Status Burgers, Steak Dinners, and Sabrina Carpenter at Wild Cherry
The Cherry Lane Theatre, which opened as such in 1924 and claims to be Off Broadway’s longest-continuously-running theater, has hosted plenty of eminences — Edna St. Vincent Millay was a founder and a 16-year-old Barbra Streisand a sort of intern — but, until the age of 101, as far as anyone can remember, never a restaurant. (A café, maybe. A speakeasy, rumored.) Wild Cherry, from Frenchette’s Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, is the first. And like Le Veau d’Or, another of their old haunts, established in 1937, Wild Cherry has opened with few tables and a blaze of fanfare.
Carved into a former black-box theater behind the concession stand and not visible to the (outrageously charming) West Village street, Wild Cherry is less dinner theater than backstage hangout, lit by a proscenium arch studded with makeup-mirror bulbs and inaccessible to all but a very few hoi polloi. (The evening I went, reservations again being unavailable, I lined up on Commerce Street to try my luck as a 5 p.m. walk-in; sometime mid-meal, Sabrina Carpenter strolled in to take her place at a table in the back.) Intended as a kind of supper-and-a-show venue, Wild Cherry so far is keeping up a pretty parallel existence to the theater it shares the building with, and tickets to a performance — currently Natalie Palamides’s neo-clown show, Weer — don’t actually buy any preferential treatment at the restaurant, unless you happen to be on good terms with A24, the indie-darling production company that bought the theater in 2023 and brought in Nasr and Hanson.
Still, I was curious what dining for the theater, or theatrical dining, might mean at New York’s good old newborn Cherry Lane, so I invited one of New York’s theater critics, Jackson McHenry, to come with me last week. Typically, he told me, pre- and post-dinner meals are the stuff of convenience, not art. “I go to plays and musicals so many times a week I’m usually trying to eat quickly and for sustenance, which means I’m obsessed with places like the recently mysteriously shuttered Green Symphony on 43rd, a grain-bowl-and-smoothie place that was coated with signed photos of former Phantoms of the Opera and usually full of theater people,” he said. “I need to find a new slop place fast.”
He instantly spotted the theater bones in the gussied-up dining room, dominated by a U-shaped bar with a number of booths on two levels radiating out around it. “The dimensions of the room still very much resemble the cramped space of a black-box theater it used to be,” he said, noting the foreshortened dimensions, in the style of a stage or film set pretending to be a restaurant. “At any moment, I did worry that a director was going to shout ‘Cut!’ or an ensemble member was going to come over and try to lure me into another room, Sleep No More style.”
There was no immersive theater, luckily, just a menu that suggested a kind of kitschy variety show. “Supper club” sets the tone — there’s a steak dinner for two, complete with a baked potato, nearly extinct on New York City menus these days — but with excursions to Little Italy clam houses and hoity-toity French spots. The oysters-and-chipolata-sausage platters are a calling card of Nasr-Hanson restaurants uptown and down and here, too, though we were more tempted by an Italo-American scungilli salad: tender bits of thinly sliced conch tossed with onion and celery and served in its own horn-of-plenty shell. I preferred that to the Dungeness crab — à la russe, as the menu had it — which was confettied with sieved egg and capers and not quite interesting enough to justify a $60 price tag.
Across the board, it’s easy to wish that the prices were a little less Broadway and a little more Off Broadway, though there’s barely a bargain to be had anywhere on the island anymore, and these days a $28 cheeseburger, especially from the architects of Minetta Tavern’s Black Label Burger, probably counts as a good deal. Slicked with marrow in the grind and served drippingly medium-rare, this one is a worthy successor, dressed simply with a slice of cheddar, raw onion, and a Frenchman’s “special sauce” (sauce Choron, a tomato-laced béarnaise). Jackson preferred the midwestern-style kielbasa and kraut, a bouncy, fat house sausage on a bed of sauerkraut, though he noted it’s an incongruous theater-restaurant dish. “I can’t imagine eating that and then sitting down to watch Natalie Palamides do clowning and feeling comfortable,” he said. “Usually, these places feel subservient to the big event of your night, but Wild Cherry elbows its way into a starring role on its own terms.”
For me, the true star of the evening was a kickline of “Frog Legs Kiev,” little drumsticks swaddled in garlicky, parsleyed butter and fried in Frenchette Bakery baguette crumbs, a genius flourish. Having already revived frogs’ legs at Le Veau d’Or, where they were served in a sizzling cocotte, the chefs are confirming their status as frogs’ public enemies Nos. 1 and 2. While the uptown version (now available only as a special) was fabulously restaurant-y, these are deep-fried, lollipopped finger food — at least until they’re dribbling garlic butter and bits of fried parsley down your chin. Did they make sense on a menu that also includes pasta Alfredo, red beans and rice, and a frozen-custard machine pumping out dessert? I think not. Does it matter?
That’s the theater: one night, comedy; the next, drama. That’s A24, which brought you Moonlight and The Brutalist as well as Ramy, Ziwe, and At Home With Amy Sedaris. We laughed, we cried, we ate a frog. “This is where Dakota Johnson would send a client on a date in Materialists,” Jackson opined as we split a giant slice of pineapple-compote-laced coconut cake. If that’s not vertical integration, what is?