The shaggy chairs along the windows of the Baccarat Hotel’s second-floor Grand Salon looked creepily familiar. Even in muted evening light, when “chandeliers have dimmed to a coquettish wattage,” as their Web site puts it, the white, black and brown fur covering them seemed to closely resemble the creatures running rampant around town.
“Coyote,” the house confirmed. Yes! The beasts now roaming our streets from the Battery to La Guardia Airport have extended their range to the new hotel’s “plush, platinum and champagne-hued” (as they describe it) boozing zone drenched in Baccarat crystal.
The slaughtered specimens are rough on your butt — the seats are rock-hard beneath the fur — but the place is worse on your wallet. The cost of passing an hour or two in the Grand Salon or adjoining Bar (60 feet long under a barrel-vaulted, burgundy ceiling) is enough to make you howl like a coyote caught in a spring trap.
Where did $151.30 go for lunch for two? (For starters, on one glass of $22 chardonnay, and $29 for misspelled “Ceasar” salad with buffet-grade salmon.) “Dinner” for two clocked in at $278.08 — including a $25 glass of 2011 Chateau Puy-Blanquet St.-Emilion Grand Cru. It was $3 more than the exact same pour at Chevalier, the Baccarat’s ground-floor restaurant, with which the Salon and Bar are not to be confused.
While Chevalier under chef Shea Gallante is aimed at serious gourmands, the Salon targets the serious wastrels — Eurotrash, oligarch wannabes, and hedge-funders and their dates who might not be on the same page. To wit, she: “Have you been to Ellen’s Stardust Diner?” He: “No, I like ‘Queen of the Night’ ” (that’s the Paramount Hotel show where tickets run as high as $450 a head).
The sprawling Salon’s suave sequence of cozily decadent, tchotchke-crammed nooks
and crannies is fun to behold. Minotaur-like sculptures reign on high shelves. Prismatic windows lend a hallucinatory ripple to MoMA across the street. A topiary-adorned al fresco terrace affords a view but falls short of Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries, its supposed inspiration.
Nobody expects a cheap night out at a place like this. But when cocktails are $24 and $26 (for “classic” and “signature” elixirs), the house had better get the fine points of food and service right.
My experiences weren’t quite as bad as friends’ comic-horror accounts of $300 Champagne served bathtub-warm and a 45-minute wait for a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé.
But “baby” beets were barely embryonic. Petit filet mignon, a rare bargain at $29, came with limp frisee rather than “asparagus-cherry tomato salad.”
Cheddar cheese covered barely half of an otherwise fine burger “royale,” while “millefeuille de fromage” turned out to be an eensy grilled-cheese sandwich drowned in truffle oil. A waiter who touted a sorbet selection had no idea what the flavors were.
But, hey — the coyotes had it a lot worse.