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The Beatrice Inn has been at 285 West 12th Street for almost 100 years in one form or another, drawing generations of New Yorkers up the steep, narrow stairs and into a dimly lit speakeasy, Italian restaurant, an impossible to enter -the door club and a lively chophouse owned by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
This year, chef and co-owner Angie Mar will be closing the restaurant after the New Years Eve service. She plans to reopen in the spring with the same team, in a new location – right next door – and with the “Inn” removed. the name of the restaurant. The new version will take concrete inspiration from its history by reinventing the long-standing institution.
“I intended to stay here,” Ms. Mar said. “But we have paid above the market, numbers that no company can support even in the best of times, let alone in the event of a loss. pandemic.”
The new space, which previously housed Blenheim, is a glazed, street-level corner with plenty of natural light – the opposite of the Beatrice Inn in every way. As Ms. Mar designs a new dining room and kitchen, she also wants to take the time to rethink the menu.
“The Beatrice Inn has been called a chophouse,” she says. “Do I cook meat? Absolutely. Do I feel like we are a chophouse? Absolutely not.”
Ms Mar said dry-aged beef will remain on the menu, but only in small quantities. If the kitchen sells its five or six steaks for the night, well, that’s tough – more steaks.
“Look, I’m also not going to do the Arpège thing and start cooking veggies,” Ms. Mar said, referring to chef Alain Passard’s cult and vegetable-obsessed restaurant in Paris. “I promise that won’t happen.” The menu will likely include more game birds, shellfish and a lot of wood-fired cuisine, with dishes rooted in French cuisine.
Ms. Mar has always found flashes of inspiration in Parisian bistros and in the most luxurious regional French cuisine. Her cooking heroes come from an older generation of French chefs, such as Jacques Pépin, whom she affectionately describes as a “fairy-god-chef”.
After a prepandemic dinner at the Beatrice Inn, where Ms. Mar left the menu and cooked dish after dish for Mr. Pepin, the chef asked Ms. Mar if she was French. “You could have fooled me,” he told her.
Ms. Mar, who grew up in Seattle, considers this one of the big compliments of her career.
It was Mr. Pépin who introduced Ms. Mar to André Soltner, another old school French luminary. Since closing his restaurant Lutèce in 2004, Mr. Soltner has stored old glassware and serving dishes at his home in Hunter, NY Charmed by Ms. Mar and her kitchen, he recently gifted her these artifacts.
“I was on the phone with André,” said Ms. Mar. “And he said,“ You need the crystal from Lutetia ”. And I thought, ‘I really do.’ “
The new space next door will be smaller, but Ms. Mar plans to bring as many pieces of New York restaurant history as possible.
This includes the chandeliers of Mr. Soltner, perhaps, and the soft and sinuous Bench at Table 26 at the Beatrice Inn, definitely. She also has an eye on the antique back room mirrors, a marble countertop slab, and a small piece of stained glass.
These pieces are significant, not only to Ms. Mar and her regulars, but also to her new owners, Sue and Mike Politis, who are part of the Cardia family, who once owned the Beatrice Inn and Casa Di Pre next door.
The family bought the Beatrice Inn in 1955 and the Casa Di Pre in 1986. For decades, if you walk down West 12th Street during the lunch and dinner break and stop in front of the building marked 285, you can hear – along with a mix of cooks and waiters from both restaurants – playing cards in the dining room.
These poker games lasted for hours, fueled by coffee, cigarettes and neighborhood gossip.
“Every day we had our family meal and our little get-togethers, and played poker after lunch, and my dad and aunt Elsie would have genoese fighting matches – it was hysterical,” Ms. Politis said. .
Ms Politis, who grew up in Queens and started working in her family’s restaurant when she was 13, recalls traveling and serving, working as a host or helping to cook daily specials like homemade cannelloni, manicotti and a tray and a lasagna tray.
Her husband, who went to culinary school, did his cooking internship in the kitchen of the Beatrice Inn. And after Mrs Politis’ father retired in 1996, the couple ran Casa Di Pre. They felt sensitive to Ms. Mar’s desire to run the restaurant and invested in its success.
“By opening a restaurant at Covid, without knowing what is going to happen, we want to be fair,” Ms. Politis said. “So we just settled things.”
Ms. Mar closed the restaurant after service on March 14 and put most of the staff on leave two days later. It reopened for take out on March 20. Although business has since picked up and 26 employees are back, many evenings during the lockdown it was a skeleton team – Ms Mar and four other workers – all cooking, washing dishes and handing out food to delivery people.
The emphasis was on comfort food. Ms. Mar wrote daily emails to diners on the restaurant’s mailing list, telling them what was on the menu and when she would be cooking, and answering the phone.
“I haven’t left my house,” said Randi Cardia, whose stepmother, Elsie Garaventa Cardia, owned the Beatrice Inn for 50 years. Ms. Cardia was one of the many locals who regularly order. “Angie definitely decided to be there for people like me, and she was our lifeline,” she said.
Before the pandemic, the kitchen was known for its aged meats and chilled seafood towers, but Ms Mar’s take-out dinners during the lockdown featured hot, comforting dishes like pozole verde, homemade versions of the Marie Callender’s chicken potpies and fried chicken with macaroni and cheese. .
“The amount of support and encouragement we got in the height of our forties when it was really, really bad here,” Ms. Mar said, her voice captivating. “I can’t let this restaurant die.”
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