A First Look at Danny Meyer's Untitled, Opening Next Week

Grid View

• The main dining room.
• View from the main dining room
• The cafe space
• Door outside - there will be cafe seating out there.
• The cafe, as seen from the stairs from the first floor.
• View from the main dining room
• A new specialty sandwich: egg salad with smoked salmon on an everything bagel.
• Grilled cheese

Next week, Danny Meyer will open Untitled, his new restaurant in the Whitney Museum, with Gramercy Tavern vet Chris Bradley in the kitchen. Like many Meyer projects, the room is divided between a casual cafe and a more formal dining area, with a bar designed for both drinking and eating. When we got a peek at the subterranean space today, the kitchen was just firing up the stoves for the first time, and the room was still coming together — the chairs you see above are just placeholders, and the banquettes are still on the way. David Rockwell has designed a seating area that can be easily collapsed to create a large, open event space for the museum.

We also got a sample of the food from chef Bradley, and just so you know: there's a serious pub burger on menu.

It's a patty of Pat Lafrieda beef topped with roasted tomatoes, caramelized onions and one-year-aged white cheddar. As for the rest of the menu, the cafe space will serve a number of pastries, both made in-house and sourced locally (the pies, for example, are from Four and Twenty Blackbirds, because Danny and Co. love them, and couldn't take on a large-scale pastry operation in the Whitney facilities). There may also be light fare like sandwiches and salads, as well as Stumptown coffee, beer and wine. The cafe will be very causal, first-come-first-serve with bench seating, and a counter set up ideal for grab-and-go. The main dining room will be waiter-service, and will serve a menu of seasonally-influenced American breakfast and lunch classics (two eggs any style, omelets, soups, salads, sandwiches, a rotating blue plate special-style entree). Both the cafe and the dining room will be open from 7:30 AM - 3 PM every day of the week, even on Mondays and Tuesdays when the museum is closed. For the immediate future, the bar will serve beer and wine only, with a full liquor list sometime soon.

Dinner will roll out next month, on Saturdays and Sundays only, and will be a more formal showcase for the kind of market-driven cooking that Bradley specialized in at Gramercy Tavern. The meals will be multi-course, family-style affairs, with a set menu for the table. Bradley and Meyer are toying around with the format, but one idea that's been floated is a "Meet Your Maker" dinner centered around a large roast or whole animal, with the purveyor in attendance. No word yet on when reservations will be available for those dinners.

The new projected opening date is Tuesday, March 22, or Wednesday, March 23 — we'll have more photos of the finished product, and a final menu next week. Oh, and a note about the name: apparently after batting around ideas, Whitney Director Adam Weinberg suggested "Untitled" because every good work of art starts out that way.
· All Coverage of Untitled [~ENY~]