Millionaire Outlook
Rich and famous features

Check the inside of Al Coro, a New NYC restaurant which makes Italian fine dining an elite experience 

The old Del Posto space has been reborn

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Al Coro, which is situated in the former Del Posto space in Chelsea, is an almost impossible project on paper. Rodriguez ran the Del Posto kitchen after Marc Ladner’s demise in 2017. Katz had taken over as general manager eight years earlier, and when the landmark restaurant shut down for Covid-19 in 2020 and permanently in 2021, the duo bought the business and set about gutting the space, exercising the demons of former owner Mario Batali and reimagining what fine dining should feel like post-pandemic. And they did all this in a 24,000-square-foot piece of real estate that really should only work as an Equinox or Tao-like clubstaurant and on a block with former mega restaurant neighbors—Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Morimoto, and Toro—conspicuously absent, killed off by Covid. There are 150 seats to fill, for private dining and a forthcoming downstairs bar, Discolo.

 

The restaurant’s opening menu ($245 for seven courses and $195 for five) consists of regional Italian deep cuts flipped and edited by a razor-sharp New Yorker. The seven antipasti are one-bite teases that make an Impact on your brain and palate into focus. Radishes dipped in buffalo brown butter look like a high-end catering crudité, but they’re centers are hollowed out and stuffed with a humble but forceful purée of anchovies and turnips. Thinly shaved bresaola cradles its doppelganger beet, and tiny fried artichokes are a crunchy vessel for electric colatura caramel, candied lemon, magenta pickled red onion and mint.

 

Al Coro isn’t only a swing for Italian fine dining. It’s got to prove that New York still supports big ideas.