Snowy Stroll by Balthazar

Opened in 1997 by restauranteur Keith McNally, Balthazar is more than a brasserie. It helped inspire an entirely new breed of New York restaurants. As Eater put it “When it opened in 1997, it represented a changing tide in what had been an industrial, art-filled downtown Manhattan, and a shift in how and what New Yorkers wanted to eat. The stuffy fine-dining French restaurants were for the olds; everyone under 30 in the late ’90s and early aughts wanted to be at Balthazar, eating French onion soup, steak frites, and profiteroles filled with ice cream and topped, table-side, with hot chocolate sauce.”

The restaurant occupies a space that was once a tannery and was designed to resemble a French brasseries, with high-backed leather booths, scarred brass mirrors, a tin ceiling, and Parisian-inspired antique lighting. Almost immediately the restaurant became a place to see and be seen. As Eater said, “…It was Balthazar that reached the greatest swath of America in and outside of New York City in its first decade. It was listed in guidebooks, it was frequented by the famous and not famous, it shook up the neighborhood, it shook up New York. The restaurant helped define an evolving New York. As Reggie Nedelson, author of At Balthazar put it, “To some, Balthazar was the beginning of the end, the last straw. ‘When Balthazar opened, I just thought, What else can they do to us?’ said cartoonist Art Spiegelman, bemoaning the old days in the time-honored New York way in which change and nostalgia are permanent twins.”