The Hindenburg. The Titanic. The MTA’s weird, limited-run, commemorative sandwich collaboration. All transit catastrophes with notable culinary elements. And all sharing more in common with the new restaurant at Grand Central Terminal, Cornelius, than anyone would guess.
The City Winery entertainment and hospitality venture started moving operations into Vanderbilt Hall last November with retail wine in refillable bottles among its offerings. Its stated “high-end” effort, named for old-timey railroad tycoon and daddy to both the site’s original hub, Grand Central Depot, and Anderson Cooper’s great-great-grandpop, followed in December.
Cornelius takes “culinary inspiration from the exquisite tastes of the Gilded Age,” according to its website, with a “modern twist on familiar favorites.” Its menu is also apparently somewhat influenced by plates available to the richest passengers on that big, doomed boat, executive chef Zach Bondy (previously of Portland, Maine’s Black Point Inn and Mopho in New Orleans) seems to indicate in a New York Live segment.
But the ode to wealth isn’t even upper middle classpirational.
“Fine dining” has become a nebulous distinction in New York. White tablecloths, which they have at Cornelius, have fallen out of vogue, as have snooty maître d' tropes and elevator music, which, as far as I can tell, they do not. Some of the city’s best and spendiest tasting destinations zag so far away from all that and toward some version of cool, in fact, that they veer toward “how do you do, fellow kids?” territory. The only constant is that anything hovering around the category is going to be expensive. And it's OK either way; affect casual qualities with a much higher price tag, or throw it back to those old clichés. But you have to deliver. Establish plainly, as Cornelius does in its public and press-facing materials, that a place is supposed to be fancy, and you’re authoring an expectation that must be executed.
“It’s like a dining car,” a friend said, once we’d navigated the chaos of late rush hour right outside and reached Cornelius. It's nearest to Grand Central’s entrance at 42nd and Vanderbilt. We’d both been on separate long-distance train trips before, and both had the goofy, youthy illusions that truly dining in the designated hurtling metallic rectangle would be even a little glamorous. It wasn’t. Those notions had some basis in reality, or at least a version of reality regurgitated in movies, but whatever romance even might have existed at these moveable feasts of yore had become aspirationally aspirational at best; white tablecloths straining to signal something that wasn’t there.
Some of Cornelius’ 75 seats are arranged into smaller sections like cozy compartments, and its inoffensive design is swiped in sepia tones. Undulating lines hark back to a more recent vintage than likely intended, and create a kind of staid, 80s business dinner tableau. The petite bar is pretty, as most backlit bottle shelves are. Images of local landmarks line the walls.
Complimentary bread is one welcome relic, semolina with golden raisins and sourdough. They aren’t at all bad and they’d be even better with a good butter, but the butter here tastes like nothing; more of a carb lubricant. Still, it’s a warm and uncommon gesture when bread service sometimes ticks into double digits elsewhere. For all the posturing, Cornelius isn’t consistently priced as fine dining, either, but closer to nicer-than-normal night out. This is not to say its quality always conceptually tracks with its dollar signs, just that there are fewer of them than at restaurants actually occupying the genre.
The salad Lyonnaise ($19), for example, is not only low on lardon but what’s there is more reminiscent of bacon bits than the hot, fatty pork that should be imparting whiffs of smokiness to the otherwise OK frisée, poached egg and truffle vinaigrette in the dish. That the rigid flecks are hard to detect is almost a wash, given how good they aren’t.
A lobster strudel ($52; trailing only the $127 chateaubriand for two and the $59 linguine with truffle and caviar in cost) is harder to swallow. Although its shellfish is proficiently prepared, it never quite coalesces with its other primary components, snappy asparagus and a hug of pastry. Imagine, if you wish, a pizza. It is a simple pizza, with cheese and, let’s say pepperoni. But those items are married together with the sauce and crust, becoming one. Cornelius’ lobster strudel lands more like its parts were prepared separately, maybe even for separate recipes, and assembled after the fact. It just isn’t mingling. And, although it might sound “high end,” the “essence” listed as an ingredient on the menu (“a reduced and clarified stock that is spritzed on the dish as it leaves the kitchen,” a rep says) adds less than the time it would take to shrink even a single drop of bone broth.
Like the fungus and fish eggs enhancing the pasta, some foodstuffs really just shout what you want to say when what you want to say is lux-u-ry, and foie gras is right up there with them. Here, it’s a fun little addition to the substantial crab cake ($33), which could be fairly shared as an app. Lentils are on the opposite and of the extravagance spectrum, capably prepared here and paired with a salty duck confit ($34) that has a good texture but enough of that prickly mineral to simmer an itch and approximately one square inch of crispy surface on its leg’s landscape of otherwise limp skin.
Cornelius isn’t reason alone to enter Grand Central, which, historic and pretty in places as it is, can also just be a real pain. But enough people pass through every day that it doesn’t have to be a destination; it gets to be a location.
It has a purpose, and that purpose is to be here whenever an expense account meal has to happen as close to the Terminal as possible, and it doesn’t get much closer than this. Its purpose is to have availability, of which there is plenty, when a friend from out of town is passing through, literally here, and has a couple of hours, max, to catch up. Its purpose is to be one of those countless anonymous spots you pass by a thousand times and maybe once improbably end up and get a funny story out of it. “A swipe date invited me to dinner in Grand Central Station,” you’ll groan, incorrectly. (It’s Terminal; Station’s where the choo-choos go.) Just bring your own butter.
Vitals
The Vibe: Business casual.
The Food: Self-billed fine dining taking “culinary inspiration from the exquisite tastes of the Gilded Age” that amounts to fair preparations of duck confit, incongruous lobster strudel, a lacking salad Lyonnaise and a pretty good crab cake.
The Drinks: Cocktails are going down the drain citywide at the moment, and this is no exception. Try the wine.
