http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/dining/a-ralph-lauren-restaurant-the-polo-bar-comes-to-new-york.html 2014-12-09 18:45:05 A Ralph Lauren Restaurant, the Polo Bar, Comes to New York Aglow with amber light and dense with equestrian paintings and trophies, the Polo Bar feels like a country club as staged by Steven Spielberg. === Ralph Lauren He spied a corner table. “I have to figure out where I’m going to sit for the rest of my life,” he said. Regardless of which leather banquette Mr. Lauren eventually settles into, his coordinates in American culture at large have remained pretty consistent for a half-century or so. At 75, he’s an emblem of and a catalyst for the New World’s longings for an Old World aristocracy. “You’ve got to be someone who pays attention to the details,” he said, and he may as well have been channeling Jay Gatsby. The Polo Bar, which is scheduled to open this month — its doorway a few steps east of his company’s flagship store at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street — looks like a place where the Earl of Grantham might repair for a porterhouse and a brandy after a brisk woodland romp. Mr. Lauren surveyed the room, paying attention to the details and speaking in a near-whisper that carried a trace of his childhood in the Bronx. “Can you tell me any restaurant that looks like this?” he asked. Well, no — at least none of recent vintage. To call the Polo Bar clubby would be a meek understatement. Aglow with amber light and dense with equestrian paintings and trophies, it feels like a country club as staged by Steven Spielberg. “It’s tradition with flair,” Mr. Lauren said, by way of encapsulating his ethos. “It’s not just tradition.” Which is to say that the Polo Bar does not resemble any major restaurant to appear on the Manhattan scene for a generation or so, and that’s fine with Mr. Lauren. “I’m about longevity, I’m about timeless,” Mr. Lauren said, sipping a cup of his own brand of coffee. “It was not my idea to be trendy. I don’t want to be the hot restaurant. I want to be the restaurant you want to go to twice a week.” Of course, these are the days of chef-driven gastronomy and décor; this is an era in which every bowl of ramen, bucket of fried chicken, indie-rock playlist and ironic bathroom adornment tends to be cast as the flowering of a chef’s creative vision. If so, that whole memo (the one with paragraphs devoted to modernist cuisine, the “The food you’re going to come here for is really the best I can do,” Mr. Lauren said. “It’s not about a fancy chef.” The project enticed him, he said, because it was a way to create something pleasurable in his hometown, and because it was a challenge. “I feel like I have something to say,” he said. In the same way that Mr. Lauren’s clothes represent a Bronx guy’s idealized tribute to the American iconography of preppies and cowboys and boating and horseback riding, he envisions the Polo Bar as a new-century nod to the old-school haunts, like the “21” Club, Harry’s Bar in London and It is no accident that what he recalls as his first date with his wife, Ricky, took place at Keens, the chophouse on West 36th Street that has been open since the first Grover Cleveland administration. (She was 19, and he remembers her playing around with one of the restaurant’s signature clay pipes.) Meanwhile, the food at the Polo Bar wouldn’t be out of place in the Eisenhower White House. There will be crab cakes, corned beef sandwiches and steaks — produced, when availability allows for it, on Mr. Lauren’s 17,000-acre cattle ranch in Colorado. There will be burgers. Such is Mr. Lauren’s fondness for burgers that he credits one with inspiring One day, Mr. Lauren found himself hungry in a hotel lobby in Paris with Charles Fagan and Alfredo Paredes, two executives from the company. “ ‘Is there any place to get a burger?’ we asked the concierge,” Mr. Lauren recalled. The usual confusion and disappointment ensued, which led Mr. Lauren to detect, perhaps, a burning need in the Gallic marketplace. Ralph’s, as he conceived it, would be an unapologetic shrine to “things that I grew up with. And the French loved it. It was fun building something that I would want to go to.” His New York spot is engineered for the same purpose, but that leaves open the question of who will fill the other 177 seats. Midtown Manhattan’s allure as a hot dinner destination has faded as much of the evening action has migrated downtown, and these days, luxury-ogling, GPS-guided tourists represent the dominant tribe on the most famous stretch of Fifth Avenue. Drew Nieporent, the veteran New York restaurateur behind spots like “I think there’s a certain type of diner who will gravitate to what he’s going to offer,” Mr. Nieporent said. “If they launch this thing correctly, it could be a big winner in New York.” Simon Doonan Also to Mr. Lauren’s advantage is the surge in the last six years or so of successful restaurants attached to stores: ABC Carpet & Home has The department store dining room is no longer seen as a punch line. “If there was a stigma attached to it in the past, it’s gone,” said Laurence Kretchmer, the business partner of the chef Mr. Lauren stressed that the Polo Bar would not be “a formal restaurant,” but what will he make of those customers who are sure to show up at the front door outfitted for a theme-park flume ride in Orlando instead of a fox hunt in the Scottish highlands? “We just had a conversation about it,” he said. “Would you turn them away if someone comes in in a T-shirt?” He admitted that he’s no stranger to the maître d’ brushoff. “I’ve been one of those guys,” Mr. Lauren said. He recalled dropping by a fancy establishment, years back, when he had already become a force in global fashion. “I had shorts on, and they turned me away,” he said. He accepted that fate with equanimity. As for the Polo Bar, sartorial regulations could wind up being flexible. Mr. Lauren broke into a subtle grin and said, “I guess if I don’t do any business, I’ll take anyone.”