Desmond’s, which opened for business a month or so ago on a gloomy stretch of 60th Street, across from the loading dock at Bloomingdale’s, aspires to be the kind of restaurant that your sophisticated grandmother used to enjoy on her stately forays into the big city. The tables in the high-ceilinged former carriage-house space are covered with white linen and decorated with little silver lamps shaped like pineapples. The waiters are dressed in suitably subdued tones of white and charcoal gray, and several of them speak with comforting (if slightly indistinct) Continental accents. There’s a version of Waldorf salad on the menu (tossed with sliced Concord grapes, the way your grandmother used to like it) and a passable Dover sole. If you’re in the mood for a stout pretheater Edwardian feast, you can even dine on a beef Wellington big enough to feed a party of six.
Desmond’s proprietors (Indochine veteran John Loeffler, former Soho House London cook David Hart, and Richard O’Hagan from London’s Annabel’s) appear to be aiming for something like a latter-day Stork Club atmosphere. But the restaurant’s timeless, slightly archaic charms are diminished somewhat by the acoustics in the echoey room (after it was a carriage house, it was a bank), not to mention the lighting, which is catacomb-gray in the afternoons and tomblike in the evenings. Then there’s the location, next to the back end of Bloomingdale’s. The spot might be convenient for a quick after-work drink or a nice shopping lunch in midtown, but it’s beset by a steady stream of traffic during the day and strewn with garbage bags from local fast-food joints (a pizza parlor next door, a Subway sandwich franchise down the street) at night.
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