FOR a lot of people who spent the Clinton years eating in and around Midtown Manhattan, 1996 was all about the crackling pork shank.
Crispy, sweet, glistening and gigantic enough to make you wonder whether you had accidentally ordered a shinbone of brontosaurus, it embodied the bright, go-go gestalt of that late-20th-century moment when it seemed as if your 401(k) was just going to keep growing fatter and sweeter by the week. Ruth Reichl hailed it that year as “original and delicious” in her New York Times review of Maloney & Porcelli, a sprawling new chophouse and hangout on East 50th Street, where the shank was the signature dish.
“There are some things like that that can become a restaurant maker,” said Alan Stillman, the legendary New York entrepreneur who opened the place. “The next thing you know, the whole world is descending upon that item. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Nor does it last forever. The Midtown pinstripes crowd has never stopped dropping by Maloney & Porcelli for that “great ball of meat,” as Ms. Reichl described it, or for the restaurant’s other signature dish, the “angry” lobster, both of which were conceived by the now-famous chef David Burke.
But there is no denying that that buzz of newness eventually did what buzz tends to do, especially in New York. It moved on, and on — most recently to David Chang and his crispy, sweet, glistening bo ssam. To the warmly smiling emissaries of the Danny Meyer empire. To speakeasies, sushi bars and sandwich shops. Even, of course, to Brooklyn.
Alan and Michael Stillman — the father-and-son team that runs Maloney & Porcelli and other spots in their Fourth Wall Restaurants group — are savvy enough to realize this, which is why they are putting the 16-year-old Midtown joint through a head-to-tail renovation (while leaving that shank alone).
In some ways, the project would make an engrossing case study at the Harvard Business School: Can any restaurant that has passed through the heat of its adolescence — much less one born in the days before Facebook, Twitter and the vogue for artisanal pickles — adapt enough to enjoy a prosperous adulthood in the flux of the New York dining scene, where what’s seen as old and square is routinely plowed under to make way for the new and hip?
Maloney & Porcelli is working every angle. By early next week, it will have a new menu, new awnings and lighting and cocktails, new art on the walls, new music on the sound system, new uniforms for its servers, even new matchbooks and toothpicks. In essence, the restaurant seems to be upgrading its aesthetic and culinary consciousness, offering retro-clubby delights (from fried-herb versions of Tater Tots to a roaming martini cart) and a tongue-in-cheek TBWA/Chiat/Day advertising campaign that will suggest it’s in sync with the way New Yorkers eat and drink now.
Plenty of spots have done the makeover mambo over the years — the Rainbow Room, the Russian Tea Room, the Waverly Inn, the Monkey Bar — sometimes repeatedly, and not always to applause. The trick of going more contemporary, of course, is that you have to start by publicly admitting that you’re not.
Scores of chefs and dining establishments have altered the conversation in the years since 1996, and the restaurant needs to adjust “to what the crowd has developed into,” said Michael Stillman, 32, a Brown University graduate who is overseeing each element of the transformation.
“We almost have to catch up with that,” he said. “We’d like the restaurant to work for another 25 years.”
But in his view, catching up and sticking around both hinge on going back: The new décor and dishes at Maloney & Porcelli are meant to reinforce the feeling that it’s the youngest member of the city’s beloved “old clubhouse” club. The idea is not to reinvent the culinary wheel, but to “re-excite our core base,” he said.
Even that will take effort, of course. If nothing else, the Maloney makeover, which borrows liberally from classic and of-the-moment trends in cooking and mixology, speaks volumes about how food consciousness has expanded and evolved in just a generation. Today, when even the mainstream diner can expound on the provenance of sea urchin and wild ramps, it takes even more attention to detail to hold on to that Midtown regular who not long ago might have settled for a plate of creamed spinach.
With that in mind, what Maloney & Porcelli is undertaking “is really logical,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who shuttles between New York and the West Coast, and who is not involved in the project.
Name recognition is crucial in the restaurant world, he said, but it’s also “a double-edged sword,” because it requires constant evolution to maintain standards. “When you go back to a place you know, it has to be the way you remember it fondly — not necessarily the way it was,” Mr. Wolf said. “So it essentially has to be better. Which requires constant small improvements, most of them invisible, but felt.
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