The Fancy Restaurant Club had its monthly gathering at the Carmine’s off Times Square tonight and it was O.K. but it’s another joint I’ve been to before. In honor of having been the first of the Club to buy and bring along the just-published Zagat 2007 New York City Restaurants, I was persuaded to choose next month’s restaurant.
I like some of celebrity chef Danny Meyer’s restaurants, especially Blue Smoke and the Shake Shack (others, less so), so I selected new Zagat entrant and 16th most-popular restaurant in New York City, The Modern. I’ve been to the casual side of the Modern before; it’s called the Bar Room and it’s fancy, but compared to the Modern proper (known as the Dining Room), it’s supposedly like eating at the kids’ table.
I was hesitant in my decision, but the sign arrived that I’d made the correct one when on my ride home late on the A train, the woman in the seat directly across from me was reading Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, Danny Meyer’s new book. This was hard to miss because she was reading it like she really wanted everyone on the train to know she was reading it. Somehow she was single-handedly holding the weighty hardcover raised to her face, the cover splayed so I was looking into the PhotoShopPhotoshop-smoothed face of Danny, his elbow resting rakishly on a tabletop draped with white linen, as if to say, “Come, bask in my dining experience, Fancy Restaurant Club.”