Helping to fuel the fear of anti-French retaliation, New York’s most expensive restaurant closed its near-empty dining room for one night this week.
Insiders at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House hotel say the swanky spot – with an average per-person dining price of $193, according to the Zagat Survey – had bookings for only a handful of its 21 tables on Thursday night, prompting the nearly three-year-old restaurant to cut its operating losses and close for the night.
“They couldn’t come close to filling the room,” said a source. “They probably had four to five tables filled.” The cancellations came the same day as the announcement that equally posh French restaurant Lespinasse was shutting down for good and the same day that NYC & Co., the city’s tourism bureau, held a press conference rallying against the boycotting of French-themed New York restaurants.
A spokeswoman for Ducasse said the cancellations came after a problem occurred in the kitchen’s exhaust system, which the spokeswoman says was fixed by Essex House engineers.
Chef Alain Ducasse received 2,700 requests for reservations before his restaurant even opened in June 2000. But those were different economic times for the eatery that gained instant stardom for its price of $500 for two.