NYCReview
Reynard
This spot is Permanently Closed.
If you asked us our thoughts on Reynard at some point since its opening in 2012, you probably heard something like, “It’s another hotel restaurant.” This likely made you think of business lunches, $21 salads, and fancy silverware. After all, you probably only go to hotel restaurants when you need an inoffensive spot to meet people you don’t really know, or you have cousins staying there who are too tired to go out after a long day searching for knockoff handbags and walking so, so slowly on sidewalks all over the city.
And for several years, Reynard was just another hotel restaurant. Sure, it was in a cool Williamsburg hotel, not the Sheraton Times Square, but it still wasn’t a very exciting place to eat. Particularly when you considered it was in one of the city’s top restaurant neighborhoods. But that’s changed in a major way: they’ve brought in a new chef, changed the menu, and Reynard is now serving some very good food.
The American food at Reynard is mostly all cooked over a wood fire, which helps make everything from steak to roasted cauliflower taste pretty delicious. And thanks to an in-house butcher, there are also some adventurous things to eat, from beef tongue to a pig head terrine. But even the dishes that sound like ordinary hotel restaurant items are much more interesting than you’d expect. The roasted squash and a half-chicken, for example, are some of the best things on the menu. The squash cooks overnight on the embers of the open-hearth, and the big portion of smoky chicken is served with sides of crispy rice and smoked cabbage that will make you wonder if there’s any safe way to cook with an open-fire in your apartment. There is not.
The bar area at Reynard is casual and you’ll almost definitely hear “Can’t Stop The Feeling” or, if the bartender is feeling sentimental, “Cry Me A River”, but overall, this is one of the fancier dinner options in the neighborhood. Unlike some Williamsburg servers who sneer if you don’t comment on their rib tattoo of the Allegory of the Cave, the servers at Reynard explain how each dish is made and recommend options from the long French wine list that will pair nicely with your food. With this in mind, besides the Nordic families and middle-aged Parisian couples staying at The Wythe, Reynard tends to be filled with Williamsburg residents who need a place that will convince their parents that they have their lives together, even if they actually have three roommates in a converted one bedroom under the BQE.
In order to get into Reynard, you’ll have to walk past groups of guys waiting for the doorman to let them up to the rooftop bar, and then you’ll have to pass through the tourist-filled lobby. But trust us, the hotel restaurant stereotype at Reynard ends there.