The POST-COVID, POST-MANHATTAN PLANS PLANS of the MOST MANHATTAN of RESTAURATEURS

KEITH McNALLY, TO GO

- Matthew Schneier

THE LIGHTS ARE back on at Balthazar, and the tables are booked; the people spill into the street again, sometimes tripping into the security guard stationed, unobtrusively but not exactly invisibly, outside. Zouheir Louhaichy, a 24-year veteran of this and other Keith McNally restaurants, is at his old post at the maître d’s stand, which has been moved outside and outfitted with a bottle of hand sanitizer. He wears the same suit and tie as always, greets just as graciously, and flips through the dog-eared pile of papers that is Balthazar’s daily reservations list—even in the age of iPads and Resy—marking his inscrutable runes in pencil at the margins.

Inside, in the bronzy, nicotine glow of the dining room, an ambient roar floating up from the tables, it’s not the rude mechanics of the place you feel. It’s the analgesic drip of service and certitude: the oil greasing the gears, not the gears themselves. On a still-warm Friday night not so long ago when I managed to land a reservation, I moved my table an inch farther away from the couple’s next to mine, and a waiter, descending to take drink orders, noticed instantaneously and slid it back into position without a word. In front of me was the editor-in-chief of Town & Country, and opposite, the Broadway actor John Benjamin Hickey. Outside, as my friend and I left, shielded under the pandemic-era outdoor-dining huts, which have increased the table count of the restaurant by half again, was Tracee Ellis Ross, laughing and snapping pictures on her phone.

Balthazar opened in 1997 but was designed to look as if it had been there for decades or longer. Its menu is derived from Parisian brasserie classics, its frites manufactured with factory-line precision (in 2013, the New York