Café Carmellini Is Fine Dining That Knows a Good Time

Café Carmellini is a serious, sophisticated restaurant, with white linens on the tables and bow-tied service captains. The exquisitely appointed dining room is all blue and gold and rich brown woods, with soaring ceilings, full-sized faux trees, and discreet balcony-level box seating. The feel is at once nautical, Old World, fantastical, and stagy, like a first-class dining room on a romance-novel zeppelin, serenely crossing the Atlantic. The elegant menu matches the room; the precise and attentive service matches the menu. But—as the frankly silly breadsticks foreshadowed—the pomp of the place never lapses into tedium. Andrew Carmellini, the restaurant’s owner and chef, cut his chops as a Boulud protege, and has spent much of his career since then building restaurants (Locanda Verde, Lafayette, the Dutch) that are stylish, for sure, and sceney, sometimes, but never snobby, and always just insouciant enough to insure a surprising amount of fun. He’s been at it for several decades now—his NoHo Hospitality Group operates more than a dozen restaurants—and Café Carmellini, the first restaurant to bear his name, feels pretty straightforwardly like a legacy play. He’s personally in the kitchen almost every night, and the air may as well be pumped full of pheromones specially calibrated to attract Michelin inspectors. But, thank goodness that, for all its fanciness, it is also just a good time.