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Balera, best Midtown East restaurants, Lele’s Roman, Leather Spa, Libertine, MORE
WORK • Tuesday Routine
Neighborhood notion
JOHN MEADOW • president & founder • LDV Hospitality
Neighborhood you work in: Flatiron
Neighborhood you live in: Upper West Side
It’s Tuesday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace?
Short for La Dolce Vita, with 20 restaurants and bars across 10 cities and five countries, LDV Hospitality is based in New York, with Scarpetta as our flagship. On Tuesday mornings only a portion of our restaurants in New York serve breakfast, Lele’s Roman at the Ace Brooklyn and La Tazza D’oro by Union Square. However, our Flatiron office is humming.
What’s on the agenda for today?
After bringing the kids to the bus and walking my Havanese, Benny, in Central Park, I head to Scarpetta for a morning coffee. There, I sit in the main dining room; it’s closed and quite peaceful. I read the reports from the night prior of all the restaurants. I then walk through Madison Square Park, admiring its extraordinary horticulture and art installations, to our LDV office in the Flatiron district above Barlume.
Every Tuesday we meet with all of the directors of the company to discuss initiatives, performance, and the team. Today, for lunch, we’ll do a tasting for our summer menu at Lele’s Roman. After that we have our kick off design meeting for American Cut in Washington, DC, that’ll open later this year at the Studio Tre workshop. Then, I’ll drive to East Hampton for dinner at LDV at the Maidstone and spend the night at the hotel to meet at Barlume Beach in Montauk for a construction meeting early Wednesday morning. Opening is a lot of work, pressure, and excitement, but somehow it always comes together. [Opened last weekend! -ed.]
Any restaurant plans today, tonight, this weekend?
The weekend is my time to go out to other spots and try new places with my family. My daughter Grace’s favorite restaurant is Indochine (something I’m very proud of). My wife Karin loves Chez Fifi, and my youngest Cecile just wants Gentile ice cream, every single day.
How about a little leisure or culture this week?
This weekend I am going to see La Bohème at the Met. I like the opera and I love everything about the experience at Lincoln Center: the Phillip Johnson design, dining at the Grand Tier before the show and dessert at intermission. It represents the best of New York, public and civic grandeur, while at the same time the gorgeous travertine everywhere gives me a whiff of Roman decadence, which is my rocketfuel.
What’s a recent big ticket purchase you love?
My dear friend and tailor Nicola Radano was in town last week from Naples, so I did a few custom summer suits, jackets, and polos with him. Working with tailors to create artisanal, unique pieces is a true joy for me, but most of all because of the human connection and really knowing where and how the garments are created.
What NYC store or service do you always recommend?
Leather Spa in Midtown is the best leather and shoe repair on earth. Raggedy Threads in Williamsburg is my favorite vintage clothing shop, and they offer a tailoring service to repair vintage pieces. I collect military pieces from the 1960s, so the repair work is critical to preserving the garments and the history. I go to Barberino’s in Midtown every Friday at 3p for either a shave or haircut with Luigi. It’s an old school escape with modern finesse.
Where are you donating your time or money?
I’m on the board of Madison Square Park Conservancy and the Food Education Fund. These are the two charities that I focus on, and they’re near and dear to my heart both personally and professionally, and to New York City as a whole.
WORK LINKS: Massive Penn Station overhaul moving forward, won’t displace MSG after all • Tribeca coworking and catering space Flawless to close at end of month • Permit filings signal NYC construction boom • Median public company general counsel pay hits $2.5M • Tough job market for teens this summer.
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RESTAURANTS • First Person
Pizza, party
Summer’s finally here, and Balera is ready. Opened in March in East Williamsburg, it’s one of the city’s most fun restaurants, new or otherwise, with a kitchen cranking until 1a on weekends serving some of its best new pizza, too.
Behind it, the culinary director/co-owner of La Rina and Brescola, and wine distributor Lorenzo Rubini (among others) and a pitch-perfect origin story: Italian expats meet in New York, become friends, come back from day of surfing, decide to open their own spot. Which is exactly what it feels like, a sun-kissed pizza party replanted onto Graham Avenue after being ripped straight outta Rimini (the Romagna coast beach destination Rubini hails from, and where the first balera — a kind of traditional Italian dance hall — opened in 1910).
Call it “coastal Italian” if you’ve gotta; for my money, it’s more “cosmo Italian” or just “Italo disco.” The tired Italian seafood menus slapped with the former label around the city, this ain’t. This is unfinicky Italian party food, done masterfully, framed by an extremely reasonable, mostly Italian wine list of natural and traditional, plus (befitting a party spot) a punchy grower-only biodynamic champagne section and novel cocktails (including a “DOCG” Martini, gin and vermouth mixed with a three-day-aged Parmigiana Reggiano infused reduction). As for the plates, they read like a rundown of dishes perfect for post-gaming a long day at the beach or pre-gaming a big night out.
Of the three sections of the menu (snacks, composed plates, and pizzas), the bookends are best. The antipasti/primi/secondi midsection is solid, for sure — a salad of green beans and snap peas with breadcrumbs, ricotta salata, and peperone crusco is excellent; grilled mackerel with orange and lemon sauce, capers, and bottarga also gets rave reviews.
But they pale in comparison to what comes out of that pizza oven. At the menu’s start, that’s homemade focaccia alongside an order of 30-month-aged Reggiano, a pile of mortadella, or 24-month prosciutto. It arrives streaming, looking knotty, tough, more rock than roll; but past the perfectly crisp exterior is a kind of downy, billowing pillow of brilliant interiority. Any meat or cheese works wonderfully, but the real move is an order of sardoncini marinati (marinated anchovies, pecorino toscano, hazelnuts, and mint) from further up the menu, stuffing them into your focaccia, then dredging it through the lemony, salty oil the anchovies left in their wake.
Still, the main event are those mattarello-style pizzas — not hand-shaped, but rolled with a pin. Arriving fresh out of a Morello Forni oven on a stand, they’re round, thin, and end in a bubbling, shattering crust that puts an exclamation point on all that came before. I’m not, by any measure, a go-out-of-my-way for pizza kind of person. For these, I would. They’re all excellent. And addictive. You can freak them your own way with a margarita or a tomato base, then toppings. Don’t. You’re better off following the kitchen’s lead.
Take, for example, the Rossa, a tomato pie that needs to be eaten fast, lest it soak through that thin crust, leaving you with soggy slices. Not that you’ll have a problem clearing it: topped with garlic, anchovies, caper leaves, black olives, Sicilian oregano, and basil, the smell-of-the-sunset red pie has a habit of turning every head nearby in envy. The Graham, with red pesto, mozzarella, provolone, broccoli rabe, fennel sausage, and toasted almonds is an ur-savory delight; the “eggplant parmigiana” (tomato sauce, smoked provolone, roasted eggplant, Parmesan, mint, basil) is a better version of the dish than most of its more earthbound namesakes. Dessert’s an easy yes after you watch a few too many plates of tiramisu and lemon sorbetto go by.
All this goes without mentioning the vibes that mint the entire operation. Inside, a long, white, bright bar room runs back to the dining room. To the immediate left, steep stairs to a lofted space holding about 30 diners at two- and four-tops. At ground level in the otherwise high-ceilinged dining room, low tables with banquettes run down one side, rounding a long communal table (that’s been packed with some kind of celebration every time I’ve visited) in the middle of the room, and a couple high tops on the other side. Hanging from the ceiling: a massive disco ball, under which is the room’s prominent light source, a single, thin strip running wall-to-wall. It’s an energized space that bustles, though if you’ve got a low tolerance for noise, your mileage will vary, especially after 10p on the weekends, when you’ll really want to stick to the bar room.
I’ll take the dining room for you, as that’s when the lights go low, and the music goes up: Italo disco, deep house, whatever it is, it’s loud, usually great, and goes (like the kitchen) until 1a. Which is kind of the whole point. Great as a pre-or-post party stop as it is, Balera just as well may be the party, in and of itself. Viva. –Foster Kamer
→ Balera (East Williamsburg) • 442 Graham Ave • Wed-Thu & Sun 530-1030p, Fri-Sat 530p-1a • Reserve.
GOODS & SERVICES LINKS: After 40 years in Tribeca, L&O Frame will close in July • Barnes & Noble teases Ave A store opening Nov ‘26 • Alison Roman bringing First Bloom, her Upstate grocery/cafe, to Brooklyn Heights this fall • Crash course in New York summer produce • How to wear color well • Do you have a mango dealer?
Did you catch our Hamptons and Upstate summer previews?
RESTAURANTS • The Nines
Restaurants, Midtown East
Our 9 favorites east of Park Ave. in Midtown (north of 42nd, south of 59th). See also all of our neighborhood Nines.
