Tick-tack lunch

I’ll tell you  how to enjoy NY Restaurant Week: choose places with min of (4) $-signs to their name. The price is set (although it grew from $25 to $29 for lunch this year), but a good Chef will be a good Chef even on unaccustomely small allowance – and you’ll get a chance to see the insides of a restaurant that is normally out of your league.

That’s how, years ago, I enjoyed my birthday dinner at Jean-George (yep, at one of Trump NY buildings). And that’s how me and a colleague went to a Clocktower at – you guessed! – Metro Life building with its enormous clock atop the tower, the one that gives Madison Park on 23rd St its Deco energy and charm. Personal anecdote – every architect/designer have similar after few years of working in this city: ~15yrs ago the new owners of the building considered converting the top 20-25 floors of the Tower into hi-end apartments, and gave our office some seed money to develop preliminary space planning. We went to survey, then shared with engineers the original base building drawings. I still remember the floor plans, especially of the 25-27, where the clock takes about a quarter of the floor plate. Naturally, when we were in the middle of design process, the owners changed their mind and sold the place to someone else – too bad. Another project that “might have been”.

But I digress.

Everything you read at the links above is true: the hotel entrance is exquisite, the spiral stair – spectacular, the restaurant decided in the posh club style, and the food is superb. If you’re a young Asian golddigger looking for hunting grounds, I highly, highly recommend The Clocktower. Two very imposing gentlemen at neighboring table, having a quick bite before cocktail hour someplace else were made of money, I could tell.

Picture worth a 1000 words, so  – see for yourself!