Lobster pot pie
After an extensive update, with new murals, a piano lounge and a more modern menu (including lobster pot pie, inset), the Redeye Grill, run by Shelly Fireman and located near Carnegie Hall, has transformed itself into a grown-up seafood house. (
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Arriving early for lunch at Trattoria dell’Arte on Seventh Avenue recently, I peeked into Redeye Grill next door. I eat often at Shelly Fireman’s Trattoria, but I’d lost touch with Redeye, its sister jumbo seafood restaurant across from Carnegie Hall.
Redeye Grill looked different than I remembered from my visits since its 1995 opening, but what exactly was new?
I quickly realized: everything. The Old Hollywood mural along the mezzanine was gone, replaced by transparent glass panels. Gone too were the suspended airplanes en route from LA to NY — the transcontinental motif that gave the place its name.
Redeye Grill (890 Seventh Ave., at 56th Street) might be the largest Manhattan restaurant ever to undergo so sweeping a transformation without a whiff of publicity.
The stealthy whirlwind swept through in stages beginning last June so Redeye Grill never had to close.
The original plain-vanilla ceiling — “the cheapest I could buy at the time,” Fireman says — gave way to rich mahogany. Only one of the bronze, Famous Dancing Shrimp — once a pair twirling over the raw bar — remains. The solo shrimp is now rotating by its lonesome atop the vestibule.
A cozy jazz lounge wrapped by a new, 88-foot mural by Red Grooms depicting “The History of the World” holds down the north wall once taken up by the bar, which was thrust into the dining room and merged with a new raw bar in a spectacular oval pod.
Some smaller murals adorning the pillars lend flashes of the old color. But the original, whimsically crafted 300-seat eatery has morphed into a more dignified looking seafood house with a steakhouse air.
“I changed everything,” affable Fireman said.
“But I hope it doesn’t look like a steakhouse!” he laughed at my observation. “I hope it looks like my house.” He calls the new look “classic.”
It isn’t quite finished: Window curtains along the west wall will finally soften the glare from passing headlights.
Redeye also has a new, more modern menu and a new managerial team: executive chef Jawn Chasteen, managing director Fabien Lepaitre and maitre d’ Carlo Mariani.
Redeye Grill needed a new image — or new substance. I’ve long passed it up for Fireman’s unsung, pleasing Italians: Trattoria dell’Arte, Fiorello and Bond 45. (His Fireman Hospitality Group also operates two places in DC, two Brooklyn Diners in Manhattan and one, remarkably, in Dubai.)
Sometimes a mature restaurant must reinvent itself to survive. Park Avenue Cafe pulled it off with its four-seasons rotation of its look, menu and name. But it doesn’t always work.
Was Redeye’s business off? “Absolutely slightly off,” Fireman said. The place was showing its age: “I was getting a little tired of it.” But it took a nudge from Post columnist Cindy Adams — who “put in a comment that we needed change,” he recalled — to galvanize him to action.
He tapped interior designer Ally Coulter to help.
“I asked Red Grooms, who I’ve known a long time, to paint his story of the world,” Fireman said. It depicts, with Groomsian wit: an icebound Russian village, a sunlit African one complete with large mammals, and the Eiffel Tower over a Venetian canal.
The result is both familiar and new. Whether more customers warm to the changes than miss the old look remains to be seen.
The menu was edited to reflect today’s taste for the appearance of simplicity. There are fewer composed dishes, but many more options for ordering the same species different ways. Cuts such as swordfish, Arctic char, salmon and halibut can each be had with a choice of three sauces.
There are shellfish platters, sushi and dry-aged steaks. Some old house favorites like “famous” Cobb salad remain. I’ve enjoyed my meals in the past few weeks, although I passed on miso matzo ball soup.
But where’s the other Dancing Shrimp? Fireman said it’s “outside my lake house in Bedford. It’s a tourist attraction.”
As for the Old Hollywood mural, it’s in storage in The Bronx. And up for grabs: “It’s for sale for $250,000,” Fireman said, adding with a laugh, “Just don’t ask me what I paid for it.”