The Met Dining Room

Sep 22

[From the 2/21/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter]

I hit the big 4-6 this Tuesday and my gift from Craig was “you can plan the whole day and I’ll tag along.” That’s quite a gift when you’re a control freak like me!

The original plan was to have lunch at Café Sabarsky, one of my favorite places in all of New York (if not the world), but after trekking there in 20-degree weather, I was embarrassed to see that it was closed on Tuesdays (they don’t take reservations, so we just planned to show up). If you know me at all, you’ll know that I went into high-alert, MUST-FIND-A-GOOD-LUNCH mode and that’s when we hid out in the entryway of a Chase Manhattan and I turned to Eater / The Infatuation / Time Out New York.

The solution, it turned out, was right there in front of me….

The Met!

By all accounts, The Met has a great dining room with a great lunch, so I snagged a reservation on OpenTable and off we hopped across the street.

Racing through the museum to find the restaurant — “Make a left at the medieval gate, a right at Perseus,” said the guard — is now one of my favorite NY memories.

The most remarkable thing about the Met dining room is the space itself: the room is elegant, smacks of history, and its iconic slanted windows overlook an obelisk in Central Park.

I started with a Butternut Squash soup that’s the best thing you could possibly eat on a freezing day:

We had wine because it was my birthday (no regrets, coyote) and then I had the salmon and little gem salad, which was excellent and cheaper than the same thing at All Time in L.A.