Those of you interested in studying the rise and fall of the many chaotic dining epochs that have rippled through the New York restaurant world over the past 30 years should pay close attention to the career of Alison Price Becker. She began in the eighties, answering phones at Jams, the seminal Jonathan Waxman establishment that introduced the city to the seasonal wonders of California cuisine. She worked at Gotham Bar and Grill while Alfred Portale was inventing his much imitated vertical cuisine, and was the manager at a short-lived restaurant called Rakel, which is notorious as the place where a talented young cook named Thomas Keller first set up shop in New York. In the late eighties, she opened Alison on Dominick, which was one of the original outlier dining destinations to open way downtown during the late eighties, and is still famous, among aged carnivores, as the place where the great Tom Valenti popularized that iconic delicacy of the early nose-to-tail era, the braised lamb shank.
Price Becker closed Alison on Dominick not long after 9/11 and then, for a time, skipped town. But now she’s back, after a spell in the Hamptons, with a new big-city venture called Alison Eighteen. The original Alison restaurant was known for its darkly baroque interior, but the new one has been modeled (by the designers of the original restaurant) in a classically clean, if slightly generic, neo-casual style. The space, on 18th Street in the Flatiron district, features a commodious tavern area up front, which was filled, when I dropped by, with dignified professional couples sipping fruity Champagne cocktails at the bar. The dining room is decorated with arrangements of forsythia blossoms and white wallpaper depicting Bemelmans-style New York street scenes. Long purple banquettes line the walls, and the waiters are dressed, like ghosts from a bygone fine-dining era, in classic white topcoats and straight purple ties.
Read more at http://nymag.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment