Café Sabarsky — Restaurant in New York

It’s a shame- I love Cafe Sabarsky and their dessert menu is one of my favorites in the entire city. Our last trip, however, was nearly ruined by an extremely rude hostess.

We had a reservation on a Saturday night at 7:30. We arrived 10 minutes early and waited patiently for our table. When we weren’t seated at 7:35, we didn’t think much of it. When we weren’t seated at 7:40, we started to get worried- we were on a time constraint and the hostess had yet to speak to us about the lateness of our table nor apologize. At 7:45 I approached the hostess and brought this to her attention.

Her reply was, “we’re very busy tonight and 15 minutes late is perfectly reasonable for New York City.”

I turned to my husband and said, “Nope, wrong answer.” We were eventually seated at 7:50, 20 minutes after our initial reservation time.

I am a hospitality professional and have worked in NYC for over a decade. I can say confidently that seating a table 20 minutes after the reservation time is completely unacceptable, for New York City or anywhere else. This hostess was not only incorrect, but was rude. She didn’t even attempt to apologize and instead made invalid excuses. When 5 minutes passed after our reservation time, we should have been apologized to. When 10 minutes passed, we should have been profusely apologized to. When 15 minutes passed, we should have received an apology from a manager and a complimentary offer- an appetizer or a toast pour of sparkling wine, something like that. Instead we were ignored for nearly 20 minutes and spoken to extremely rudely when her and the restaurant’s shortcoming were brought to her attention.

When we sat, we were served promptly. When my husband ordered the duck special that they had run out of, the server returned to the table with a menu and apologized- like a professional- that they had run out of the item he wanted.

I love it here but I’m hesitant to return. Being busy in NYC is no excuse to disrespect your customers and their time- in fact, New York should be offering the absolute paramount service, not the...

Warning: the comments on the food quality and taste depended solely on the sweets/desserts. No entrees are involved.

This place is inside of the Neue Galerie, which happens to host Klimt Landscape, so I happened to pay a visit to the cafe for a taste of Germany and Austria.

I was recommended to try the mozarttorte, the Nougat cake with pistachio and chocolate. Very good cake, as for the 15.50 dollar per piece, it is worth the experience to feel the vibe (wouldn’t do it too much though). The cake is topped with a piece of pistachio white chocolate and whipped cream. There are layers of chocolate, pistachio, chocolate mousse with choco-caviar (which I termed for all crunchy cocoa puff things). I was so impressed by the addition of choco-caviar, which discreetly provided textural contrast on top of the melt-in-the mouth mousse. The chocolate and pistachio flavors balance each other: nothing is overpowering. And the cake is not overly sweet, which is like the huge compliment nowadays lol.

My friend had the Joghurt, which is yogurt cake with raspberry and poppy seed cake. You would think that yogurt cakes are less sweet, but on the contrary it is sooook sweet to me. The raspberry jam on top has whole raspberries, which are nice touches, and the yogurt to poppy seed cake is almost 1:1 in ratio. I liked the poppy seed cake on the bottom, while the yogurt topping is overly sweet for me.

The coffee and the tea are just usual. But the green tea comes with palm-size pot volume so that’s a plus. I would definitely order tea or coffee to pair with cakes, as anything too much at once without counterbalance is bad, both for palate and health (don’t even know why I mention this aspect but I think you get it).

We went in at 12:30 pm. The line is short for museum and long for the cafe. They opened the downstairs for cafe, which carries the exactly the same things as upstairs. Usually the line for downstairs is drastically shorter. If you are here just for the food not for the grandiose decor, go downstairs...

It is located inside the Neue Galerie as their café, and named after the co-founder of Neue Galerie, the German and Austrian Art museum. Since this Viennese cafés is inside the museum, it comes with incredible artistic interior.

There is a staff at the door, since there usually is a line out the door to get in to Neue Galerie. Not everyone is going to see the arts, but only to the café. For the ones going into the museum will go straight to the desk to pay admission. The ones going to the café will go to the right, towards the golden sign and another line…for the café only this time.

The inside is a one big room with tall ceiling. The floor and walls were covered with dark wood, topped with beautiful crown molding. They had large windows from floor to ceiling, bringing in lots of natural lights.

Out of all the super delicious sounding dessert menu, we finally decided on Feuilletine and Topfentorte. Most of the desserts were priced at $9.50. They were both incredibly amazing, although they were smaller than I had hoped for... We also ordered Kaiser Mélange and Einspänner, basically coffee with whipped cream. But they brought these coffee to the next level...It was awesome!

The service was nice and efficient, our waitress was nice and friendly. The ambiance was really nice, it was like dining in a room full of artistic history. It was constantly busy the whole time we were there, and very lively. I would love to go back again for more desserts, and also for their food items during breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Read my full review of the cafe and food on my food blog,...