The eagerly awaited Ladurée Soho “tea salon” that touched down on West Broadway from the Champs-Élysées two months ago is “perfect,” according to Vogue. But roast salmon thickly coated in raspberry jam was perfectly awful. Raspberry jam on salmon? Oui.
The fabled, Paris-born pâtisserie/cafe’s first American restaurant, Ladurée Soho will have nearly 170 seats when its outdoor garden opens in a few weeks. If not “the most beautiful Ladurée in the world,” as chairman David Holder promised, the Soho satellite channels the esprit of the originals.
I love Ladurée in Paris. I love the macarons they sell at their shop on upper Madison Avenue. But Ladurée Soho, in the old Barolo space, lays a big, fat oeuf.
That’s a little unfair because the eggs are swell, especially a lush omelet stuffed and crowned with plump morels — “from Jura, where I am from,” the waitress charmed me. (The mushrooms are local, but we loved her anyway.) By all means go for breakfast.
For lunch, stick with big-enough-for-two, seasonally attuned salads ($19 to $21) — especially the signature “salade Ladurée,” a composed affair of arugula, artichokes, asparagus and mozzarella, woven into a spring fantasia by pitch-perfect citrus vinaigrette. Sweet service makes you want to settle in for the foreseeable lifetime.
But the rest of the lunch and dinner menu is as pathetic as the rooms — oops, salons — are pastel-pretty.
French, Italian and crypt-euro accents waft through a succession of adorable spaces. The “Madeleine Castaing Salon” is girly-cozy, with demure gueridon tables, silk trim, deepblue banquettes and palegreen walls. The curtained “Pompadour Salon” is airier and brighter; Sephora-burnished faces gleam under a golden chandelier suspended from a blue-sky ceiling.
Tight quarters make for intimate overhearing. Twenty-something babe to hunk: “Oh my God, she drugged you? That’s just wrong.”
No more wrong, though, than the dishes which most customers will order past noon. You’d think Holder would go the extra mile to uphold French culinary creds in the neighborhood of Balthazar and the Dutch, but beware of executive chef Johann Giraud’s starters ($15 to $23) and main dishes ($26 to $41).
Beef tournedos tasted 100 percent gray despite pink centers. Dense, flavorless “Dauphine truffled” potatoes suggested prison inmates’ holiday meals. I enjoyed hot and creamy truffle-scented vichyssoise. But the rally ended with lamb saddle that faded into a mysterious brown sauce.
The real mystery is the macarons in a jillion flavors. The genuine Ladurée article is prized not only for top-quality fruit, nuts and herbs inside the meringue shell, but for tactile tension between crisp crust and soft innards.
But Ladurée Soho’s tasted weary, as if they had trouble finding a taxi to Manhattan after their flight from Paris — twice soggy and, once, borderline stale.
It didn’t stop customers from lining up at the front retail counter. Some asked for “macaroons” and seemed shocked to pay $3.15 for a single tiny macaron.
I’ll pay that when they’re as good as uptown’s. But Les Entrées and Les Plats, not at any price.