The Wire
Rooms
Every room, by desk and neighborhood. Every name opens the map.
Altamarea's Asian dining room under MoMA: all blades and glass and one very good bar.
A taverna the size of a block, where the fish is sold by the pound and the room by the hour.
Still the best room in the city for a 5:30 martini and a bad decision.
Garage doors open in summer, kale salad with a cult.
Silk-and-stone Japanese downstairs, with a bar that outsells the dining room every Friday.
Tiny, French, always louder than you remembered.
The Twenty Two's Levantine ground floor: all tile and low light, with a bar that fills first.
Andrew Carmellini's meat-and-Seaport room, with a great steak aging in a glass box.
The uptown outpost of Notting Hill's velvet-and-brass club, transplanted to 61st Street.
A downtown bistro with uptown manners, and the hardest table above 70th Street.
The white-jacketed SoHo room that still feels like a set built for one specific person.
Melissa Rodriguez in the old Del Posto room, now a live-fire steakhouse with a Tao Group crowd.
The 1837 room where the city invented the steakhouse and has failed to improve on it since.
A bistro-bar with a DJ booth and a wine list that means it.
Small plates, low light, the most copied restaurant of its decade.
The room where nothing has ever gone wrong.
Mutton chops and fifty thousand clay pipes above your head.
Four decades of seafood and still the cleanest dining room in Midtown.
Madison Avenue's café chair, occupied since 1986 by the same fifteen tables of regulars.
Daniel Boulud's steakhouse, where the prime rib trolley does the talking.
The only dining room in the park, on the Lake, and it knows it.
A dim sum-and-rum basement in Tribeca still running on 1930s Macau and a lot of candles.
A SoHo dining room that dresses like a brothel and serves like a bistro until two.
The Lowell's garden room: French technique, Moroccan spice, and the quietest money on the East Side.
La Mercerie's team inside Sotheby's Breuer building: French continental, priced like an auction.
The Flatiron's Russian living room, complete with samovars and a grandmother's worth of wallpaper.
A steakhouse for people who treat the room as a negotiation.
A Greek fish market with a marble room attached, and the best lunch deal in Midtown.
Red leather, low light, and the Black Label burger.
Fifty years of hand-pulled noodles and an equal amount of hand-pulled attitude.
The brasserie that lit the neighborhood; the bar is the room.
The Meatpacking fantasy of Paris, restarted and packed as if it never closed.
A furniture showroom that quietly runs one of the most expensive dining rooms in the district.
Emilia-Romagna pasta in a room that hums.
Midcentury power dining, cart service, an absurd wine list.
The most wanted table downtown: Italian-American cooking with a precision the room pretends not to need.
Corner banquettes, candlelight, and the best plate of vegetables in the city.
Tokyo discipline in a Midtown office tower: the robata counter is where the evening actually happens, the dining room is where the deals do, and both are full by six.