Restaurant review, Fried Chicken for Ladies Who Lunch.

The curse of the boom-time hotel restaurant has been well documented in this column. Boom-time hotels tend to spring up around town like exotic mushrooms during (or just after) periods of economic excess. They’re shaped like giant concrete Kleenex boxes (the James, on the southern edge of Soho) or great billowing sails (the Cooper Square Hotel, on the Bowery), and many of them feature elaborate new restaurants run, at least temporarily, by big-name chefs (David Burke at the James, for example). The cooks are drawn into the arrangement by the publicity, ready-made clientele, and sometimes cheaper-than-usual rents. In return, however, they often find themselves marooned in strange, unfamiliar neighborhoods (David Chang’s Má Pêche in midtown, Susur Lee at the tragically located Thompson Hotel on the Lower East Side) or saddled with a poky, ungainly space, like the one Scott Conant’s doomed Faustina briefly occupied off the lobby of the Cooper Square Hotel.

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