Clandestine Cuisine
new york has more than a few hidden restaurants. the late chumley's, a prohibition-era speakeasy, was perhaps the most famous. it was virtually invisible, with a secret barrow street entrance in the heart of the west village. a number of hotel restaurants are practically hidden; you have to go all the way into the vast lobby of the waldorf astoria to find peacock alley. similarly, to find andré, you have to go through the opia lounge entrance in the renaissance hotel, wind your way upstairs and all the way through the usually teeming lounge to the edge of the bar, where you'll finally find andré's nearly invisible corner entrance.
the dining room is diminutive and soigné, seating just 36. there are maroon velvet and sienna leather banquettes, scarlet chairs,
framed artsy black-and-white celebrity photographs and six gauzily curtained windows overlooking east 57th street and lexington avenue. each table is graced by a stemless rose parked in an inch of water in a glass cube.
like most hotel restaurants, andré is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. manager nicholas has fine-tuned his expert staff, just as executive chef ted pryor continually fine-tunes his seasonal menus. pryor's prior experiences include cooking at the venerable french restaurants orsay, les halles and the late la goulue, but he has cooked the world over, from paris to south carolina.
nice chewy bread is brought with rosemary-infused olive oil. i don't know about you, but i'm kind of "over" bread and olive oil. especially now that marvelous julia child is back in vogue, let's bring back good old butter.
the bar back in opia lounge makes the best appletini i've ever had. somehow it had layers of apple flavors that made me long for autumn even more than the grotesque summer humidity.
truffle vichyssoise is creamy and cool, not overly fungal, but with just the right earthy tang to ground the light potato cream.
peekytoe crab salad features shredded crabmeat formed into a pudgy round cake, set on a round 1/2-inch bed of pureed english peas. the crab is very delicately seasoned, as it should be, and dabs of apricot puree finish the plate.
pâté de campagne certainly has its wits about it, with lots of creamy flavors coming together perfectly. pungent gherkins provide their needed acidity, and a startlingly strong english mustard made for a welcome clearing of sinuses.
cool poached lobster salad amounts to a generous stack of poached lobster meat lightly dressed and plated with golden and crimson medium-firm braised beets on a gentle creamy cole slaw.
herb-crusted rack of lamb had only four ribs, but what ribs they were! the juicy ruby meat marries well with any number of herbs, as chef pryor obviously knows.
pastry chef jose velazco has a hard act to follow, but he steps up to the plate with some fine french desserts. floating island is one of my favorites; velazco cleverly serves the meringue "island" in a manageable deep tumbler of luscious crème anglaise. a deeply carameled dulce de leche flan is spackled with big august blueberries. i could go without the ubiquitous molten chocolate cake for the rest of my days, but my companion adores it, and he declared it the best he'd ever had.
it's well worth seeking out andré, because once you've found it, you're sure to return. -- andré 130 e. 57th st., at lexington avenue upstairs and deep inside the opia lounge in the renaissance hotel 212-688-3939 entrees: $22 to $34