A Wednesday Afternoon at Two Upper East Side Institutions
Martinis at Bemelmans Bar, Followed by a Cheeseburger and Cottage Fries at J.G. Melon
Dante x Bemelmans Bar
LAST CALL readers and subscribers already know I’m a longtime regular of Dante and a bit of a Friday afternoon fixture at my favorite corner seat at the bar of their original MacDougal Street location. Dante is no stranger to hosting some of the world’s best international bars, and they’ve taken their own bar on the road for residencies in Italy, Spain, South America, and Australia. But the only Dante “away game” I had personally experienced was nearly seven years ago when their bartenders brought their acclaimed Martini service a quick subway ride north for a one-night pop-up at Manhattan’s Gramercy Tavern. But all that changed when I was invited to spend an afternoon at one of the three recent Dante “Legends of New York” takeovers at New York’s Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle, where the unionized bar welcomed an outside team behind their storied bar for the first time.
I lived in Manhattan for four years in the early-to-mid ‘90s and have called Brooklyn home since 2010, but as a New Yorker I was mildly embarrassed to admit I had never set foot in Bemelmans. I knew of the bar, of course, and its famous mural by the bar’s namesake Ludwig Bemelmans, the Austrian-American author and artist of the Madeline picture books, but had only seen its interior as the setting of Sofia Coppola’s A Very Murray Christmas and featured in On the Rocks.
Unless it’s to visit the Guggenheim, Kitchen Arts & Letters, The New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, or J.G. Melon, I can’t say I spend much time on the Upper East Side. And with its history of hosting Presidents, world leaders, celebrities, and socialites, The Carlyle—the luxurious residential hotel built in 1930 and its discreet hideaway of a bar with its cover charges, dress codes, and expensive cocktails—Bemelmans didn’t seem like the sort of place where I would feel comfortable posting up. I’m all for upscale elegance in small doses, but these days I’m more about the everyman comforts of a neighborhood bar.