Every grizzled fine-dining veteran knows that your enjoyment of dinner can be directly affected by where you’re seated in a restaurant. But I’ve never encountered two rooms as jarringly different as the ones on display at Sam Talbot’s new seafood restaurant, Imperial No. Nine, which opened several weeks ago off the lobby of the Mondrian Soho hotel. The main dining room, where I was seated one grim evening, is a windowless lounge-lizard Siberia. There, the house music is annoyingly loud, and the glowing imitation Louis Quatorze furniture looks like it’s been lifted from the VIP lounge of an after-hours club in suburban L.A. The garden room, by contrast, is an airy space enclosed in glass, like a giant greenhouse, and decorated with flowerpots and handblown chandeliers. On a clear evening, you can look up and see the stars twinkling dimly over downtown Manhattan. So it was a lucky thing, for Talbot and his crew, that the maître d’ decided to seat our party in the garden room when I took Mrs. Platt to dine at the Mondrian. “I love this place,” she announced not once but twice, as we gazed up at the sky from our table next to a row of mossy planters.
Like the faux-bucolic surroundings in the front of the house, much of the food at Imperial No. Nine seems to have been designed with a delicately discerning—you could say feminine—sensibility in mind. There is no burger on the dinner menu. All of the ingredients, as our waiter (who looked uncannily like Jonathan Rhys Meyers from The Tudors) took pains to explain, are righteously sourced. The fish is “line-caught” and not “dredged” by commercial boats from the ocean floor. The heirloom vegetables are handpicked from a boutique Ohio farm (there are seven non-meat dishes on the menu), and many are designed to make a meal in themselves.
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