On whatever day the Crosby Street Hotel restaurant figures out the whole
Best hotel business card ever
serving-food-to-people thing—and that day is definitely not today—it’s going to be Balthazar‘s first serious breakfast rival in Nolita. The brand-new hotel and its dining room, called the Crosby Bar, are wickedly gorgeous, in the same eclectic-funky way as the owners’ ultra-cool London hotels (the Haymarket, et. al). And the Crosby Bar is serving what should and will soon be a fantastic breakfast. It’s beautifully set up: a poppingly fresh-looking layout of fruits, pastries like a killer bacon-cheese brioche, Swiss-style muesli, and yogurts; and it’s all-you-can-eat for $19, which includes coffee, fresh-squeezed juice, and toast. Not bad at all in these parts. (The more elaborate à  la carte breakfasts are in the $25 range.)
But today, although only a dozen-odd people were breakfasting here, it took 15 minutes to bring the coffee. That’s 16 minutes too long; doesn’t everyone show up at breakfast in desperate need of coffee immediately? Isn’t that the one thing not to screw up? The toast and marmalade took another 15 minutes. “The kitchen is overloaded,” the sweet waitress, rushing around for no visible reason, kept pleading. Overloaded why? The dining room is near-empty. Room service maybe? But at 9am in Nolita? Come on, no one gets up that early on a Friday in this hood. Another disappointment: No black pudding available yet for the English breakfast, which is happily on the menu. It’s one of the British empire’s more enduring culinary contributions: eggs, bacon, roasted tomatoes, grilled mushrooms, and black pudding, a.k.a. blood sausage (a suitably painful-sounding but bracing way to launch a rainy day in the UK). Whenever it shows up in the kitchen here, it’ll be a welcome foil for the more health-conscious buffet.
The dining room is a knockout: striped banquettes in greens, oranges, purples; hammered-silver surfaces; perfectly thought out bits of miscellany. Arrive pre-caffeinated, and this might be the most civilized morning kick-off you’ve had in months.