Restaurant review, Sol Brother.

Gaudy revivals may work on Broadway, but they’re a hazardous proposition in restaurant land. Just ask the poor souls who put their dollars behind the star-crossed attempt to resuscitate the Russian Tea Room a couple of years ago. But if you are going to reprise a restaurant from the city’s dashing culinary past, you could do a lot worse than Joe Baum’s fabulous, Mad Men–era, three-martini-lunch spot, La Fonda del Sol. The original restaurant opened on the ground floor of the Time-Life Building in 1960, shortly after Baum had rolled out his famous over-the-top flop, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and his great masterpiece, The Four Seasons. Baum was the inventor of the theme restaurant, and La Fonda’s theme was Latin America (the name means “Inn of the Sun”), complete with a blue-tiled bar; tall, decorative, custom-made sangria pitchers; and special La Fonda swivel chairs, built for the room’s designer, Alexander Girard, by his colleagues Charles and Ray Eames. “It was like having lunch at a New York version of the Fontainebleau,” said one of my nostalgic guests as we examined the new incarnation of La Fonda del Sol, which opened a couple of months ago in a dark little corner of the Met Life Building, near the western entrance to Grand Central.

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