Maybe Las Vegas really has changed the concept of fine dining.  For to sit amidst the opulent surroundings of Café Gray with its hodge-podge of rich materials is to feel suspended from time and isolated from all familiar reference points.  There you are in the Time Warner Center, encased in a womblike setting – although, admittedly, a womb designed by an ersatz Fabergé with a Midas touch – but rather than feel completely disoriented, instead, you recall dining in Vegas – at Caesars or the Venetian, or was it the Wynn?  In those overladen rooms set down in the middle of the desert, sealed off from the casinos, you could be anywhere – which is, perhaps, the point. 

Given that Café Gray is tucked away in a remote corner of the third floor – and just past the NYC outpost of Bouchon Bakery, another Vegas establishment, as it were – you might be forgiven for expecting to leave behind the kerching-kerching of slot machines as you step onto the chocolate-brown carpet which covers the gently sloping catwalk of an entrance.  In front of you, there’s a pleasant enough wood-panelled bar, whose antecedents might include the Blue Bar at the Algonquin, or the old Melrose Lounge off the front entrance of the Stanhope.  But thereafter, you’ve returned to Vegas.  Admittedly, there’s a sliver of Central Park visible between the stack of tureens and the chef’s toque, if you shift in your seat just a little to the right and around the urn overflowing with a Mafioso profusion of stargazer lilies— 

But, as in Vegas, the view’s beside the point.  Who needs a view when the food commands attention?  There’s a mélange salad, deconstructed into two bowls, so that jicama, guacamole and a circular breadstick grace one bowl, while the other contains some of the most vibrant greens grown on this earth.  And then a ratatouille which arrives like a painting from the Vegas Guggenheim’s walls, a Rothko, perhaps.  Served in a chilled bowl, the liquid  is perfectly bisected into two half moons, one side creamy yellow, the other luscious red, while in the middle of the circle is a bull’s-eye of pine nuts resting atop fried zucchini blossoms.  Something like a refined gazpacho, or a chilled tomato water, this is ratatouille distilled to its essence.   

Later, for dessert, there’s apricot tiramisu, which takes a page from the humble t.v. tray dinner whereby a lacy fan of chocolate serves as a scrim between the compartments of granita, stewed apricots, mascarpone and ladyfingers,

As for the service at Café Gray, it’s that impeccably polished Vegas style.  The servers in better suits than many of the guests.  Everyone’s a winner.  Everyone’s making money.  There’s money everywhere – and everything’s expensive.  Maybe where you ate in Vegas doesn’t stay there, after all.

Best always,
Mark and Robert