Dinner at Ralph's

Just over there, on a banquette beneath an oil painting depicting the racehorses Man o' War and Citation in bookend profile, Rihanna and Naomi Campbell sit huddled like sleek and improbably beautiful fillies after a sudden storm. Not far away, the Departures editor, Richard D. Story, candlelight burnishing his mahogany tan, is deep in what anyone who knows him can guess is drollery with Lee Radziwill, sole survivor of Truman Capote's storied social swans and still resembling a Tanagra figurine. Away in a niche and glowing in light cast by a dozen subtle sources, the heiress and disc jockey Hannah Bronfman is caught up in lively conversation with David Rockefeller, chatting as amiably as if a seven-decade difference in their ages did not exist. Tucked behind a corner table, the Creative Artists Agency honcho Bryan Lourd is tearing into a Gruyere popover, sharing deep agent thoughts with the superhero hunk Chris Hemsworth, although please don't mention this to Page Six. Back to the room and facing a beveled mirror, Hemsworth is practicing his incognito, which is what one does when the prize view at a prime-view table happens to be you. Somewhere around here someone said that Karlie Kloss, the pride of Webster Groves, Missouri, had been spotted, possibly with her best friend forever, Taylor Swift. But you can never be quite sure about these things without getting the visual yourself. It is far too easy for people to become befuddled amid the dazzle and excitement of visiting a celebrity petting zoo. The name of this delightful pleasure ground is, of course, the Polo Bar, Ralph Lauren's brand-new restaurant in Midtown. The bilevel space opened eight weeks ago during the bitter days of winter for invitation-only previews and to a universally warm reception; almost immediately thereafter it became the kind of hot place where even knowing the secret email is no guarantee of booking a table any time soon or even a seat at the bar. This enraged the blogosphere, of course, and with good reason. Right now, virtually no reservations are available before the second week of April (except, as a caller was informed on Wednesday, for "a party of two at 6 p.m., the last week of March"). As Grub Street pointed out, that is a "lot of advance planning for a place that serves cheeseburgers and brownie sundaes." Yet apex feeders aren't fussed about pretty gatekeepers shooing tourists away from the Polo Bar's portals, standing guard with reservation lists studded with famous names and iPads bearing photo cues for identifying the kind of people too busy being powerful to bother cultivating face recognition. Big leaguers don't need to wear a Michael Bloomberg mask to gain entry, because in all likelihood they are the former mayor of New York. If the city's elite were drawn at first to the Polo Bar for its novelty in a dining dead zone (and for the reassuring sense that they would be among others of their ilk), they have returned to a place that is already giving Michael's or the Modern or the Monkey Bar competition as the cozy in-crowd clubhouse for an unexpected reason: They like the food. "Where else can you go that's buzzy and cozy that has great comfort food and is truly chic?" Lynn Nesbit asked one evening. Frenetic as ever, Nesbit flitted among tables where the author Renata Adler was sitting - elegant snowy braid looking just as it did in the famous Avedon photo - and Vera Wang was with a group of female pals taking selfies and in a corner booth Lauren sat surveying the scene he'd created, magisterial as the Grand Poobah in his black jeans and turtleneck and with an enormous silver concha belt slung around his hips. As befits a literary power agent, Nesbit had already scoped out a table for future power lunches with authors, never mind that the restaurant doesn't plan to serve midday meals for at least another month. "It's the '21' Club meets the Carlyle," said Aerin Lauder, the Estée Lauder heiress and eponymous founder of a lifestyle luxury brand. "The second you walk in, you're greeted at this beautiful bar, with the silver buckets of wine and waiters looking perfect and bowls of fried olives," she added. And it is true that as a theatrical stage set, the Polo Bar would be hard to improve upon. On a recent evening, its mile-long banquette of aged and channeled leather was packed, as Lauder pointed out, with an unusually "cross-generational" array of New Yorkers. The socialite Jamee Gregory perched next to a young guy with an extravagant man bun sipping a Vespers martini while also surreptitiously checking out Drew Barrymore, there to dine with her in-laws, Arie and Coco Kopelman. At the head of a stair, just past a row of bistro tables with beaten-brass tops the size of hubcaps, stood Derek Jeter, patiently waiting to be conducted downstairs to a dining room that the chef Eric Ripert recently termed the best-lighted restaurant in New York. The theatrical legerdemain deployed at the Polo Bar by Lauren's design team was necessary to distract diners from what is clearly its most glaring deficit. "It was only later that I realized there were no windows," Barbara Walters said of a recent dinner eaten in what, as she pointed out, is in fact a basement. True, this subterranean space once housed the service kitchens for a storied restaurant of an earlier era, La Cote Basque. But at that place, best remembered for having provided a title for a Capote short story that turned into his social and professional tombstone, the actual dining rooms were at street level, curtained windows filtering strong ambient light. "There's something sacred about that, like being on top of an ancient burial grounds," said Story. For his part, the celebrity chef Bobby Flay expressed awe at Lauren's ability to take what amounts to an oversized crypt and turn it into a warmly inviting destination restaurant. "If a broker would have shown me that space, with the bar upstairs and the restaurant downstairs, I would have walked out in 12 seconds," Flay said. "I don't think I'm that good." Yet Lauren is, and when he decided to create what, in an interview, he called, "the restaurant I wanted to go to," he was unambiguous about the requisites. The lighting had to be pretty enough to flatter diners not necessarily in the first blush of youth. "Brooke Astor would have loved it," said Adler of a scheme deploying virtually every trick known to interior design. It had to feel cozy and homey, even if few homes not inhabited by people named Whitney or Mellon have ever been homey in quite the Ralph Lauren way. The designer decreed that his restaurant feature the simple foods he favors, simplicity meaning not just an array of hearty proteins like grass-fed beefsteaks or the thinly-pounded chicken beloved of social skeletons, but also a fatty delicacy remembered fondly from his borough boyhood. "When I was a kid, you could get a great corned beef sandwich downtown," the Bronx-born billionaire behind the world's largest fashion brand noted. "I suddenly thought to myself, I haven't had a good corned-beef sandwich in a long time. Let's work on that." The $22 corned beef Polo Bar sandwich may not be the towering meat cake familiar to lovers of New York deli but, true to its roots in a city that, as the 2014 documentary "Deli Man" points out, once had 1,550 registered kosher delicatessens, it is house-brined, served with melted Swiss cheese on marble rye and comes with a pickle and a side of coleslaw. "I like the idea of it being Ralph's club, of club food, the pastrami sandwich," Story said. "And I think it makes a big difference to the success of the place when the head member of the club is there." "At the end of the day, restaurants are about storytelling, about creating a space between fantasy and reality," said the celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, a Polo Bar regular and a proprietor who accomplished at his Red Rooster in Harlem what Polo Bar bids to do in the no-man's land of Midtown: create a scene that endures after the initial hype burns off. The Laurens - Ralph; his wife, Ricky; their children, Andrew, David and Dylan - "Eat as a family, vacation as a family, eat and breathe New York, and are part of the community," Samuelsson added. At the very least, they epitomize that always-evolving community of New York strivers who revel in having made it to the inside, past the immigration officials, all the barriers to success, the velvet ropes and officious pretties with iPads, the very people who keep the civic envy-machine humming along. "Listen, people always want to go where they can't get in," Walters said. "Who can figure out what makes a place the place where everyone wants to go? If you figure it out, call me. We'll go to lunch." © 2015 New York Times News Service