November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

May 19th, Saturday evening, my wife IM and I decide to spend having dinner at a nice restaurant nearby the Buckingham Hotel where we’re spending a long weekend in Manhattan. I’m recounting the four days in the Big Apple through the receipts I’ve collected during our stay. I’m on the 9th receipt, which we acquired Saturday evening at the Brasserie 8 ½ Restaurant at 9 W. 57th Street—just over a city block from the hotel. The towering 725-foot high 49-story black and white building occupying 70 percent of an acre of prime Midtown Manhattan real estate where the restaurant resides is a landmark on 57th Street. A large red sculpture of the number “9” smack in the middle of the wide pedestrian travertine marble sidewalk in the front of the building announces its address.

What makes the building—designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—unique is its shape. Viewed from a distance looking east or west you can see a distinct bell-shaped 40-degree slope on its north and south face as the building descends from the 19th floor to street level. Looking at the east or west side of the building, you see two white columns of travertine marble separated by a dark area slightly wider than either column. The white marble frames the dark area at the top. Within the dark glass covered center column you can make out three huge “x”s—the width of the center column—equidistantly spaced between the roof and ground floor of the building. The north and south façade of the building is likewise covered from top to bottom in dark-colored glass framed on the sides, top and bottom by a width of the same white travertine marble.

Brasserie 8 ½ occupies the basement of 9 West 57th Street. You get there by descending a red-carpeted spiral staircase that curves around a red-carpeted lounge within the center of the spiral, passing a long bar—about as long as the diameter of the lounge with a slight bow in its middle—and ending at a Maitre ‘d at the end of the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, the long bar is on your right and you’re facing a smaller bar just ahead and in front of the 250-person capacity main dining room—one bar is smoking; the other non-smoking. At the end of the room opposite the staircase is the kitchen.

Patina Restaurant Group owns the restaurant along with many others scattered on the east and west coast of the country. One of the restaurants the company owns in Manhattan is the Brasserie, located in the Seagram’s Building at 100 East 53rd between Park and Lexington Avenue, where my wife IM and I have dined on many occasions starting back in 1979 when I first started traveling to New York as a PR account executive.

The Brasserie derives its name from the French word brasseur, meaning brewer. Refugees from the Franco-Prussian War in the late 1800s found their way to Paris from the Alsace Region. Some Alsatians started breweries like those they owned in their region. In the breweries they also served the food typically found in a hofbrauhaus in Germany—sauerkraut with sausages of various kinds, which the French called choucroute garnie—as well as the dishes Parisians demanded.

Patricia Wells writing in the December 4th 1992 issue of the Herald Tribune described the quintessential Parisian brasserie, “Le Train Bleu” founded at the turn of the 20th century. She writes “the two giant dining rooms—with their eclectic, "neo-renaissance baroque" décor—are adorned with signed paintings by more than 30 provincial artists, each selected to depict the glories of his region. The paintings fill the walls, curling up onto the ceiling, and their cheeriness is particularly welcoming on gray Parisian days.”

The Brasserie was the place where the classes mixed: shift workers showing up before or after the morning, swing, or graveyard shifts for a quick, inexpensive, good, and filling meal; rubbing elbows with artists, professionals, politicians, and every other occupation found in a thriving metropolitan city. That’s how I came to first find my way to the Brasserie on East 53rd in the late 1970s. Landing at Kennedy at 8:00 PM on a Sunday evening and wanting to grab something to eat after a long flight from the west coast, my companion—a product marketing manager from Apple Computer—and I ended up there having dinner and wine at 10:00 PM.

The Brasserie 8 ½ couldn’t qualify for the description Patricia Wells attributed to “Le Train Bleu”, though the original Brasserie in the late 1970s certainly fit the mold of egalitarian eatery. Both restaurants today tend toward the avant-garde in décor. The banquette of the 1970s in the original Brasserie replaced by plush leather booths—the bench seat backs of which extend to the ceiling providing a floor to ceiling barrier between diners in adjacent booths.

We had arrived at 7:30 PM and the Maitre ‘d showed us to our table and the waiter showed up with menus and we each ordered a glass of champagne, Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label. We ordered a dish of Escargot—the evening’s appetizer special—to split between the two of us. The evening’s fish was a halibut, something IM couldn’t resist. I, for my part had my heart, set on steak frites. Before the snails arrived, the waiter showed up with a complementary appetizer, a bite of something special he had come up with to surprise each guest. The main course came and I ordered a glass of Chianti to go with the medium rare steak. IM opted for another glass of Veuve. We finished off the meal with chocolate cake that we shared and latte for IM and regular coffee for me. The receipt came to $222.41 with tip. Up the stairs a little after 9:00 PM, we decided to walk our dinner off along Central Park South.