These Hotel Restaurants Don’t Just Cater to Tourists

Hello friends! I replace our regular hostess, Nikita. This week I want to address what may be the most reviled category in New York dining: the hotel restaurant.

The skepticism is valid: By nature, a hotel restaurant is designed for tourists, not residents. But in recent years there’s been a boom in honestly good New Yorker-approved restaurants that just happen to be found in boutique hotels. You could spend an entire weekend visiting hotels as foodie destinations, rather than as necessary stopovers with in-between food (at best).

Feel free to email Nikita at wheretoeat@nytimes.com with your questions or advice, or just to tell her that you missed her this week. (I did!)

If something is going to have a hotel restaurant it is glamour. I am a known hater of Manhattan West, but the scene in of zou at the Pendry Hotel is undeniably charming: soaring ceilings, velvet banquettes, the works. A variety of Mediterranean sauces, served on a mirrored cake stand, makes a worthy appetizer for Yemeni filet mignon kebabs and Wadi Rum jeweled rice.

The crocodile, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has to be the most glamorous hotel restaurant of all, with distinctive New York charms: exposed brick walls, arched windows, and detailed tile floors. While the Wythe Hotel dates back only to 2012, it occupies a 122-year-old factory building. The menu, from the folks at Chez Ma Tante, a Greenpoint favorite, is a hit: steak and fries al poivre, French onion soup, and a frisée salad with poached egg (and smoked eel instead of lardons).

Rooftop Shrimp and Arak Cocktails in Williamsburg

Williamsburg has become, seemingly overnight, the unofficial neighborhood for the Cool Hotel Restaurant. In the new Moxy Williamsburg is Mesiba, inspired by the restaurant scene in Tel Aviv. You don’t even have to walk through the hotel lobby to enter the high-ceilinged dining room, where you’ll find tender lamb neck served with Yemeni pancakes; an epic whole fish fry; and, of course, cocktails made with Arak.

And last month Jaffa cocktail and raw bar open on the inside and outside roof deck on the Hoxton. It’s a surprisingly laid-back (at the time of publishing, mind you) alternative to laser wolf a few flights up. The menu focuses on seafood, such as pastrami-spiced horse mackerel with vaguely gherkin-like grilled cucumber; raw tuna topped with grated cured egg yolk; and shakshuka octopus. And, because the bar is set on a Brooklyn rooftop in the year 2023, it serves up an icy drink: the Jaffa Orange, basically a vodka melted Creamsicle.

Thanks for listening. you can always hit me instagram with your thoughts, feelings, complaints, gossip and photos of dogs.

In other news …

• This week, Pete Wells reviews disgusting witch, the latest restaurant on the team behind Roberta’s. He writes that the restaurant cleverly “summons the ghost” of Blanca, the team’s now-closed tasting menu restaurant, but “in a simpler, more streamlined way.”

• openings: lever housethe restaurant at Lever House on Park Avenue received an update and a new menu; southern charm is a new destination for cookies in the West Village; and spy goldthe bar component of Dan Kluger’s new Greywind restaurant, opens Friday.

• In an effort to avoid controversy, The James Beard Foundation is now investigating the chefs nominated for its awards. But the opaque vetting process is causing controversy, report Julia Moskin and Brett Anderson. (Are here the winners from last night’s James Beard Awards.)

• For decades, Cooper Donuts in Los Angeles was commemorated for being the site of an uprising that preceded the Stonewall Inn riots by 10 years. The story, however, It may be more myth than fact.reports Erik Piepenburg.

• Andres Bellucci, the pizzaiolo with a checkered past (and creator of a very good clam pizza), died last week at age 59, writes Pete Wells.