After their opening chef and general manager jumped ship a month in, the Battery (oh, you know) has scored some serious kitchen talent. Finally.
According to Inside Scoop, the (in)famous private club hired Justine Kelly of Slanted Door to be its executive chef. Smart move. Kelly, as Inside Scoop's Paolo Lucchesi reports, "is a seasoned industry veteran who has been working within the Charles Phan family since 1996, when Phan noticed her at the Red Cat and hired her as his pastry chef at the Slanted Door." She became the chef de cuisine in 2007, then later went on to do other things. But now she'll feed makers and other notables fine fare while they upload shots of the bathroom wallpaper to Instagram. And not a moment too soon, really. (I dined at the club a last week and had two items from the menu: buckwheat gnocchi, a remarkable dish I want again and again, and an over-smoked potato-based atrocity the name of which I cannot recall because it was too repugnant for my mind to record. The kitchen, at least to me, seems all over the place.)
Speaking of, the fratpad/spa/hotel/club for "billionaire geeks and schlubby bro-grammers" made an appearance in the New York Times on Friday. Apparently the place is kind of a bust. Or not. But perhaps. Its exclusivity, it seems, might be turning off well-funded partygoers. "A lot of the people here look like they should be in bed by 10 p.m.," Ruby Skye'd Brian Trent, 42, an entrepreneur at Ankh Marketing.
