To the right of the glass doors on Church Street is an entryway framed by fold upon fold of shimmery red fabric, suggesting that you are about to walk into a room full of elegantly debauched vampires. Instead you find hotel guests and solitary men in an awkward lounge illuminated by slashing bolts of red neon lightning; it’s how you’d imagine a sexy downtown bar if you’d never been downtown, gone to a bar or had sex.
To the left of the entrance is the main dining room, its rear wall given entirely over to a diptych by a young, fast-climbing artist named Alex Israel. Each half of the work features text in sans-serif block capitals, in the manner of Barbara Kruger, but instead of spooky aphorisms about power, we get cheese-ball romantic comedy dialogue superimposed on pink fireworks:
“‘Sometimes you know it in your head,’ the chef whispered.”
“‘Sometimes you feel it in your stomach,’ she smiled, buzzed.”
Sometimes you gag in your mouth, the critic sighed.
Early in the meal, a short glass vase arrives at the table loaded with Parmesan-crusted breadsticks about a yard long. They always seem to be aimed straight at my face, as if challenging me to a duel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/dining/cut-by-wolfgang-puck-review.html?ref=dining&_r=0
