The Central Park Boathouse Is Back, and It’s Perfectly Fine

As at all restaurants with spectacular views, the food at the Boathouse is hardly the draw; neither is the service. We come here to slip into a New York fantasy in precisely the way the metal rowboats, docked just to the side of the restaurant’s terrace, glide at a push into the artichoke-green water of the lake. The Boathouse is a beautiful place to eat lunch, especially in fine weather, especially at the easy pace of people with no pressing work to get back to. (Are they rich, or are they tourists?) The meal itself, to be honest, is considerably more satisfying than a pricey tourist-bait canteen has any right to be. The kitchen is now run by the chef Adam Fiscus, with consulting from David Pasternack, a renowned seafood chef who did brilliant things at the late, much-beloved midtown Italian restaurant Esca. They seem to be embracing all the dreamy, Upper West Side-y, tweed-and-loafers Nora Ephron of it all, with a menu evocative of a Reagan-era (but Dukakis-voting) luncheon party. There are stuffed mushrooms with Ritz-cracker crumbs and Gruyère, oysters Rockefeller, chicken-liver pâté served with craggy slices of toast. The spring menu included a shaved-asparagus salad topped with a très “Silver Palate” medallion of warmed goat cheese, and swordfish (my God, remember swordfish?). Russian dressing, zippy and coral-pink, is drizzled on romaine with freshly grated horseradish, and reappears in a ramekin as a dipping sauce for golden fries. Every meal starts with a relish tray, pleasantly retro if rather anemic: a few leaves of endive, a couple of black olives, melba toast, a little puddle of dip.