Michael Anthony Has Spent Months on His Waldorf Salad
This is going to be a challenge,” Michael Anthony says, pensively. He is a very pensive chef, and he’s standing inside his entirely new kitchen inside the also-almost-entirely-new Waldorf Astoria. The challenge in question is a three-foot clearance between the hot-line expo and the kitchen wall, a narrow strait where a chef would need to stand while making way for the constant traffic of porters bearing heavy loads of clean flatware piled high above the pass, each one neatly labeled: plates for broccoli and carrots, bowls for chicken soup and potatoe purée. Anthony has spent most of his professional career in the Gramercy Tavern kitchen, where he’s been the executive chef for nearly 20 years. That kitchen is square, but this one is long and narrow and will require the chef to recalibrate his approach some. “I didn’t design it,” he concedes, “but everything in here is brand new.”
From this line, a team of 14 chefs will turn out breakfast, lunch, and dinner — as well as wood-fired pizza, a bar menu, and room service — seven days a week, from 6 a.m. to midnight, within the reborn Waldorf. The Wheel of Life in the Park Avenue lobby has been restored, as has the clock in Peacock Alley, where Cole Porter’s piano sits as well, its keyboard at the ready. And as part of this renovation, Hilton, the latest operator of the property, tapped Anthony to run its signature restaurant, Lex Yard. It’s also the first venture Anthony has undertaken without his partner, Danny Meyer, since he arrived at Gramercy in 2006.
That Meyer, a zealously protective businessman, would give his blessing to a potential Gramercy competitor is a testament to Anthony’s diplomatic skills and the long relationship the two men have enjoyed. (In 2006, Tom Colicchio’s departure from Gramercy Tavern for Craft did not go as smoothly; nor did Daniel Humm and Will Guidara’s expansion to Nomad in 2011, which involved them purchasing Eleven Madison Park from Meyer.) “I was a little nervous,” Anthony explains. “The standard is like, ‘Hey, you want to do that? Good luck. It’s been nice knowing you.’ But when I brought the idea to Danny and our partners, I expressed my enthusiasm for the project, my confidence in my ability to do something that I feel strongly will generate pride, and I underlined that I am as in love with Gramercy as I’ve ever been.”
Lex Yard, a vast 220-seat, two-story “American brasserie,” sits above a 12-track storage yard northeast of Grand Central. (Track 61 of the yard was once occupied by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal rail carriage.) The space has been designed by AvroKo in swaddled pastel Deco touches. The downstairs, entered from Lexington Avenue, has a long bar and feels like, well, a bar. There’s a menu of snacks and drinks from PDT’s Jeff Bell. This is where they hope to draw the post-work happy-hour clientele. The upper floor, meanwhile, is all undulating green leather banquettes, globular lighting, and marble tabletops. The dining room features a four-course menu — “I call it a ‘market menu,’” (as opposed to a tasting menu), “so people don’t run for the hills,” explains Anthony — in addition to à la carte options.
The food at first seems as low-key as the chef making it. Nothing shouts nor clamors for virality. Rather it follows Anthony’s passion for the ingredient-driven American cooking he has honed at Gramercy. “A dish that’s successful on this menu is one that lives up to the elegance of this place, that speaks that language of seasonality, but also is simple enough to be memorable,” he explains. There will be mushroom tagliatelle, rib eye with broccolini, slow-poached halibut. “There’s this notion of underpromising and overdelivering,” Anthony adds. “In New York City, that seems to work as long as you can deliver.”
But for Anthony die-hards, surprises abound, evidence of an innately modest chef who, here, is willing to get a bit showy. There are three caviar services — including a royal osetra sandwich on a toasted brioche with lemon cream — and a fully loaded lobster roll also spiked with caviar. “I’m grating truffles over the whole damn thing,” Anthony says, as surprised as anyone else. “It is definitely not consistent with my general approach.” And then there are the fries made with beef tallow. “I’ve never served a French fry in a restaurant in my life,” Anthony admits, explaining that one of the few similarities he and Colicchio shared was an aversion to installing a deep fryer in the Gramercy kitchen. There is a burger, and there will be breakfast, and, of course, there is the celery-studded elephant in the room — the Waldorf salad, which was invented at the hotel in 1893. Long derided as insipid hotel food, there was no getting around the need to offer one at Lex Yard.
“I thought for months long and hard about how to approach the salad. Will it be an architectural wonder of the world? Will it be a replica of something that was served here in 1931? Or will it just be a salad that is good enough to make people who try it want to eat it again?” he ponders. “Obviously, that’s the route that we’re taking.” The chef has created a three-layer composition of chopped gem lettuce followed by a mixture of apples, grapes, celery, and — with aioli and a veil of cheddar cheese — salted and toasted sunflower seeds and sprouts. The uppermost layer of the salad will change with the seasons. “There’ll be a discreet change,” he explains. “There’s not one almighty Waldorf salad.”
Will it be enough to get New Yorkers into the dining room? “I’m trying to thread the needle — this is a hotel restaurant, but if we’re doing everything right, hopefully it will become a neighborhood restaurant, too,” says Anthony as he steps back from the pass into an alcove, letting the porter wheel her cart by. “I don’t know how she does it,” he says as he watches her transfer a stack of heavy plates into a vertiginous column above the pass, “but if she can make it work, so can we.”