A Spanish Revival on 23rd Street

The Hotel Chelsea's El Quijote is back and better than ever.

- By Adam Platt. Photograph by Desean McClinton-Holland

OVER THE PAST few years, we’ve all become familiar with the doleful death notices for the hundreds of dive bars and diners and “beloved” dining institutions that have closed their doors around town. The closings continue, many of them quiet and not memorialized, though as the city begins its long, slow recovery from the great covid nightmare, we’ve noticed that here and there, as winter turns to spring, some of these former institutions have begun to come back to life. A new team of cooks will be trying their luck in the grandiose former Del Posto dining room this spring, and the slimmed-down version of the Gotham Bar and Grill, now called Gotham, has been doing a brisk neighborhood business on 12th Street, down in the Village, with new owners, the same maître d’ in the front of the house, and the former pastry chef running the kitchen.

Few of these revivals have been more successful or unexpected than that of the 1930s-era El Quijote, which served jugs of sangria and a roster of stolid Spanish classics for close to 90 years at the bottom of the Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street before shut tering in 2018. Prior to its demise, generations of assorted crackpots and doomed geniuses lived above (Dylan Thomas; Hendrix and Joplin; Sid and Nancy, of course) and got famously blotto in the famous room with its glass etchings of giant lobsters and murals of Don Quijote on the walls, though if you’d wandered by during the depths of the lockdown, as I did, and peeped through the dark window at the stacks of chairs and the dusty, deserted bar, it would have felt as if you were looking back in time into the stateroom of a wrecked Spanish galleon.