Review: The Palm Restaurant

...The one in which I pretty much devour an entire cow. I don’t know how I swallowed that cow…but…I’m getting ahead of myself….let me back up.



We had theater tickets for 8:00 pm this evening, and so, while doing my incessant research, I discovered a steakhouse that was literally right across the street from the theater.

The Palm Restaurant, located at 250 West 50th Street, has been around since 1926…so I figured it must be good. On TripAdvisor, it’s listed at #999 out of 9,299 restaurants in NYC – and has received the 2013 Certificate of Excellence. It also had good reviews on Yelp, so I went ahead and made reservations for 6:00 pm for Friday, June 21st.




We were seated immediately once we arrived – taken back to a table along the far wall, which gave us a good view of the entire restaurant. While waiting for our service, we enjoyed the cartoon caricatures on the walls – there were hundreds of them. The story has it that the original Palm was located next to a newspaper office – and the newspaper cartoonists traded their services for food at the restaurant…and the tradition continues to this day.





I was fortunate to be seated directly across from Hugh Jackman, although you wouldn’t know that from this horrible photo that I took:


Dining with Hugh Jackman...what a treat!


Keep in mind that – as is typical, for some reason, in nicer restaurants – the lighting was VERY dim…so most of our photos were not the best quality.

Our waiter – whose name escapes me, unfortunately, but I believe was Jamie – was extremely attentive. He was very interested in this blog, and wanted me to mention him - and here I can't remember his name! Argh!!! Such are the perils of getting older...I should have been making better notes...but anyway - here's a photo of our wonderful-waiter-whose-name-may-or-may-not-be-Jamie-but-was-still-fabulous:


Call Me Jamie...Maybe...



We started off our meal with some delicious lobster bisque, which was creamy with a hint of sherry, as well as a crisp iceberg lettuce salad, topped with blue cheese, walnuts, bacon, chives and fried onions. I absolutely LOVED the soup – if I could have, I would have licked my bowl. As it was, I was pretty much like a cat – licking my whiskers after a delicious bowl of cream. The salad was a bit of a disappointment, as the blue cheese was too plentiful and too strong. It pretty much overpowered the rest of the toppings on the salad, which is a shame. I love me some blue cheese, but this was too much, even for my standards.

Daughter dined on a 9 oz filet mignon, which she declared perfect. Hubby and I each chose ‘the special’, which was a prime rib. Because it wasn’t printed in the menu, that I could find, anyway, we really had no idea what size to expect. Imagine our shock when an 18-oz piece of meat was put in front of each of us:



This pretty much took up the entire plate…and our reaction was, “Holy Cow!” Literally. Wow. We both bravely dove in, and found the meat to be tender, juicy and flavorful. The only problem – if you can consider this a problem – is that there was just too much of it. We would have been better off if we could have split this, as I barely made a dent in mine and felt so sad that I couldn’t take it with me. (I didn’t think my fellow theater-goers would appreciate me sitting there with a giant hunk of meat in my lap. They’re welcome.)

For dessert, we all shared a delicious crème brulee - which was creamy and tasty…the perfect sweet ending to a very-satisfying meal:



Hubby had ordered a glass of Merlot for his dinner – imagine his surprise when we discovered it was $25.50 for that 9-oz glass…and of course, we didn’t make this discovery until we got the bill.

Our meal ended up costing a staggering $250 for the three of us…gulp. We decided to consider it a celebration dinner of our first night in the Big Apple, and we vowed to starve the rest of the ten days – but we all deemed it worth it.



The service was good…the ambiance was good…and the food was delicious. What made it even better – we literally only had to walk about 200 feet to the theater for our show…and this show was the one that my Daughter had been driving me crazy for MONTHS about...with her incessant SINGING....

That post to come next!