Balthazar, with Rich

I really love what the NY Times food critic, Sam Sifton, said of Keith McNally recently: The restaurant is a vision of Manhattan that, like all of Mr. McNally’s projects, is at once entirely fake and entirely accurate. Restaurant dressed as theater dressed as nostalgia, is how the novelist Richard Price put it, in “Lush Life.” You gotta give him credit, the guy really knows what people want and he knows how to deliver it. We rarely have lunch at Balthazar because it's always too crowded and we're too lazy to think ahead and make reservations. But on a lark today we walked in at that perfect moment when a table opened up so that we could sit and have a lunch of french salads.
Balthazar, 80 Spring St, NY, NY 10012 (at Crosby)