’s ups and downs. This summer, he moved the restaurant to Bryant Park-again, right in the middle of a recession. In 1988, he opened Aureole on the Upper East Side just in time for a recession. If you want to time the stock market, don’t ask Charlie Palmer. ![]() The current head man is Marcus Ware, a sous chef who had been with Aureole for four years, dating back to its Upper East Side townhouse days. Chrisophe Belanca, the former chef of Le Cirque, replaced him for five months, then departed in April 2011. Note: This is a review under chef Chris Lee, who left the restaurant in December 2010.
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