When did we stop dressing for lunch? La Côte Basque is a distant memory, and the suit-and-hat midday feast is consigned to the occasional Ryan Murphy miniseries. Sometime around the Bowl Revolution, with its plastic sporks and Guacamole Greens, athleisure became the uncontested norm.
Yet even in a workout-leggings world, there are still a few vestigial reminders of the way we wore. There they were at Cafe Commerce, which opened in January on Lexington near 70th, a part of town somehow both full of restaurants and in desperate need of them. (As one Upper East Sider wailed to me, “There’s nothing. Except Italian.”) On parade at the brand-new lunch service were the kinds of important jackets and important bags sold up and down Madison Avenue and the tonier parts of Fifth: a Max Mara teddy coat, a quilted Chanel, an Hermès Kelly.
These women, and a few of their men, are making Cafe Commerce a new Upper East Side destination. Some might have known Commerce, as it was called during its first iteration, from 2008 to 2015 in the West Village. Many of them probably did not. I was never a downtown Commerce habitué, but to me, this restaurant makes sense on Lex. It typifies what I like to think of — with affection! — as department-store cooking: Fancy enough for the fancies, knockabout enough to be fun, it draws, as those stores do, from France and Italy but doesn’t turn up its nose at down-home Americana and, as a treat, makes a little room for Ashkenazi comfort food. (How else to explain the presence of stuffed cabbage and chicken noodle soup with “Grandma’s vegetables”?) Department-store cooking’s haunts are elevated but unchallenging, its clientele genteel and appreciative.
The standard-bearer for this style of cooking was Freds at Barneys, as famous for Mark Strausman’s diet-friendly “Palm Beach” shrimp salad as for his spaghetti and meatballs. Freds was a power-lunch hub for years, and though it has departed, some of its spirit lives on in Strausman’s very good Mark’s Off Madison — but that’s 35 blocks south. In its old neighborhood, Cafe Commerce is here to take up the cause.
“I came with my three friends from Thomas’s twos program,” one mother I know said as we slid into a booth under the warm glow of bistro sconces on a recent Tuesday night. The evening scene was a post-bedtime mirror of the afternoon, when I’d watched toned women pick at egg-white omelets and bread baskets that arrived piping hot (free with any entrée but $12 without, in tacit acknowledgment of the just-a-salad-for-me crowd). “This is the kind of bread basket to write home about,” my friend Marisa, who fled Dimes Square for the Upper East, had enthused, tearing into a warm pretzel, which was joined our afternoon by a square of focaccia, and another evening by a pain d’epi baguette, shaped, in the French style, as a stalk of wheat.
Cafe Commerce proves eminently capable of catering to several constituencies at once. The ladies-luncheon crowd — and the diners did skew heavily female during my visits — can nibble on a 20-herb salad (I counted parsley, mint, tarragon, and dill before giving up) with a few discreet shavings of manchego, or the latter-day inheritor to shrimp salads of yore: marinated hamachi crudo bright with yuzu and topped with squiggles of cucumber plus a couple burning rings of jalapeño. Hungrier diners will be grateful for deviled eggs with crisp bacon or a platter of diaphanous, featherlight potato chips with a tub of roe-studded onion dip (onto which you can optionally dump caviar). There’s a hearty, classic-looking cheeseburger, served “LTO,” which would have been my choice had I not been tempted away by the artistically plated, perfectly shaped globe of stuffed cabbage with vivid-green herb oil. It didn’t prevent me from stealing a few bites of Marisa’s chicken-salad sandwich and its sidecar of fries.
Harold Moore, Commerce’s chef and co-owner, is a reliable, quietly luxuriant cook, and his menu seems divided along one-for-me, one-for-them lines. I have little doubt he would like to be known for his cheffy roast chicken — “Harold’s famous,” as it appears on the menu — which is presented to the table in its entire mottled glory before being whisked back to the kitchen to be sectioned and reassembled with foie gras bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, and a little silver sauceboat of jus. But I didn’t get much foie from the bird, whose skin wilts in its serving platter. I preferred the Tuesday-night special: duck-and-mushroom potpie with a nice, crispy crust from which a bony leg protruded medievally. Thomas’s mom pronounced herself very pleased with its winey sauce, a departure from the usual potpie cream.
This old world does still exist, although it more routinely pairs its Chanel 2.55s with Lululemon, and it even occasionally has dessert, in its way. I couldn’t help noticing that the most expensive one on the menu, at $27, was a plate of fresh berries, for when money is no object and calories allowed no quarter. (The tangy frozen Greek yogurt, with a few berries of its own, is a relative steal at $22.) For the rest of us, there are two super-tall layer cakes. Locally renowned is Moore’s coconut cake with cream-cheese frosting. Controversially, I’d opt instead for the classic birthday cake, four stories of tender yellow sponge and milk-chocolate frosting spackled with rainbow sprinkles and stuck, regardless of a diner’s age or the date, with a lit candle. Do not underestimate the Pavlovian joy this inspires. A vanishing world? Not yet. Day after day and night after night, its inhabitants celebrate their own good fortune.
Scratchpad
Cafe Commerce
964 Lexington Ave., nr. E. 70th St.; cafecommercenyc.com
One Menu, All Hours
Cafe Commerce’s menu is the same for lunch and dinner. No more of this “Sorry, that burger is lunch only” nonsense.
A Siberia
Avoid the farthest-back table if you can — the fluorescent light from the adjacent kitchen door is a serious mood spoiler.
Familiar Favorites
In addition to some standards from the old Commerce menu — the chicken, the sweet-potato tortelloni — a giant Gauguinesque painting made the move uptown.
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