Chloe Is the Comeback Story of the Year — But Is It Any Good?
The year is 2015. Millennials have yet to be admonished for buying avocado toast, and they leave parties in $10 Uber pools before posting, earnestly, about their nights on Instagram because Stories do not yet exist. On Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Chloe Coscarelli, a Cupcake Wars winner and author of a handful of vegan cookbooks, has opened the counter-service spot By Chloe, selling quinoa tacos, macaroni and “cheese” with shiitake bacon, air-baked sweet-potato fries, and tempeh-lentil-chia-walnut burgers. One juice on the menu contains activated charcoal, and everyone loves the “Kale Us Maybe.” The customers swarming the small space and lining up down the block are about the same age as the 28-year-old chef; others buy their lunches with NYU cash, a now-defunct collegiate currency.
Two weeks ago, just shy of a decade after By Chloe’s debut, Coscarelli opened Chloe in the same space. It is a rising-from-the-ashes moment for Coscarelli: Her business partnership with Esquared Hospitality turned sour in 2017 when Coscarelli was kicked out of the restaurant and entered a yearslong legal battle over her ownership and IP. At the same time, By Chloe fell into bankruptcy, rebranded as Beatnic, and eventually saw its remaining locations sold off to the fast-casual chain Inday earlier this year. The comeback story is irresistible; I wondered if the new restaurant would be any good.
The world, of course, is a very different place than it was during the end of the Obama administration. There’s all the obvious stuff, plus Sweetgreens have proliferated across the city, Superiority Burger is now a diner, and “plant-based” is an all-too-common phrase. Somehow, Chloe’s launch has still managed to draw as much attention as its predecessor, with lines this past week winding around the corner on Macdougal before noon.
Inside, there was barely any room to stand. That didn’t stop a family of five from waiting for a table while a couple ahead of me on line eventually gave up and left. I saw Coscarelli appear in a chef’s jacket and black apron from the kitchen on two out of three visits, chatting with some diners who told her they’d eaten at By Chloe on a first date and are now married with kids.
As before, there’s a communal table in the center of the room, surrounded by decorative stools, and small tables around the perimeter, each with its own Zafferano lamp. The menu sticks to a similar format of greatest hits like loaded salads, veggie burgers, and baked goods, with the addition of dishes such as butternut nachos and spicy cashew-kelp noodles.
Chloe is the type of restaurant where staff take any request to make a chopped salad gluten free very seriously, as with the guy in front of me who opted for a side of quinoa instead of the minted pearl couscous. While waiting, I asked if he had been to the original restaurant, but he had no idea what I meant; he’d only chosen to eat at Chloe because he was in the neighborhood and it looked good. When I filled him in on By Chloe’s Shakespearean backstory, he seemed to hold his chopped salad with a little more gravity.
Looking around, I saw a salad at nearly every table, each one studded with impactful sources of flavor and protein like tofu feta and almond Parmesan. Coscarelli’s meat substitutes don’t taste fake, either: The burger is juicy with a tender, coarse grind and an almost alarmingly cheesy cashew sauce; spicy maple seitan is the highlight of a taco salad; and the basil-y “meatballs,” with cherry-tomato jam on a chewy pizza-dough roll from Sullivan Street Bakery, are given a dark crust that makes way for a soft, crumbly interior. Coscarelli says she’s cooked vegan meatballs before, but this recipe, made with portobello mushrooms, walnuts, caramelized onions, and fennel seeds, is new.
The baked goods stacked in the counter display case are the other hallmark of the Chloe experience, made with as much technical care as everything else. Crisp cinnamon-espresso cookies are the size of dinner plates, while the normal-size cookies are gooey with chocolate, caramel, and vegan marshmallow. My favorite was a thick slice of sprinkle-coated, vanilla-frosted three-layer chocolate cake that was sugary in all the right ways.
Prices are on par with much bigger fast-casual chains: The classic burger is $11, and salads max out at $17. A vegan NYU graduate student eating a kale salad next to me said she was a fan of Coscarelli’s: “I heard there was an original, and once it reopened I had to go.” This was already her second time at Chloe. She’d been impressed, on her first visit, by the nachos (“the sauce really tasted like cheese”) and the sprinkle cake. “I’m trying to come here once a week,” she said.