425 Park Avenue
Of course there’s no sign for 425 Park Avenue, the newest Jean-Gorges Restaurant in New York.
I poke around the massive front entrance to this glass and steel office building in the heart of the city until the well-dressed concierge at the massive front desk directs me to a side entrance outside the lobby. With no sign.
There’s the first moment when I step into the restaurant – a quick intake of breath – when I look down the long bar, rows of dark leather seats, a sole occupant with her back to me at the end of the bar. She’s blond, clearly at great expense, not rail thin like the glamorous young model you’d expect, but older, a little heavier.
A Park Avenue widow? Living twenty blocks north in one of New York’s grand old apartment buildings with a formally dressed doorman who has worked the entrance for thirty years, knows everyone in the building, their background and backstory by heart and always has a smile as his white-gloved hand pulls open the heavy front door, and smiles a warm greeting for each returning resident, from the precious and sometimes obnoxious school kids to that woman at the bar enjoying a quite lunch, quite alone.
In front of her is lunch: a burger — not an ordinary burger but a Jean-Georges slab of ground beef that no doubt has been elevated to food with an unexpected quality — and an ice-cold martini. It’s noon.
The bar side tables — small two-seaters made for drinking — are empty too. After all it is noon.
The friendly (sincere not fake) young woman at the podium, elegantly but not flashily dressed, welcomes us and leads the way the length of the bar, passing hundreds of glistening bottles and polished glasses and most striking of all, a long abstract gold and yellow mural that spans the entire length. Breathtaking.
At the end is a grand stairway leading to the second-floor dining room. Another sharp intake of breath when I step into a massive, high-ceiling room that, were it not for the dining tables, would be the epitome of Zen.
It’s a palette of soft beiges and browns. Just quiet enough. My heart rate slows in anticipation that something wonderful is going to happen. This is not just lunch but, well, we’ll see.
An army of young, handsome people — designer-dressed in the restaurant uniform — smoothly cover the room. It takes seconds for a bright-faced server — a smiling 20-something woman who must feel, if her career goal is working in a restaurant, then she’s hit the pinnacle at such an early age — greets us. Not just greets but makes us feel like we’ve been personally invited to have lunch at her restaurant.
I haven’t even had time to get a good look at the whole room. When she leaves us, promising to return with water, I look around, it’s half full already, and take in the bright kitchen, a hive of muted activity, behind an enormous wall-sized slab of glass. There’s the chef conferring with a sous chef. It’s calm, no one’s yelling, even as they act out the scene in silence behind the glass.
So how was lunch, you ask? Well, I ordered the pea soup. Pea soup you say, incredulous, in a fancy restaurant like this? Yes, and it was incredible. In fact, I’m astounded. How can a chef turn a simple ingredient into such a sublime experience? A pea, seriously. That, I’m pretty sure, is magic.
I won’t bore you with the other food I ate during that three-hour lunch except to say that it all measured up to the pea soup.
As we left, walking slowly down the grand stairway, looking down on the bar and its breathtaking mural, I thought, there’s no place on earth you can experience a lunch — a humble meal we eat more often than not every day — like this except in New York City.
Of course there are other great cities — Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Copenhagen, Sydney, Tokyo — where food can reach heights you never thought possible. But New York, well it has its own je ne sais quoi.