Clock, marrow stock and two streaky tables

The restaurant in Ian Schrager’s new Madison Square Park-corner EDITION is, at first, hard to find, and then somewhat hard to understand. Lack of signage at street level means you rather have to know The Clocktower, accessed by a lovely modernist spiral staircase via an unmarked door onto Madison Square. Oddly, this seems par for the course: several New Yorkers I spoke to in the weeks leading up to my meal here were surprised to learn The EDITION had even opened here.

Jason Atherton’s Clocktower at EDITION, New York

The next difficulty comes in trying to parse exactly what this restaurant is meant to be – or who it’s meant to appeal to. While the walls teem with vintage monochrome photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge, New York beaches and Coney Island’s Luna Park, as though to give the Clocktower that classic Old New York ambiance, the lighting is bright and cheerful rather than menu-obscuringly dim and gauzy. The walls are panelled in dark wood and banquettes upholstered in racing green, yet there is no sign of the heavy white linen tablecloths you might expect. Instead, between courses, hapless service staff are charged with cleaning the dark wood tabletops (I was trying to be careful, bit it’s hard to dole out four platesful from a shared dish of yuzu-sparkly uni and crab risotto (pictured, top) without some of it spilling onto the table) with what appeared to be a Wet Wipe, leaving grubby fat smears across the wood. The music – Echo and the Bunnymen, Bryan Ferry, the loungier end of the Rolling Stones back catalogue – is “middle-aged divorcees’ wedding disco”.

Can there be any better feeling than electing, reluctantly, for what looks like the healthy option, only to receive a fish that’s swapped swimming in water for swimming in butter?

Classics and more innovative dishes mingle on the menu. Oysters with “bits and bobs”, the inevitable mac and cheese and cheese burger are all present and correct; so too is a 32oz côte de boeuf to be shared between two very hungry people, and accompanied by a seemingly unending series of sides and condiments, from gratin potatoes to a deep jus studded with fatty nuggets of bone marrow. This is no-holds-barred, screw-the-diet New York indulgence. Even the green bean and hazelnut salad is stuffed with generous cubes of foie gras. An ostensibly lighter dish, roasted Dover sole, still comes luminous with clarified butter. I was delighted: can there be any better feeling than electing, reluctantly, for what looks like the healthy option, only to receive a fish that’s swapped swimming in water for swimming in butter? Head chef Jason Atherton has been at the pass every day since opening night in this kitchen, fine-tuning every dish: I feel like he’s got my back.

Likewise, the cocktail menu eschews classics in favour of two dozen hip concoctions you won’t find elsewhere. Several contain peas (by far the tastiest, in fact, was an alcohol-free rink involving pea and mint reduction, soda water and, er, quinine, blessed with the happy name “Ps and Qs”); one, the “Gap Year”, is presented in a sort of ceramic bong with a friendship bracelet knotted around it and two glowsticks protruding; in fairness, presentation aside, the drink within does recall, in its unidentifiable flavours, precisely the kind of heavily fortified kiwi-melon spirit I might have drunk as a thirsty 19-year-old with no thought of the potential for extreme inebriation or indeed for going blind.

With a cocktail list like this, you might expect a trendier, more youthful crowd; with a space designed to emulate the classic New York dining room, an older, more genteel clientele. In fact what you get is tourists, EDITION Hotel guests, and the kind of minor celebrity you squint at from behind your menu, raking your brains for what Netflix show you saw him in. The service staff are brilliant: knowledgeable, helpful, patient, friendly but not over-friendly. (One minor let-down was that we had to ask, rather than have it explained, why our meal was taking so long to come out; a great rush of bookings all being seated simultaneously was stretching the kitchen to breaking point.) We went over to say goodbye to our head server as we were leaving because we’d enjoyed his company so much. Wherever The EDITION has found this team, it should take care to hold onto them. C

The Clocktower, EDITION New York, 5 Madisoin Avenue, New York 10010 USA
+212 413 4200; editionhotels.com