THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 25
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PHOTOGRAPH BY AMANDA HAKAN FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Verōnika
281 Park Avenue South
Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, the
married couple behind the interior-design
firm Roman and Williams, met while
working on a movie set. This first act seems
to have informed their aesthetic at large,
but of their many projects in New York—
including the French restaurants Le Cou-
cou and La Mercerie—none feels quite as
cinematic as Verōnika, the restaurant in
the new New York outpost of the Swedish
photography museum Fotografiska.
The drama begins at the reservation
stage. For access to Verōnika, which is
owned and operated by the upmarket
restaurateur Stephen Starr, you need not
only money (the menu includes imperial
beluga caviar for two hundred and fifty-
five dollars and lobster for fifty-six) but
also connections, or staff, unless you have
time to spend what feels like hours plead-
ing with icy reservationists and adding
yourself to the wait list.
“Bonsoir, Madame,” the maître d’ said
on the night I finally got lucky. Bonsoir,
indeed. Taper candles cast moody light
on elegantly wild floral arrangements
and on the stained glass original to the
building, a gorgeous Renaissance Revival
landmark. Both the bar and the dining
room are as immersive as the set of “Sleep
No More,” liquor bottles rising to the
ceiling on a pyramid of bronze-and-glass
shelves, brocade armchairs in intimate
clusters, creamy pink-marble tables set
with filigreed chargers.
On my second visit, a hostess asked if
my date and I minded sitting side by side
on a velvet banquette. We didn’t; all the
better for people-watching. Particularly
transfixing was our server, whose long,
wiry face, pencil mustache, and slightly
hunched posture I was certain I’d seen
somewhere before—a Buñuel film, per-
haps, or a Hirschfeld drawing. (I was so
busy studying him that I didn’t realize
we had agreed to “filtered” water instead
of tap until I noticed a six-dollar charge
on the bill.)
Despite the provenance of Fo-
tografiska, Verōnika’s food is not Swedish,
though many dishes come from just across
the Baltic Sea. (The restaurant seems to
have little to do with the museum, which
exhibits mostly contemporary large-scale
color photographs, and which sells a note-
book printed with the words “If you don’t
write your story, who will?” in the gift
shop.) The menu offers a whimsical mix
of fancified Eastern and Central Euro-
pean staples and highly technical archaic
French delicacies: borscht, goulash, and
“Herring Under a Fur Coat”; soufflé, sole
meunière, and chou farci.
All this feels tailor-made for a Wes
Anderson world—or for a Russian oli-
garch. Indeed, if there’s a through line, it’s
embodied by the coulibiac salmon, a Rus-
sian dish that was adopted into the French
canon by “one of those nineteenth-cen-
tury guys,” the chef Daniel Boulud once
told Bill Buford for an article in this mag-
azine, referring to Auguste Escoffier and
his peers. “They were all in Russia, hoping
to get hired by a tsar.”
Coulibiac is confoundingly difficult
to make because its component parts—
filleted fish, whole eggs, rice, and mush-
room duxelles wrapped in nesting-doll
layers of spinach and pastry—require
wildly different cooking times. Verōni-
ka’s iteration hits all its marks; served in
visually arresting slices, with a spoonful
of champagne sauce and a cascade of
trout roe, it’s at once ostentatious and
comfortingly homey.
The same can be said of the foie-gras
poché, for which a lobe is poached and
presented in golden consommé, encircled
by delicately cut radish, fennel, and carrot.
I thought I knew how deeply chickeny a
chicken soup could taste; adding goose
liver, it turns out, opens up the bottom.
But in less than two years foie gras will be
illegal in New York. It’s hard to imagine
that coulibiac will come back into style, or
that a restaurant like Verōnika will survive
the coming culture wars. It’s a place for
a last hurrah, for one final Baked Alaska,
also known as omelette norvégienne. Its
dome of Italian meringue, concealing
salsify ice cream atop a disk of spice cake,
gets doused in rum and set on fire, a blaze
of blue. Watch it flicker, and then fade
out. (Entrées $27-$58.)
—Hannah Goldfield
