Opening a successful big-money restaurant in this finicky town has always been a dark, mercurial art. But these days, with the economy being buffeted by hazardous downdrafts and popular tastes changing at warp speed, the process can be downright perilous. Just ask that grizzled veteran of the New York dining scene, Robert De Niro. This past year, he and a group of constantly revolving partners have, at great cost and frustration, opened (and in one case, closed) two vastly different styles of Italian restaurant in the same corner space of the new Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca. The first was the New York outlet of a traditional, upmarket Italian joint favored by the movie glitterati in West Hollywood called Ago. The waiters wore white shirts with vests, like bartenders in an elderly Vegas hotel. The menu was an antique assemblage of pricey, tediously familiar entrées (greasy veal Milanese, wrinkled disks of eggplant Parmesan) and tired red-sauce ragùs. The room was designed to inspire grandeur but felt vacant and bland, possibly because, as the acid reviews rolled in, nobody was ever there. Ten months after it opened, the starchy waiters were sent packing and Ago mercifully disappeared.
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