From pickled playwrights to pickled black trumpet mushrooms.
That’s the story of Chumley’s, a 95 year-old New York “institution” that was for many years easy to laugh at despite a long-ago literary legacy. The new Chumley’s — pricier, a lot prettier but a bit precious — is hard not to love.
First opened as a speakeasy in 1922, Chumley’s hosted insatiable inebriates like Eugene O’Neill and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was said to enjoy a tryst with a strange woman in a booth while he was married to Zelda. In more recent decades, it was a pit stop for easily impressed tourists wowed by the fact that there was no name on the door at 86 Bedford St. — how exotic! — and NYU students equipped with fake IDs.
In 2007, the 19th-century building that housed the divey bar partially collapsed, and nostalgia-obsessed New Yorkers fretted that Chumley’s would never rise from its booze-sodden ashes.
Around 14 months ago, Alessandro Borgognone, the wizard behind Sushi Nakazawa, rode to the rescue. Borgognone and his partners cleverly transformed the empty shell that was Chumley’s into a clubby bistro for heat-seeking locals while preserving much of its Prohibition-era charm.
He re-installed or replicated 250-odd writers’ portraits, restored shelves lined with vintage book jackets, and replaced rigid, boxy wood seats with sexy, pleated-leather banquettes. An infectiously warm vibe flows from the open kitchen through two romantically lit, cheerfully staffed rooms that you don’t want to leave on a cold night.
True, quirks and glitches drive you batty. There’s a ridiculously priced $13 pretzel. Beets are buried beneath a heap of shoots dubiously described by the house as nasturtiums. Taking a cue from the sign-less door, there’s no sign of specials enthusiastically touted by the waiter moments before: “Sorry, we’re out of steak frites.”
But most of the menu wins the high ground. Executive chef Victoria Blamey’s limited American menu boasts marvelous king salmon ($34): a prodigious slab joyously moist under near-black, candy-crisp skin. Spicy Dungeness crab “pot pie” ($45) arrives inside a giant shell with an appealing, popover-like pastry crust. Those pickled black trumpets lend a piquant note to ragingly delicious fried chicken with cognac ($25).
In a town of over-ambitious, underachieving “beverage programs,” Chumley’s is truly an educated drinker’s paradise. Fun $16 cocktails shuttle cheerfully between the Caribbean, Europe and Olde New York. “You! You Can Never Tell” marries Jamaican rum with Amaro Montenegro, grapefruit, plum, honey and lime.
The wine list includes underpriced gems such as the 2008 Nebbiolo Punta Exclamativa from Clendenen Family Vineyard in California’s Santa Maria Valley.
Sold at retail and online for $50-$60, it’s marked up to a mere $80 at Chumley’s — a bargain that, like much else about the place, was worth a 95-year wait. Just don’t look for Scott or Zelda.
