Union Square Cafe

[Jay_Winton]

@Victor Hong

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/dining/union-square-cafe-review.html

nice read! Thanks for posting Victor.

[Victor_Hong]

I took my wife, some of her family members, a fellow wine-geek banker, and my longest and best friend for dinner there on Saturday night. The meal, service, and ambiance were very good.

[lsmorris]

My wife and I had a Saturday lunch there a few months ago and it was easily as good as at 16th Street except I am not a fan of the addition of other seafood to the fried calamari. In our case it was scallops, which were fine, but that was the one dish they shouldn’t have messed with. The ricotta gnocchi were insanely delicate and tender. After further thought, they must be cooking them on the serving dish, because I can’t imagine trying to plate them otherwise. And the new version of the banana tart was just delicious, among the better desserts I have eaten.

[Victor_Hong]

Birthday dinner with my best friend, and best man at my wedding.

[alan_weinberg]

John Mariano 's very favorable review of the restaurant:Virtual Gourmet

[mattcitrang]

@Victor Hong

Birthday dinner with my best friend, and best man at my wedding.

Is that Frank?

[Ramon_C]

Happy Birthday!

[Victor_Hong]

Thank you. The food was excellent. As you can see above, we all cleaned our plates.
(No, I was not on dish-washing duty, at least that night. )

We were lucky to get a table, last Saturday night. After that three-star New York Times review, weekend dinner reservations have become quite scarce. Even the waiting list for prime-time tables is often now over-booked, sometimes closed! Soon, nobody will go there, because it is too crowded.

@mattcitrang

@Victor Hong

Birthday dinner with my best friend, and best man at my wedding.

Is that Frank?

Who dat?

[MitchTallan]

@Glenn L e v i n e

Nice photo Victor.

Loved Rockpile and GP & The Rumour at The Palladium back in late 70s/early 80s.

Ha! Seconds of Pleasure and Squeezing out Sparks were on my turntable constantly back in '80, 81, 82.

[John_Morris]

@Jay Miller

@Paul McCourt

@Michael Sopher

I remember the far east village of the late 80’s early 90’s. Had a GF that was pretty hip back then… we were at one bar on the corner of the park (The Horseshoe Bar???) The two of us may have been the only non junkies in the place… certainly the two healthiest…

In the early 80s I worked in a factory on Spring and Mercer in the summers (yeah, back then SOHO was still mostly industrial… galleries were just starting to open) a bit west of the place was fine (a few blocks from Ben’s famous pizza and the paddleball courts that were in a scene in “Big” (even though they are too far from where the toy company offices supposedly were)… but east of there on Spring they found dead bodies in dumpsters… not too infrequently

People forget what the city was like back then. It is so very different now.

Union Sq was one of my first “nice” restaurants.

Every time I go to a restaurant in the East Village I think “I used to be afraid to walk in this neighborhood and now I can’t afford to live here.”

Two memories that capture the change in the city:

1. Walking across an utterly deserted SoHo (Broome Street, I think) from Varick one night circa 1984 headed toward the Grotta Azzurra Restaurant in Little Italy. It was scary – dark and not a soul on the street.

2. Emerging warily from the subway at Union Square at dusk in 1993 with a suitcase, looking around to check for junkies and other nasties and discovering that all the folks on the benches were yuppies – that the neighboorhood had flipped since the last time I’d stayed with my friend at 12th and Broadway maybe two years earlier.

[Victor_Hong]

What Hospitality Means to Times Restaurant Critic Pete Wells (Published 2017)

[Michael_Sopher]

Had dinner there last week. Wonderful as always. The ricotta gnocchi were an epiphany in every bite. Rest of the meal was great too. And the banana tart was as good a dessert as it was 20+ years ago when I first had one. (and the Rivers Marie pinot I toted along didn’t suck either)

[Victor_Hong]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/high-rents-in-union-square-west-could-create-a-food-desert

[Victor_Hong]

As Danny Meyer Eliminates Tipping, His Staff Struggles to Adapt

Difficulties.

[Victor_Hong]

Great memories. Going there in the mid-late '80s. A colleague had gone to college with Danny Meyer, and every time we ate there he would come over to the table, bring some bottles of wine for us to taste, etc. Great experience, great food. And everyone was so young then. And the neighborhood was very, very sketchy (no more!)

In your training class? Who?