New Yorkers love eating outdoors in the city’s parks. But I love it more when a park restaurant lets in its surroundings, rather than shuts out the sights of the skyline, frolicking kids and all forms of summertime merriment.
We enjoy the sense of being one with the park at Central Park’s Boathouse Cafe and in Tavern on the Green’s courtyard; glass-walled Bryant Park Grill, with its marvelous roof deck; Gigino, overlooking the Hudson River in Battery Park City; and the grove-shaded patio of Fort Tryon Park’s New Leaf Restaurant.
But merely to be inside a park isn’t enough. The two new contenders for outdoor-eating bragging rights — Fornino in Brooklyn Bridge Park and The Pavilion in Union Square Park — both opened this year but couldn’t be less alike. While Fornino instantly achieves al fresco heaven, The Pavilion seems to think it’s in the dangerous park of 30 years ago and needs to shield customers from the creepy goings-on around it.
Fornino couldn’t be simpler. It offers eye-popping vistas of Planet New York City from a pizza cafe on the roof of a modest, two-story wooden building designed by owner Michael Ayoub.
Picnic-table seating is all the 175-capacity, wide-open upstairs setting requires. Dinner-plate-size pizzas are wood-fired in rooftop ovens, and they’re dandy, from traditional margherita to Calabrese-style with sopressata picante. There are salads and desserts, too, plus a full bar. Sandwiches and snacks are available in an enclosed space with more seats downstairs.
But the real feast is the one for your eyes — the stirring panorama of reborn lower Manhattan with One World Trade Center poking through the clouds, the bustling harbor and Statue of Liberty, Downtown Brooklyn’s new towers and, of course, the bridge that gives this magnificent new park its name.
Fornino’s roof was the best place in town to watch the July Fourth fireworks. But I prefer dining there without them: The visuals above and around the deck are pyrotechnics enough to appreciate the power and glory of the city’s heroic skyline and water-bound setting.
The Pavilion, on the other hand, looks as if it would rather be somewhere else, coldly turning its back on its leafy surroundings.
There’s only one way into the open-air restaurant inside the 1928 colonnaded structure — from Union Square Park’s far north end near 17th Street. It looks enchanting from that angle, thanks to suspended globe lights glowing like a Parisian fantasy through the tall, open archway.
But the forbidden-castlelike south façade moons 80 percent of the park. A sunken children’s playground forms a moat between The Pavilion and the colorful kaleidoscope of greenery, statues, plazas and the human carnival of Union Square.
The impression that diners must be protected from riffraff isn’t all the fault of Simon Oren’s Chef Driven Market. We can also blame the Parks Department, which a few years ago replaced the popular Luna Park Cafe on the park’s south side in order to enlarge the playground.
But the restaurant’s design worsens its estrangement from everything of interest nearby. Although the high-roofed pavilion makes a pleasant breezeway on a sultry afternoon or evening, the view toward 14th Street from its 90-seat, elevated dining floor is interrupted at diner’s-eye height by installations of fake grass and a mirror over the bar.
Even through the noble, south-facing archway, you see only treetops, not the grand sprawl of the park itself.
Truly open views are to the north — of storefronts and a skimpy plaza that looks bare when the Greenmarket isn’t open. The wrong-side plaza has 90 more ground-level seats for those who strike out getting into The Pavilion itself.
As if to compensate for the place’s aloofness from its surroundings, hostesses sport pretty floral dresses and vegetables from the adjacent Greenmarket pop up on most every dish.
I had first-rate squid a la plancha, workaday roast chicken, flavor-free tuna niçoise and salmon “pot au feu” tasting mainly of salt butter and Béarnaise sauce.
But I don’t go to a place like this for fussy preparation. Just give me the park!
Outdoor places Cuozzo loves
■ Brasserie Ruhlmann, 45 Rockefeller Plaza:
Gorgeously situated amid Rock Center’s limestone and flags.
■ Barawine Harlem, 200 Lenox Ave.:
Sit on the sidewalk and watch the Harlem crowd go by.
■ Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street:
Second-floor marbled terrace majestically overlooks the Financial District.
■ Spice Market, 403 W. 13th St.:
Outdoor tables put you up close to the Meatpacking District scene.
. . . And a few he doesn’t
■ Tony’s DiNapoli, 1081 Third Ave.:
It’s fine indoors, but the tables in the adjacent alley are just bizarre.
■ The Stumble Inn, 1454 Second Ave.:
Raucous Upper East Side bar’s sidewalk seats are convenient to dumpsters.
■ Bistro Milano, 1350 Sixth Ave. at 55th Street:
Sidewalk terrace 8, food 0.
