Nestled among the Time Warner Center’s top-notch restaurants on the fourth floor, the Center Bar has warmed up its lobby location with truly superb small plates, splendid desserts and an open lounge atmosphere. (Anne Wermiel/New York Post)
Expertly made cocktails and an accessible wine list are highlights. (Anne Wermiel/New York Post)
Time Warner Center’s “Restaurant Collection” is finally complete. So what if it took 10 years? Bland-sounding Center Bar is anything but: a stylish refuge just outside the doors of Per Se, Masa and Porter House — with its own vivid, Mediterranean-tinted menu.
Center Bar modestly calls itself a lounge. It opened last fall in the middle of the mall’s fourth floor, long a nowhere-land at the fabled restaurants’ doorsteps. A previous short-lived wine bar was entombed inside a wall; not surprisingly, it lasted barely a year.
Center Bar is as open as the sea, with a light-dappled Central Park view through the soaring atrium window. Set on a platform two steps up, Jeffrey Beers’ sleek design possesses the floor without crowding it. Low-slung sofas taken up by (lightly) canoodling couples form one boundary, the atrium railing the other.
Live tunes from a baby grand piano suit the mood set by neutral-tone upholstery, custom Art Deco-style lamps and clubby tables on chrome pillars. A sexy murmur ebbs from the gleaming curved bar as disconcertingly fine dishes flow out of the small display kitchen behind it.
Not quite a full-scale restaurant, Center Bar offers “small plates,” cocktails and wine. (It’s open 4 to 11 p.m. weeknights, and 1 to 11 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 212-823-9482). But they’re killer, uptown-classy small plates: no eerie entrails or scary growths. No wonder the house’s 52 seats are often full.
Related Companies honchos Stephen Ross and Ken Himmel, who developed the building, had long struggled to warm up the floor’s dead zone. When the old wine bar conked out a few years ago, they asked Porter House chef/partner Michael Lomonaco to come up with a lounge concept.
The three grasped that another mediocrity so near to the great restaurants wouldn’t cut it. The menu and the basic concept were all Lomonaco’s idea. But it was Ross, Lomonaco recalls, who said, “You need a piano.”
The chemistry includes a fun floor show. Edgy-looking tourists peruse Per Se menus, couples emerge from Masa weary from a 20-course feast, open-shirted guys and laughing babes wobble out of Stone Rose bar.
Center Bar gives nothing away in the booze department. Cocktails (“classic,” “signature” and “pre-Prohibition”) are mixed precisely; I’m partial to the Colony, made with Beefeater gin, grapefruit juice and maraschino. Fine, accessible wines chosen by beverage manager Brad Nugent are mostly in the $40 to $80 range; some are available by the glass.
My “small” menu favorites include Sicilian arancini decadently rich with porcini mushrooms, pecorino and prosciutto, and crackling-spiced ahi tuna refreshingly parried by ice-cold Bloody Mary sorbet.
Several larger choices are strapping entrees for just $15 to $21. Mayan prawns provide a Latinate departure with vividly composed salsita. Juicy, roasted halibut dusted with Berber-style Moroccan spices shares the plate with a vegetarian stew anchored by yellow lentils.
Berkshire pork belly proved to be a braised belly and suckling-pig hybrid, the lush meat wallowed in fat confit-style and reposing under skin ultra-crisp from a turn in the oven. Splendid desserts like bourbon vanilla rice pudding with honey gelato close out the fun.
Saturday night, Center Bar’s floor trembled alarmingly. Like many there, I took it for an earthquake and nervously tweeted the news.
But what rattled customers and bottles alike turned out to be tremors from Tom Morello’s Nightwatchman concert in the Allen Room above, where the audience was invited onstage to jump up and down.
Good thing that doesn’t happen every night — Center Bar rocks enough without any help at all.