Blue Fin

Profile

It takes guts to open a restaurant in Times Square that lacks a theme or strives to be classier than a carnival. The dizzingly busy, frenetically lit corridor is home to an Applebee’s that shills $450 VIP Experience tickets for New Year’s Eve, and its biggest opening in the 2010s was Diners, Dives, and Drive-Ins host Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar. Blue Fin has managed to stick it out while offering something more civilized, albeit with an audacious voyeur’s paradise in a soaring staircase that rises alongside a suspended abstract sculpture of a school of fish. But the restaurant was opened by Steve Hanson when he was still running B&R Guest, and the master crowd-pleaser didn’t make a flight of fancy-clad diners the main attraction. In 2015, the restaurant was halved to make room for sister spot Dos Caminos and then given a hipper makeover by the Brooklyn designer behind Williamsburg spots like Surf Lodge and Sant Ambroeus. There’s still plenty of sushi, including rolls like the Times Square, with crab, spicy hamachi, mango, avocado, and yuzu-miso sauce. But there’s also lots of cooked food, including “bang-bang edamame” and rock-shrimp wontons, as well as a children’s menu for the kids and smoothies during breakfast.

Sat.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–4 p.m.

Related Stories

New York Magazine Reviews

• Hal Rubenstein's Full Review (4/29/02)

Best of New York Awards

• Best Lunch to Impress (2003)

Recipes at Blue Fin

• Frozen Melon Parfait (2002)