Café Carmellini, New York City

Last summer, after three decades in New York, I moved home to Southern California. Within hours of landing at LAX I knew it was the correct decision, a fact confirmed whenever I pull up to the Mariscos Jalisco truck on La Cienega and treat myself to two shrimp tacos and a Mexican mineral water. I wear flip-flops and sit on a plastic stool. The bill is eight dollars.

Los Angeles does the sidewalk thing extremely well, whereas New York City excels at something else. That something is why, on that inevitable day when Gotham lures me back east, I envision catching a cab directly from JFK to Café Carmellini at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “Opulence” has become a dirty word of late, so let’s give it a whirl. Entering Café Carmellini from the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue is like having your neurons enrobed in opulence. All at once your eyes take in sapphire-blue velvet banquettes, roving flambé carts, silver cloches, the golden glow of chandeliers. From the dining room you spy, above, an extra level of what appear to be opera boxes; actually, the whole room has the sweeping, ambered majesty of a European opera house. You check your phone: Did this place open in 2023, or 1923?

A year in, Café Carmellini already embodies the essence of a New Classic, proving that the old techniques and gestures still have plenty of juice — or, more precisely, juiciness. The fatty pan juices you get when you sauté an ingredient instead of suffocating it in a sous-vide bag. The juices that flow when a handsome drinks cart rolls up and Darryl Chan pours you a glass of vintage Chartreuse. I know the first thing I’m ordering is chef Andrew Carmellini’s juicy duck-duck-duck tortellini, the pasta packed with minced duck and crowned with a velvet trifecta: a glaze of duck sugo, a froth of foie gras, a drizzle of cherry moscato.

Against the odds and the sociological tides, Café Carmellini delivers the kind of evening that keeps New York City’s reputation (a little opulent, a little dirty) alive and bristling. I expect to walk into that room having made all sorts of West Coast wellness promises to myself — no drinks, no desserts, no overspending, et cetera. And thanks to the city’s satiny powers of persuasion, I expect to walk out having broken every single one.

Jeff Gordinier writes about food for Esquire and poetry for the New York Times. He is the author of 2019’s Hungry, a book about the Danish chef René Redzepi.