58 GOURMET TRAVELLER
Casio Lucio). Even the merch stall, complete with
José Andrés cookbooks and paella pans, is tasteful.
On the fifth floor, Momofuku restaurateur David
Chang has opened Kawi, a serious Korean operation
quite unlike the raucous establishments that made
him famous. Taking the humour out of Momofuku
might sound like a risky move, but it works under
head chef Eunjo Park, who was most recently at
Momofuku Ko and has also cooked at Per Se, Daniel
and prestigious establishments in South Korea. At
Kawi her kimbap, the Korean answer to sushi, is
revelatory, particularly a version with thick foie gras
terrine and tart pickled daikon, and her traditional
stew of soybeans and pork belly tastes like the sort
of dish a world-class chef would cook at home.
It’s served in a windowless dining room that is
noticeably quieter and less scene-y than Chang’s other
Manhattan eateries. The low-key atmosphere seems
deliberate. As Wells wrote in his Times review of Kawi:
“Park makes food that you want to concentrate on.”
Then there’s Tak Room, by chef Thomas Keller,
of The French Laundry and Per Se. In a sprawling
dining room with plush velvet chairs and a live jazz
band, smartly uniformed waitstaff serve the sort of
continental cuisine that the American élite preferred
in the 1950s: prawn cocktail, roast chicken, Dover
sole meunière and prime rib. Nothing served here
is original, and the priciest mains cost more than
US$100, yet Tak Room has been close to fully booked
since it opened in April. The refined nostalgia of the
experience is powerful: Manhattans to start, then
clam chowder evocative of summers by the sea,
roast chicken for two and a time-warp slice of heavily
frosted dark-chocolate layer cake. Critics approve,
too; New York magazine’s Adam Platt called Tak
Room an “outlandishly pricey but curiously satisfying”
destination that “provides plenty of retro pleasure”.Clockwise
fromtopleft:
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skylineincluding
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sofritoatKawi.Keller’s isn’t the only restaurant at Hudson Yards
catering to those with deep pockets. Costas Spiliadis
has opened a branch of his flamboyant Greek seafood
chain Estiatorio Milos (other outposts are in London,
Montreal and Athens) and he’s charging more for
seafood that just about anyone else in the city. And
Michael Lomonaco – who runs one of New York’s
most expensive steakhouses, Porter House, on the
Upper West Side – is serving pricey plates of beef
at the Hudson Yards Grill. Both establishments
seat more than 200 diners, and both have been
reliably busy since opening a few months ago.
Not everyone is convinced. Food-savvy New
Yorkers have been expressing mixed opinions in
private and public about the blockbuster dimensions
of some Hudson Yards venues. “One of the reasons
there’s been a bit of a backlash against the Hudson
Yards restaurants is that a lot of them don’t seem to
have anything to do with how New Yorkers wish to
dine today,” says Wells. “The places that people have
responded to lately [in Manhattan and Brooklyn]
have been smaller, more modest, not necessarily
inexpensive but not obviously built for rich people
in the way some of the Hudson Yards restaurants are.”
Many locals are unhappy with the neighbourhood
more broadly. Some see Hudson Yards, with its
expensive apartments and boutiques, as élitist.
Writing in The New York Times, architecture critic
Michael Kimmelman denounced the development
as “a supersized suburban-style office park, with a
shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community
targeted at the 0.1 per cent”.
The Vessel – commissioned by Stephen Ross,
the billionaire who developed Hudson Yards – comes
in for harsh criticism, with many questioning the
merits of what is essentially a series of interconnected
staircases. “The developer’s idea of public space turns
out to be this big twisted pretzel with a pretentious
name,” says Wells, “and you can’t even walk on
it without making a reservation weeks in advance.”
Writing for New York, Justin Davidson called it
“a grotesque monument to a rich man’s vanity”.
Yet many New York residents I’ve spoken to have
visited Hudson Yards at least once since it opened PHOTOGRAPHY ANDREW BEZEK KAWI & PEACH MART, LIZ CLAYMAN MAR & GETTY IMAGES HUDSON YARDS.