Landmarc at Time Warner: A Collection Gets Real

I like a lot of the food served at the restaurants at the Time Warner Center, but sometimes the collective pretentions of the restaurants there, Per Se, Masa, Bouchon Bakery, Porter House, get to me. How down to earth can any restaurant be when it's part of something described as "The Restaurant Collection"? Enter Landmarc, the uptown branch of the beloved family-friendly bastion of Frenchy comfort food in Tribeca. A casual, unpretentious, no reservations (for parties smaller than six) restaurant serving well-executed familiar food at reasonable prices would bring a welcome bit of fresh air to the "Collection," and based on one meal I had with my brother this week, that's just what Landmarc is delivering.

Mike and I arrived at 7:30 on Tuesday night, and we were immediately seated at a smallish table at what is actually a large restaurant seating 200 (plus a bunch of private dining rooms). Mike ordered the hangar steak medium rare, which came with fries, a salad, and a choice of sauce on the side (Mike chose the chimichurri). Knowing I was going to have to answer to Serious Eats Managing Editor and A Hamburger Today creator, Adam Kuban, I ordered a cheddar burger medium-rare, which also came with a salad and fries. Mike's hangar steak was beefy, beautifully charred, and arrived cooked as ordered. My burger had a great crust, but was medium at best. It came on a good toasted brioche bun that was just soft enough to easily absorb the meat juices. Of course a medium burger doesn't have much juice. Some housemade bread and butter pickles completed what would have been a great burger if it were a couple of ounces smaller and came to the table medium-rare.

The fries, obviously made from fresh potatoes, were good enough to eat but not to rave about. For dessert we shared some icy, too cold tangerine and apple sorbets from Il Laboratorio. They ended up coming to the table perched precariously on mini-sugar cones, a Landmarc practice that had migrated uptown. The mini-cones made the sorbets difficult to eat.

Landmarc adds a necessary, grounded, and welcome bit of "realness" to the "Restaurant Collection" at Time Warner. In fact, maybe it shouldn't be considered part of a collection at all. Let's just call it a restaurant, and a pretty good one at that.

Landmarc (Tribeca) 179 West Broadway New York, NY 10013 212-343-3883

Landmarc (Time-Warner Center) 10 Columbus Circle 3rd fl. New York, NY 10019 212-823-6123

Photographs courtesy Robyn Lee

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