No restaurant in New York City — maybe in America — ever opened to greater hoopla, hysteria and impossible-to-satisfy demand than Balthazar did on April 21, 1997. The 180 seats at Keith McNally’s Soho brasserie, crafted to evoke a romantic Paris that might never have existed, were impossible to come by without connections. Before I wrote about restaurants for the New York Post, I never got into Balthazar until nearly a year after it opened — and that was only thanks to a friend who knew McNally.
Only two earlier, non-restaurant phenomena compared to its fusion of media and public madness — “A Chorus Line” when it moved to Broadway in 1975 and the debut of Studio 54 in 1977. Everybody wanted in to Balthazar. McNally had “invented” Tribeca with The Odeon in 1980 and launched a few other small places after that. But this new colossus on a vibrant Soho corner, constructed in secrecy behind plywood, would be his magnum opus. “Have you been to Balthazar?” was the great status-definer of its time, the way “Have you seen ‘Hamilton?’” is today.
When I finally passed through the doors at 80 Spring St., I was transported by its yellow-and-gold walls and ceiling that were new but looked old, red leather banquettes framed by brass trim and Art Deco flourishes. Golden, Renoir-ish light, bouncing off mirrors tilted to reflect the room, made everyone beautiful.
The crowd was a mix of celebrities including Calvin Klein and Madonna and chic unknowns dressed entirely in black. I was less dazzled by the food. Standards like steak au poivre and moules frites didn’t seem so different from dishes I’d had elsewhere.
Twenty years later, Balthazar is a much better, and more democratic, restaurant. Today you’ll see many more ordinary New Yorkers and tourists than celebrities — but the house still draws the likes of Taylor Swift, Cate Blanchett and the great Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert, who calls it his favorite New York place.
For all its enduring success, Balthazar is at the age when restaurant lovers start to worry about its future. But for now, celebration’s in order. A strange and charming new book, Reggie Nadelson’s “At Balthazar: The New York Brasserie at the Center of the World” (Gallery Books), brings the place to colorful, quirky life — and in the process pays homage to the life-affirming qualities of every place we pay to be fed.
Nadelson was born in Greenwich Village and moved to Soho in 1986. She lives around the corner from Balthazar but, notwithstanding a life rich with romance, family and friends, seems to spend more time there than at home. She went every day for years after 9/ll, when “New Yorkers huddled together more than any time I could remember, the need for community was powerful, and for that I went to Balthazar for breakfast every morning.”
Like an easily distracted table-hopper, she flits from the eating habits of 17th century Dutch New York to how Balthazar’s bussers pour butter into little cups. But the thematic tissue that holds it together is her insatiable passion for Balthazar.
From the virtual run-of-the-house owner McNally bravely gave her, we learn fascinating facts about the eatery: Its prep kitchen and storage areas sprawl through underground “catacombs” that stretch all the way from Crosby Street to Broadway. Balthazar backer Dick Robinson wrote a $2 million check to start work on the basis of a sketch McNally and designer Ian McPheely drew on a napkin.
I learned that the banana ricotta tart that I enjoyed last week has been on the menu since Day 1 in 1997. Balthazar serves a half-million meals and takes in $20 million to $25 million every year. Phone reservations are taken in McNally’s offices at 568 Broadway — which Nadelson was stunned to recognize as having once belonged to her father’s printing business. Oysters, “a big deal at Balthazar from the beginning,” sells so many varieties that waiters have a tough time learning all their names and characteristics. Oyster master Jerry Alvarez shucks so many that his hands “hurt like hell at the end of a week.” Nadelson’s own finger bleeds from the shucking lesson he gives her.
Shucking oysters at the restaurant One Fifth was McNally’s first job in New York. Born a working-class Englishman in war-ravaged East London in 1951, he fled the stubborn shackles of his nation’s class system for Gotham in 1975. He helped give birth to the city’s modern-day dining culture and “invented” neighborhoods. Tribeca was a dim, dangerous no-man’s-land when he launched The Odeon and the Lower East Side’s far-eastern fringe still full of crack and crime before he created Schiller’s in 2003.
Nadelson brings to life his enigmatic personality as well as anyone ever has. McNally’s youthful stage-acting experience helped inspire his theatrical flair with restaurants, and the book lends nuance to his star-struck impulses. I once endured a phone harangue from him after I’d written, entirely accurately, that the “no-reservations” policy at his later bistro Pastis was phony because seats were always held for the Jack Nicholsons and Anna Wintours who took up half the house.
But McNally understood, Nadelson suggests, that star power was needed at the outset to set a new place on fire. And while scoring reservations at Balthazar was a snap for celebrities including Meryl Streep and Lauren Bacall, the favoritism was later relaxed — just as it did at Pastis.
In the early going, even Balthazar’s seen-’em-all floor crew were awestruck by Joe DiMaggio. But former maitre d’ Zouheir Louhaichy recalled facing down one powerful customer who wanted the table next to himself and his wife kept empty just to have extra room.
McNally’s youthful stage-acting experience helped inspire his theatrical flair with restaurants, and the book lends nuance to his star-struck impulses.
“I said I was so sorry, but the seats were reserved,” Louhaichy told a surprisingly uncombative Donald Trump.
We also meet employees from Poland, Bangladesh, France, Mexico, Ecuador, Canada, Senegal. Their individual sagas of striving bring to life the great ship Balthazar as it tools up from idling speed in the morning to battle stations at dinner.
In Nadelson’s deft hands, the restaurant becomes a metaphor for the city’s ceaseless cycles of ambition, immigration and change. Morris Propp, a 19th century Jewish immigrant from Belarus who fled the pogroms and “built the first great business that sold electric Christmas tree lights,” later bought 80 Spring St. — the building of which Balthazar is part. His grandson owns it today.
I rarely give a thought to the former life and times of the pig on my plate. But Nadelson understands that, while the world may come to a great restaurant, the restaurant must first take from the world. She chases down the origins, not of “luxury” ingredients such as truffles, but of less exotic staples.
Enamored of Balthazar’s steak frites, she journeys to Creekstone Farms in Arkansas City, Kan., where all of the restaurant’s meat is processed. Meaning: animals killed.
In nearby grazing land, it troubled Nadelson that “Black Angus, their sleek hides shining in the sun, gained 300 pounds in three months.”
Once, hundreds of the beasts that were peacefully munching, “turned all at once as a herd and bolted . . . a terrible collective whimpering rose up.” What spooked them was the approach of a “rendering truck” used to pick up sick or injured cows, which were killed for tallow and sometimes dog food.
Back in New York, Nadelson couldn’t immediately shake the memory: “I didn’t order the steak, not that night.”
But return for it she did.
Nadelson knows that Balthazar won’t likely last forever, at least not in its present form. McNally’s company, Third Man Management, became more corporate than in its seat-of-the-pants early years. Since Balthazar, it grew to include Morandi, Pulino’s (now Cherche Midi), Minetta Tavern, a Balthazar in London, and brand-new Augustine in the Beekman Hotel downtown. Nadelson perceived “just a faint whisper of it, the kind of thing that brushed against your skin,” that one day it could be sold and turn into a tourist trap.
No restaurant is forever. But just as a new World Trade Center has risen since 9/11, in the 20 years since Balthazar opened, grand new places have come onto the scene that will go on winning hearts well into the future — Nobu, Marea, The Breslin, Eleven Madison Park, Le Coucou, and, yes, Augustine. Others — Union Square Cafe, The Four Seasons — can even come back from the dead.
Politically motivated haters may go on warning that evil landlords will one day drive every last restaurant out of town. But these palaces of pleasure will be with us as long as there are ones like Balthazar — and the people who love them