Of course the decor has taken all the attention, so I shall not repeat the superlatives. They know, as documented here, that Wilde visited America for an entire year in 1882, and spent more time in New York than anywhere else. There is every reason for the owners to be serious about their Wilde. Or, as Gwendolen says about the name Ernest in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: each has “a music of its own” which “inspires absolute confidence.” This is perhaps why the owners, stirred by these lyrical overtures have been persuaded into such philharmonic proportions with a homage to the man himself. Now that it is finished it was time to attend the press reception.Ĭonducting this knowing symphony of ornamentation are Tommy Burke and Frank McCole, maestros of three other restaurants in the city, each with reverberations of Oscar Wilde: Lillie’s, Lille’s Times Square, and the Papillon Bistro.Įach of these restaurants in its own way is ornate and unique. Raising The Barīut believe me, none of them, past or present, comes remotely close to the lavishness to be found at the new Oscar Wilde Bar in New York City.Īs one artistic passerby was heard to exclaim when poking his head through the door, “Minimalism is dead!” And that was when the place was only half finished during the renovations. One or two, such as Wilde’s Restaurant in The Lodge at Ashford Castle, in Cong, Ireland, and the Oscar Wilde room at the Café Royal in Piccadilly, London, try a little harder to embody Oscar’s maxim that moderation is a fatal thing, and nothing succeeds like excess. Most of these pretenders, however, merely give a nod to the old boy by borrowing his name. There is a Wilde Café in Minneapolis, and a bar called Oscar Wilde 9 located, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, at #9 Oscar Wilde St. There have been Oscar Wilde bars before now: in Berlin, San Diego, Chicago, and, I seem to recall, one previously in New York City. It is its own reward.Aesthetic period door plaque. What an amazing tribute to the brief, wondrous life of Oscar Wilde. How far has the cultural vanguard come since Wilde’s heyday? A straight bar can be openly devoted to a queer icon. We happily lapped up the Gutter & Stars: jaunty, floral and velvety with a playful tumble of gin, sparkling wine and lavender bitters. Rose wine, elderflower liqueur and grapefruit botch their ménage à trois the rose literally settles to the bottom. But dodge the Potent Elixir (cognac, Guinness syrup, lavender bitters and champagne? It’s a slush pile of half-thought ideas). The botanical lift of the cucumber vodka and grape liqueur in the Writer’s Block cocktail is bubbly and bright. The 50 Shades of Dorian Gray, driven by five-spice cherry gin, is the kind of cocktail that uses its passport as ID: alluring, showy, deliciously straddling the faraway and the familiar. The fare descriptions are rife with tongue-in-cheek Freudian slurps that suggest the tongue has ventured elsewhere. Naturally, the menu is packed with odes and double entendres (any true Wilde fan loves a double).
Oscar wilde nyc menu windows#
Either it goes or I do.” The venue is awash in deliriously decadent bric-a-brac like painted-glass windows and crushed-velvet chairs, without the impotence of being earnest-and almost everything is dolled up with gaudy marble or heavily lacquered wood. (The menu quotes Wilde: “Pleasure without champagne is purely artificial.”)ĭecor is a challenge at this homage to a man whose dying words were reportedly “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Equal parts salon, pub and bordello, it serves a broad mix, including tipples in the Victorian style and Prohibition-inspired cocktails (the building previously housed the Prohibition Enforcement Headquarters) despite the fact that Wilde died 19 years before the Volstead Act, in a country that never tried the “noble experiment.” And there’s champagne, of course. “If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know, you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”Įpitomized by brine-curious pickles and “broccomole” (which tastes like mushy peas and comes with taro chips), the British writer’s namesake guise-gone-Wilde bar, fittingly, has no idea what it is. “If you want to be a grocer or a general or a politician or a judge, you will invariably become it that is your punishment,” wrote Oscar Wilde.
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