Lululemon and Coconut Cake

Cafe Commerce offers easy uptown glamour, day or night.

-  MATTHEW SCHNEIER

WHEN DID WE stop dressing for lunch? La Côte Basque is a distant memory, and the suit-and-hat midday feast is consigned to the occasional Ryan Murphy miniseries. Sometime around the Bowl Revolution, with its plastic sporks and Guacamole Greens, athleisure became the uncontested norm.

Yet even in a workout-leggings world, there are a few vestigial reminders of the way we wore. There they were at Cafe Commerce, which opened in January on Lexington near 70th, a part of town somehow both full of restaurants and in desperate need of them. (As one Upper East Sider wailed to me, "There's nothing. Except Italian.") On parade at the brand-new lunch service were the kinds of important jackets and important bags sold up and down Madison Avenue and the tonier parts of Fifth: a Max Mara teddy coat, a quilted Chanel, an Hermès Kelly.

Some might have known Commerce, as it was called during its first iteration, from 2008 to 2015 in the West Village, but many of them probably did not. I was never a downtown Commerce habitué, but to me, this restaurant makes sense on Lex. It typifies what I like to think of—with affection!—as department-store cooking: Fancy enough for the fancies, knockabout enough to be fun, it draws, as those stores do, from France and Italy but doesn't turn up its nose at down-home Americana and, as a treat, makes a little room for Ashkenazi comfort food. How else to explain the presence of stuffed cabbage and chicken noodle soup with "Grandma's vegetables"?