Delmonico’s can never live up to its history or its hype. The creation of Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico, the restaurant was founded on William Street in 1827 as a pastry shop selling “small cakes” (probably cupcakes). It soon turned into a dining room with six tables, then hopscotched around William Street until the Great Fire of 1835 razed the entire block—and most of the young city with it. A much grander restaurant arose at the smoldering corner of William and Beaver streets in 1837. By that time, the menu had ballooned to 11 pages, including 47 different veal dishes. Delmonico’s is considered the city’s first real restaurant, replacing the table d’hôte dining rooms, eating houses, and coffee shops of earlier generations, embracing French cuisine while many Americans were still wearing fringed leather jackets and carrying flintlocks. The further history of the restaurant is too complicated to recount, but suffice it to say that various iterations of Delmonico’s moved steadily northward (at one time, there were four), even though the present location—the same as in 1837—has been home to one evocation or another for 151 discontinuous years. Most recently, the Bice Group revived the brand in 1998, returning the décor to something like its 1891 state—the year the current building was constructed.
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