One day in the fall of 1985, I got a call in my office at Vanity Fair from contributing editor Beatrice Monti Della Corte to confirm our lunch date with a visiting Italian journalist. Beatrice proposed that we try out a restaurant that had just opened off Union Square on 16th Street. It was called Union Square Cafe. When I got to the address, which was near my apartment, I recognized it as the former location of a health-food place called Brownies, where local residents would occasionally see Andy Warhol sitting at the counter with a dachshund at his feet. (The Factory, his studio, was a block away.)
It was clear the moment I entered that the new proprietor, a 27-year-old named Danny Meyer, had swept away every trace of Brownies. The large, step-down dining room was flooded with sunlight. The walls were covered with original art, the linens were crisp and white, and the glassware sparkled. The food was simple but well prepared and tasty. Most impressive of all was the service, provided by a youthful, personable staff, wearing an array of pastel-striped button-down Oxford shirts. Mr. Meyer, whoever he was, seemed to have done everything right. With its fresh, casual, refined tone, this place made you feel good.
And it would continue to do so for the next 30 years, until 2015, when a major rent hike persuaded Meyer to move it to a new location, three blocks away, at the northeast corner of Park Avenue and 19th Street, where a restaurant called City Crab was ready to end its long run. The site was so close to the old address that the name didn’t even have to be changed. The new Union Square Cafe opened, with little fanfare, this past December.
In the three decades since its creation, however, the restaurant—and its owner—had achieved iconic status. The Zagat annual guide has listed it an unequaled nine times as New York’s most popular restaurant, and the James Beard Foundation has bestowed on it many of the top awards, from best chef to outstanding wine service. Gail Zweigenthal, the former editor of Gourmet, once told me, “It’s hard to believe, but subscribers actually write or call Gourmet and beg us to help them get reservations at Union Square Cafe.” The place also became a sort of Four Seasons for downtown publishers such as Abrams and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose chief editors soon had their regular tables.
Since his debut in 1985, Danny Meyer has also shot to superstardom. Under the corporate name Union Square Hospitality Group, he has introduced one phenomenal success after another, starting with Gramercy Tavern, Zagat’s “most popular” in many of those years when Union Square Cafe did not top the list. His other triumphs have included the very fancy Eleven Madison Park, which he sold to the chef Daniel Humm in 2011; Blue Smoke, a barbecue parlor with live jazz downstairs; Marta, the Italian cafe in the Martha Washington Hotel; the Modern, in the Museum of Modern Art, a model for institutional dining, with a handsome bar room and a high-end restaurant; Untitled, in the downtown Whitney Museum; and the prodigious Shake Shack, which started in 2004 as a glorified hot-dog stand in Madison Square Park and has mushroomed internationally. It now has more than 100 branches in the United States and outlets in dozens of cities around the globe—with lines around them all. Meyer is in the admirable process of introducing a non-tipping system into his many restaurants. This not only eliminates the mean tips left by unsophisticated visitors (as well as by all the born mean tippers) but also ensures a healthier living wage for the whole staff.
A month after its opening, the new Union Square is booming. With two bars, an extensive mezzanine, and two spaces for private dining, it holds 198, as opposed to the 152 it could accommodate on 16th Street. Some of the old art is on the walls, and the menu, though revised, still includes the bibb and red-oak-leaf lettuces salad and the tuna burger (now the 19th Street Yellowfin Tuna Burger). It also features a New York strip steak with marrow mashed potatoes and radish salad, which two women friends, on separate evenings, pronounced the best they had ever eaten. On one of those nights, I had the roasted pork rack with shell beans, kale, and fennel-apple mostarda, which was choice. The other time I chose the very rich, very satisfying pappardelle with duck and chanterelle sugo, Brussels sprouts, and winter squash. For any and every meal I would recommend for dessert the pumpkin-bread pudding with caramelized white-chocolate ice cream, because it is unforgettable and unmatchable.
Like its sister restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, only two blocks away, Union Square Cafe now stays open straight through from noon to 10 P.M. The sharp, better-paid staff, still warm and welcoming, now wear white shirts, open at the neck.
