Cru
Tasting menu: $125 per person
With an 80,000-bottle cellar especially rich in Burgundies and Barolos, this clubby brown-on-beige oenophile's haunt is where wine barons uncork 1937 Romane Conti and the city's top sommeliers trade grape gossip after work in the bar. Unbelievably, the real draw is the Italianate cooking by the unstoppably creative young chef Shea Gallante, who has a genius for combining the comforting and the cutting edge in dishes like hamachi crudo (raw young yellowfish) with spicy radish sprouts, tortellini with duck and a surprising accent of cocoa, and his signature silky-soft buttermilk-poached baby chicken served alongside smoky, bacony spaetzle.
Tip: While the main dining room is strictly prix fixe, the front room is a great place to sample small plates and discuss malolactic fermentation (a technique used to make wine less sour) over glasses of Vermentino, a new-wave white wine from Liguria.
As Featured In...
From Food & Wine, Apr 2008
“The recipes here, from chef Shea Gallante of Manhattan’s Cru, are delicious with lots of different wines—red and white, light and rich, New World and Old—for the ultimate in simple pairing. ...” MORE>>
From Food & Wine, Jul 2005
“Cru is the rarest of new restaurants—one with a cellar full of old wine. Though cellar isn't quite an accurate term, as the restaurant couldn't possibly store its almost comically massive wine inventory on the premises....” MORE>>
From the Apr 2008 Food & Wine Go List
In addition to exquisite pastas from Shea Gallante (an F&W Best New Chef 2005), Cru also boasts one of the country's best and biggest wine lists—more than 200 pages of reds, whites and sparklers. Also a Go List selection in 2006.
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