When this restaurant was Elaine’s, the food was beside the point. Think of the scene in “Manhattan” that took place there, in which Mariel Hemingway tells Woody Allen she needs to leave their double date early because she has an exam the next day. It’s so dark you can barely see their faces—that’s because Elaine Kaufman, the longtime proprietor and legendary smoker, reportedly got the lights from a funeral parlor. And even though it’s dinnertime, no one’s eating. “The key thing to remember is that the food at Elaine’s sucked,” said an Upper East Side resident who frequented the legendary literary hangout, which lasted forty-eight years, until a few months after Kaufman’s death, in 2010.
What’s new? Not the famous canopy, which still juts out to Second Avenue, although it’s now a corporate-colored charcoal, rather than bright yellow. There’s a Disneyland feel to the décor, with photos from the glory days (Gay Talese, Jackie Onassis) hanging in the main dining room alongside blown-up renderings of typewriter keys, while out back wall-to-wall bookshelves are filled not with eclectic paperbacks but with a carefully curated selection of books, many by past regulars. We are eating among ghosts, but that’s no excuse for the veal meatloaf: gray, pallid, probably a decent packing material for jewelry.
The benign mediocrity of Elaine’s red-sauce Italian food has been replaced with middle-of-the-road newish American cuisine of the kind you might imagine Stephen Colbert would enjoy when in character: doughy Parker House rolls to start, baby-back ribs with a barbecue sauce that tastes only of apples, stealth carbs—a puzzling hunk of flatbread—hidden underneath the spinach salad, spaghetti and meatballs as dry as the Great Plains. There are chopped hearts of palm in the farmer’s salad, and wilted romaine, utterly vanquished by a green-goddess dressing, but only one of these retro touches is charming.
At the end of a recent dinner, there was a cheesecake that was also a cobbler, as though the problem with that dessert were its fundamental asceticism, and more funnel cake than you’d get in a serving at Six Flags. All of this would be fine, even fun, if it were delicious, but it’s not—the funnel cake, for instance, comes with Meyer-lemon mousse, which makes you long for the simple powdered-sugar finish of the original. Elaine’s was never about the food, and that was O.K., because it was about so much else. But what is the Writing Room about? ♦
Open daily for dinner and weekends for brunch. Entrées $27-$52.
