Stulman Checks In

Simon & the Whale is a crowd-pleaser with enough personality to keep things interesting.

- Adam Platt

LIKE DANNY MEYER before him, Gabriel Stulman has navigated the city’s treacherous dining landscape over the years by taking a very small, specific patch of real estate and making it his own. Like Meyer, his restaurants (there are five of them in his personal culinary Yoknapatawpha County around Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue in the West Village) have a distinctive, recognizable style (lively bar; inventively comforting menus; a cheerfully efficient staff, many lured, in the old days, from Stulman’s alma mater, the University of Wisconsin–Madison). And, as with Meyer, it was only a matter of time before one of the city’s hundreds of new hotels would recruit the talented restaurateur to sprinkle his special brand of hospitality fairy dust on a shiny new operation.