Thierry Despont's Ferry Terminal Dining Room, and Who Gets Past the Door
The Battery Maritime Building is now a members' club with a hotel attached. Non-members eat in the dining room, keep a jacket on, and skip the fifth floor entirely.
The Battery Maritime Building has been sitting on South Street since 1906, one of the last Beaux-Arts ferry terminals left in Manhattan, and for most of the last century it did nothing useful for a diner. Casa Cipriani turned it into a members' club with a 47-room hotel wedged inside, and the ground-floor dining room is the part of it a non-member can actually access. The interiors are Thierry Despont's — the same hand behind the Ritz Paris restoration and the Cartier Mansion — and the room is doing more work than the food is.
The Cipriani family have been running dining rooms since Harry's Bar opened in Venice in 1931, and the New York outposts (Downtown, Wall Street, Cipriani 42nd) have long been in the business of selling a specific kind of evening: Italian food that is competent rather than surprising, service that is warm, and a room built to be seen in. Casa Cipriani is the fullest version of that thesis. The fifth-floor club — with its lounges, bars, jazz, and terrace — is the thing everyone is trying to get into. The dining room, which is what this review is about, is the consolation prize that most visitors will experience.
The dining room is a beautiful place to eat a competent Italian meal you could have eaten better and cheaper three neighbourhoods away.
Editorial Deep
The kitchen covers the Cipriani canon and does not stray from it — the family's Venetian-Italian repertoire, the same shape of menu you find at Cipriani Downtown or 42nd, executed with the same intent. It is not the room in which to look for a chef's point of view, because a chef's point of view is not what is being sold. It is a house style, and the house style is nearly a century old.
The crowd is older than at most of the Italian rooms that get written about in this city — mid-forties and up on a weeknight, sixties well represented, hotel guests mixed with members coming down from the fifth floor, dressed appropriately because they have to be. Men are in jackets, which is enforced rather than suggested, and the dress code holds even in July when everyone else in Lower Manhattan has given up. The room reads as an occasion room even at 7pm on a Tuesday.
Arrival is choreographed through the hotel: a doorman on the street, a pass-through at the front desk, then a host who already has your name and walks you to the dining room without a pause. It is the level of choreography a place charging these prices needs to deliver, and the wider staff — doorman, housekeeping, the club floor — get consistent praise for the same reason. Service in the dining room itself is professional and warm rather than familial, well-paced, and knows the menu. Not the anticipatory service of a top-tier fine-dining room, but a clear cut above the standard for a hotel restaurant.
Avoid the wine list as a place to add spend. The mark-ups sit where you would expect at a hotel restaurant with a Cipriani name over the door, and this is not a room where trading up the list buys you a noticeably more interesting bottle. A glass by the glass, or a bottle at the lower end of the list, keeps the bill honest; a serious wine order at dinner is where a couple's evening goes from expensive to hard to defend.
The clear circumstance is breakfast — an early table in the dining room with the light coming off the East River, the uovo al pomodoro, a proper coffee, and none of the evening's dress-code enforcement or crowd pressure. It is the meal that shows the room and the kitchen at their best relative to what you are paying, and it is the reservation to make if you want to understand what Casa Cipriani does well without buying the full dinner-and-scene package.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Uovo al pomodoro at breakfast; stay in the classic Italian lane at dinner
“A beautiful Despont dining room in a Beaux-Arts ferry terminal, wrapped around cooking that is competent rather than the reason to come.”
Go for breakfast on the water, or for a dinner where the room and the address are what you are buying. If it is the Italian food you want at this spend, Torrisi is doing more with the same money; if it is a Cipriani evening, this is the fullest version of one. Just accept that the fifth floor is not part of the deal.
The Verdict
