Butter — Restaurant in New York

It takes a lot for me to leave a bad review but the treatment we received here was so awful that I have to. We had a 5:00 p.m. reservation. We needed to leave at 6:25 for the theater. We had to wait outside in the cold until 5:04 when they finally unlocked the door. Once inside we waited another 10 to 12 minutes before they finally sat us. Our server Jacqui was friendly but scarce. We waited and waited for her to come back and take our order. Our dinners finally arrived at 6:00 p.m. and they brought me the wrong meal. I ordered halibut and they brought the branzino. I immediately told them and they took it back. About 5 minutes later Jackie finally came to the table blaming the kitchen for making the wrong fish. She said she ordered correctly but the kitchen made the wrong one. Of course I told my husband to go ahead and eat his pork chop before it gets cold. The manager finally delivered my halibut at 6:17 leaving me 8 minutes to scarf it down so of course we ended up leaving late and had to rush to the theater. We were quite surprised when the bill arrived and the halibut was on it. Thought for sure the manager would have comped it. This was my birthday celebration and the restaurant knew this and they dropped the ball big time. We asked for the manager to come back to our table and told him we were surprised that the meal was not comped and he proceeded to try to blame it on me saying things such as I had asked for a lighter fish etc and none of that conversation took place! Jacqui clearly had lied to him to cover for her own mistake and had the nerve to tell him that I didn't even know what I was ordering or something. I was floored and extremely angry. My jaw was almost on the floor with shock that she had lied to her boss like that and blamed her mistake on me. So she told me it was the kitchen's fault and then she told her boss that it was my fault. I worked in the restaurant industry for 20 years and when you make a mistake you need to simply apologize to the customer and do your best to fix it right away. It was only after I started running down the entire list of all of the failures on this dinner that was supposed to be a very special birthday celebration, that he finally relented and angrily grabbed the check and said I'll take the fish off then he returned and quickly dropped it on the table and just kept going. It was so rude! The food was quite good other than the fact that the $16 broccoli side I had ordered was not hot when it arrived and then when my correct dinner finally arrived 17 minutes later I had cold broccoli to eat with it because they didn't even make a fresh hot one. The saddest part of all of this is that my husband had surprised me with a trip to NYC that he had planned for months and everything was planned around this dinner. He was so excited to surprise me with dinner at Alex G's restaurant and it ended up being a terrible experience due to the horrible treatment...

Happiness is the Bucket List event that lives up to my unreasonable expectations.

Last week, we went to Butter, Chef Alex Guarnaschelli’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan.

Poor Chef. She is my absolute favorite Food Network chef/judge, and I have long dreamt of eating her food. Finally, Tuesday, 30 April 2024, was The Day. And, to complicate matters, we had Carnegie Hall tickets and traffic was as traffic is in Manhattan, namely horrible. So, one might say I didn’t make it easy for Chef and her staff.

Stepping into Butter was a delightful surprise. A short elevator ride transported us to the dining room, while a private room on the 10th floor added an intriguing element to the restaurant's layout. I couldn't help but wonder about the dynamics it created for the wait staff.

The dining room is large, with booths circling a capacious bar. The place is wood-lined but suffused with a warm glow that is not at all men’s-den-like. I liked the mildly broody wall art (my wife disagrees with me).

We started off with Parker House rolls, with flaky salt and house-made compound butters. I mean, we had to, right? ‘Cuz, Butter.

For apps, B opted for the gnocchi mac-n-cheese. My app was the charred octopus with tahini and white beans. Oh, my dear Gd, I was in heaven. From a teensy-tasting bite of the white beans/tahini came such enormous flavor. How did she do that? Octopus is notoriously difficult to get right and easy to get gummy and unappealing. My goodness did this dish G E T I T R I G H T. Wow. B’s review of the mac-n-cheese: gnocchi done to toothsome turn, with delicious topping, and almost too rich to finish. But to die for.

For mains, B went pork chop, and I went fish. The double-cut pork chop was mildly smoky, and tender and juicy throughout. Some serious cooking chops are needed (see what I did there?) to cook a chop, at least three inches thick, to be juicy in the middle. We are still marveling at the feat. And those apples, cooked to look like potatoes? Whimsical, delicious, and a perfect accompaniment. My fish—pan-seared branzino—was quite simply the best fish I have ever eaten. The skin, the crispy, crispy skin, just gobsmacked me. And the flesh, tender and meltingly sweet.

For her dessert, B ordered a scoop of chocolate ice cream. I think she thought she’d be getting your basic, maybe even store-bought, chocolate ice cream. Nope, that is not what landed on the table. Don’t think it was dark chocolate; perhaps Belgian? Delish. As for me, I treated my happy inner child with the dark chocolate pudding and floated on a cloud of chocolate bliss through the stinking traffic to Carnegie Hall.

A special shout out to our server, Jasmine, who timed our meal perfectly for our concert tickets and was an intelligent and friendly guide...

This is specifically about an event space, not the general dining room.

We had a work event on the 10th floor, with the terrace. It was raining, though, so 60% of the space was unusable because there were no anti slip pads or rain mitigation strategies employed. This meant that our party of 40 had to squeeze into a 20-person space, fire code be damned.

The food was okay. Their salad was fresh and paired well with the dressing. The cauliflower was also pretty good, but that was also the only main that I could eat and it was still a bit on the heavy side, mostly owing to the sauce. The drinks selection available to us was alright, but I ultimately went with juice (they had pineapple and cranberry) because the Sauvignon Blanc seemed the most promising and was still pretty bad (thankfully, I asked for a small sample, so there wasn't too much wasted).

They also didn't provide adequate climate control for the room. At first, I had asked them to open the door or let me stand under the overhang to cool off, but understandably they said they'd wait till everyone was seated before doing so. About half an hour later, after everyone was already seated, I'd already become too overheated for iced beverages to work, so I asked them again for access to the terrace under the overhang, but they denied both that and the option of just propping the door open (presumably due to the terrace having poor drainage, reasonably enough). I told them I was heating up way too much in the room, to which they said they had the AC on -- at max. If that is true, their AC must be a desk fan because the temperature was steadily inching up, even in the coolest spots by the window (where I sat).

At that point, I was already starting to feel the effects of overheating and decided to head out, but the elevator buttons didn't work. I had to wait for someone to come up and rescue me, which took about 5 minutes, but felt like forever as I was trying to stay conscious.

It looked like the others were able to deal with the heat okay, but I definitely could not stay any longer. It probably would've been better had they put a contingency in place, either a larger indoor space or some way of making the outdoor space work for people willing to take on that risk. Their handling of the situation, waffling between empty promises and reneging on them, was certainly also quite disappointing.

For others looking to hold larger events on the terrace floor, make sure you have a contingency set in place, in case weather happens, because they definitely don't have one...