Our friendly waitress at the Park Hyatt’s Back Room at One57 proudly introduced a salmon amuse-bouche with great detail, down to its last obscure, pickled micro-component.
Only problem: Her description contained more words than the item had molecules. So tiny it required a flashlight to locate the morsel on a wide plate, it was the silliest — but by no means the only — ridiculous offering at this ridiculous restaurant. For the record, we tasted no salmon at all.
We normally wouldn’t waste a review on a corporate-hotel, steakhouse-style eatery like Back Room, except that months of breathless hype preceded its launch.
Narciso Rodriguez staff uniforms! Fashion Week parties!
Three-star former Veritas chef Sam Hazen in the kitchen! — until he quit days after the opening.
When a great hotel company opens its only 5-star Manhattan property inside the city’s most-watched new skyscraper — home to $90 million condo apartments bought by the likes of hedge fund king Bill Ackman and mysterious Chinese tycoons — you assume its restaurant will, at the very least, not be completely terrible.
But this expectation is tossed to the Midtown winds at the Back Room. It’s bad enough to chase the moguls to the laugh-riot Russian Tea Room across the street, which is a feast for the eyes if not for the palate.
Even a union-staffed, uptown hotel catering to a conservative clientele can offer a rewarding dining experience: think of the Regency Bar & Grill, Carlyle Restaurant, and the Waldorf- Astoria’s Bull & Bear.
All those offer a sense of place. But Back Room’s cookie-cutter, brown-on-brown, high-ceilinged void on the Park Hyatt’s third floor, buried behind a buzzy lounge, blows off its iconic location across from Carnegie Hall.
Window views offer scant relief from the gloom. Awful, pulsing “music” made the 96-seat room seem even emptier than it was on recent nights.
At least the service has grown up since an early visit, when terrified staffers all but offered to pre-chew our food. But after Hazen bailed out, the all-thumbs kitchen was taken over by Sebastien Archambault, formerly of “acclaimed” Blue Duck Tavern in Washington, DC. Is he really on the job?
A few tolerable dishes included conventional but well-turned-out crisp sweetbreads and crispy-skinned wild salmon amply accompanied by braised beans and avocado.
But, oy — Hyatt’s idea of presentation wouldn’t cut it at tourist-packed Rue 57 down the block. Lobster “salad” turned out to be a Thermidorish cream bath with a few leaves scrunched into a coffee cup. Pricey meat cuts sprawled naked in the center of big, unadorned plates.
A moisture-free, unseasoned veal chop ranked as the saddest dead flesh in captivity. It was $60, one of many prices that seemed inspired by One57’s 1,005-foot height.
Meat courses tasted not at all like their pedigrees. Generic-tasting, on-the-bone sirloin bore none of the flavor concentration that should come of 45-day dry aging.
Kobe beef claiming the highest A5 grade resembled no Japanese Wagyu I’ve had. While lacking the prized breed’s high-fat silkiness on the tongue, each strip was ringed with visible fat clusters like those at Tad’s Broiled Steaks.
When the munchies strike the gazillionaires upstairs, they can find better steaks and chops within a 10-minute stroll to Quality Italian, Quality Meats or Porter House. At least they’ll see the neighborhood, the land that Back Room forgot.