© Billy Farrell/BFA.com

The address promises an experience: 80 Spring Street, Soho, Manhattan. The French brasserie Balthazar opened in the former tannery in April 1997. Real estate agents and boutique owners were discovering the artists' quarter, the abandoned warehouses became chic apartments and studios. Soho became the playground of bohemian chic and Balthazar became its dining room.

© Michael Grimm

More than 25 years later, the restaurant has achieved legendary status. It's not because the kitchen offers a fine-dining program at Michelin level, but because it guarantees an ongoing quality in a shift system: breakfast, lunch and dinner are prepared every day by almost 200 employees and busy waiters bustle through the 180-seat hall like extras in a Hollywood blockbuster.

© Michael Grimm

Balthazar isn't just a restaurant, it's a New York institution (with a branch in London since 2013). If you spot the yellow capital letters on a red background, enter the restaurant with its meter-high ceiling. Perhaps you'll manage to get a table without a reservation. Then, you can hope for fabulous steak frites for 49 dollars (the restaurant's flagship dish) - as well as sightings of famous contemporaries. Jerry Seinfeld asked his now-wife to marry him at Balthazar, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z dined between red leather furniture and omnipresent mega-mirrors on the first evening after the pandemic lockdown. Discretion looks different.

A gold status and a house ban

© Michael Grimm

As befits a proper celebrity restaurant, the Balthazar is always in the gossip columns of the tabloids - that's also because founder Keith McNally posts the stars of the evening and their waiter ratings on his Instagram account. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, for example, has a gold standard with an AAA rating. Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio at least still gets an AA rating - only British talk show host James Corden was publicly banned from the house in 2022. McNally let it be known that he was a "tiny cretin of a man" because he had flipped out over an allegedly incorrectly prepared egg dish.

© Michael Grimm

A-list celebrities already know from the 1980s that Manhattan's restaurant guru doesn't mince his words. Back then, the nightlife designer with ringmaster airs ran the famous club Nell's around the corner in Soho. The only rule of the dance hall: every guest had to pay five dollars admission. When Madonna once tried to walk through without paying this fee, McNally turned her away at the entrance. The singer then called him a ''fucking bastard". These are the legends that make up McNally, creating the reputation of his restaurant.

© Rommel Demano/BFA.com

The British-born chef never wanted to run a restaurant. He came to New York as a filmmaker in 1975, " got on the wrong bus somehow" and ended up in the restaurant business. With his outsider's perspective, he was one of the first to understand that restaurants and clubs are part of the same dregs of nightlife and should be seen as complementary. You want to celebrate your life in a brasserie just as much as in a disco. Hedonism also goes through the stomach at lunchtime - and very explicitly in the Balthazar.

Balthazar New York
80 Spring St, New York, NY 10012, USA
Tel.: +1 212 965-1414
Web: balthazarny.com