• Café Sabarsky

  1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, 212-288-0665

  What with all that bemused head-tilting and chin-stroking, art appreciation can give you quite an appetite. But we’ve come a long way from pushing trays on the Met’s cafeteria line. Just a few blocks north at the Neue Galerie, Café Sabarsky is the parlor of the robber baron’s Fifth Avenue mansion you never had, a lofty-ceilinged cocoon of dark wood paneling and dark-roast coffee. Despite the profusion of caffeinated beverages and exquisite pastries (try the strudel or the Klimt torte), Sabarsky is much more than a fin-de-siècle kaffeehaus with period furnishings. It’s a full-fledged restaurant whose dapper habitués congregate for Bavarian ham and rolls at breakfast and open-faced herring sandwiches at lunch. The wine list is appropriately big on Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners. And Thursday through Sunday, the kitchen turns out sophisticated dinner entrées like beef goulash with spaetzle—just the sort of hearty, nourishing fare you’ll require after a fatiguing spin around the galleries upstairs..

From the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine