A 45-Day Resy Window for a Room That Books a Lobby
Ralph Scamardella's French-Mediterranean scene restaurant inside the Moxy East Village trades on the room and the wine list. The plates rarely earn their prices.
The fettuccine arrives under a shower of black truffle at a table where the music has already made you lean in. Forty-two dollars of buttered pasta with shaved fungus on top, delivered in a room built to be photographed and priced to fund the photography. It is a competent plate of food in a room that is trying much harder than the plate is.
Cathédrale sits in the base of the Moxy East Village, which is the first thing most people don't realize about it. Ralph Scamardella runs it under the Tao Group banner, with Jason Hall — Gotham Bar & Grill, Anthos, Craft — in the kitchen. The wine list has held a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence five years running and the Burgundy section is where the money is well spent. Everything else about the operation is the room, the crowd, and the door.
A wine list that deserves its awards attached to a kitchen that does not, in a room built for the photograph rather than the meal.
Editorial Deep
The fettuccine lands with a small drift of shaved black truffle over butter and pasta. It eats like what it is: correct pasta, decent butter, truffle that smells more than it tastes. Nothing is wrong with it. Nothing about it argues for the price either. The veal porterhouse comes with a truffle sauce pooled underneath, and the sauce is the most interesting thing on the plate — the veal itself is cooked accurately and seasoned conservatively.
Conversation is possible at a normal volume until about eight, and then it isn't. The soundtrack leans hard on dad rock, played at a level that says the room would rather you look at it than talk through it. By nine you are leaning across a two-top to hear the wine list being described.
Resy advertises a 45-day window and behaves like one — prime Friday and Saturday slots go inside the first day the window opens, but a Tuesday at nine, booked two weeks out, is available now. Online booking caps at eight guests, which is the detail most parties discover at the wrong moment. For nine or ten, call 212-888-1093 or email nycathedralereservations@taogroup.com; eleven or more goes through private events. Dress code is smart/elegant, enforced loosely but visibly at the door.
The cheapest visit that would still count as eating well here is the Tomatoes à la Provençal, the rôtisserie chicken ($39), and a glass from the Burgundy list. That version is worth doing. Would we send someone to do exactly that? Yes, with the caveat that they are buying the room and the wine list, not the food.
A return makes sense once the plan is a bottle and a bar snack rather than a full dinner. Sit at the bar, order the tomatoes and the salade verte, drink Burgundy, look at the room. That is the version of Cathédrale that argues for itself.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Tomatoes à la Provençal, rôtisserie chicken à la moutarde, a bottle from the Burgundy list
“A scene room and a serious wine list, attached to a kitchen that does not justify its prices.”
Go for the bar seat, the tomatoes, and a Burgundy bottle. For dinner proper, Frenchette does more with the same money in a room that is honest about what it is.
The Verdict
