Ernesto's Interregnum

Between our critic’s first and last visits to the Basque-inspired taverna, not much (and everything) has changed.

- By Adam Platt

LIKE MANY RESTAURANT FANATICS of a certain age, I used to like to grab a pack or two of matches on my way out the door of the places I reviewed or dined at semi-regularly. Since we have a working fireplace at home, there was some practical value to this old habit, which likely goes back to the vanished era of the Stork Club and the Rainbow Room, when gentlemen drank their martinis straight up at lunchtime and the most sophisticated couples burned through a pack of cigarettes a day. Lots of places have discontinued the practice in recent years, preferring to dispense carefully carved toothpicks, or mini-notepads, or party bags filled with boxes of organic chocolate or granola. In our household, these tend to get lost, or thrown away, or eaten, but the old fine-dining matchbooks still survive, stowed furtively in bathrooms or tossed in a ceramic bowl above the fireplace.

Lately, this little collection has taken on a kind of nostalgic, even anthropological quality, of course. Fishing around in the bottom of the bowl the other day, I found a couple of matchboxes from old deceased regulars like Gotham Bar & Grill and others from hotels I stayed at long ago in another life on trips to far-off places like Tokyo and the Kingdom of Bhutan. In the middle of the pile were ones from a jumble of places I’d forgotten or hadn’t thought about in a while (Peasant, the Dutch, legions of half-remembered Japanese