RESTAURANT REVIEW: Everyone's Eating at Bridges

Manhattan's hottest restaurant doesn't play it safe.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Once and again, favor settles onto a certain restaurant, subject to a logic only its own. The diners’ diners, the sport eaters, and the socially fluent suddenly agree that a new place is “It,” and renown gathers like a heat dome. At the moment, Bridges is that place. My phone buzzes with renewed interest from long-lost friends: “Hi my hun!!” a pal freshly returned from Paris texted. “Do you know who to email for bridges resy?” “Oh, it’s a great place for a first date,” a MoMA curator I met out and about told me, “that you want to be seen on.” On two recent visits, I ran into the same food-world stalwart, once with friends and once entertaining a table of 20-something food influencers, one capping his clout with a yes chef trucker hat.

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Bridges 9 Chatham Sq., nr. Doyers St. bridges-nyc.​com

Chef, in this case, is Sam Lawrence, an Australian who cut his teeth at Estela and grew to become the culinary director of Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant group. It’s no insult to say that Bridges is recognizably Estela-ish, a callback to an era of designer dining that borrowed less from the lusty bistro playbook of recent years and angled itself in a cooler, more clinical direction. The best dishes at Estela, and here at Bridges, have the feel of welldesigned science experiments, small, spare arrangements reduced to their essentials, underpromising and overdelivering. Even the menu styles, with their allusive/elusive poetry, delivered in floating lists ("fried arroz negro, squid, and romesco" at Estela, "sweetbreads, leeks, and mustard" at Bridges) that raise more questions than they answer, play to the theme. There's a chilly chic to Bridges' Billy Cotton-designed dining room with its chrome-and-concrete scheme-a nod to the Brutalism of the nearby Chatham Towers.