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Aureole: the Hard-Hat Tour

BY Kate Krader | POSTED JUNE 9, 2009 AT 7:43PM EDT

I've just come back from a tour of the opening-in-a-few-weeks Aureole, newly relocated to One Bryant Park on 42nd Street in midtown, and here’s what I can tell you:

* It’s night-and-day different from the original. Chef/owner Charlie Palmer called the old town house one-dimensional; the new space, 3-D.
* There are three eating options in the new location: a small-bites menu, a bar room with an American brasserie menu and a more formal room with a prix-fixe fine dining menu.
* Chef Christopher Lee (an F&W Best New Chef 2006) is on Day One of menu testing, so there are no confirmed dishes, but he’s talking about pork belly pastrami sliders on the bar menu and a surf-and-turf of lobster tail and pork belly in the dining room. (No word yet on whether he’ll do some version of the Gossip Grill, the grilled-cheese-and-truffle sandwich he made famous on the TV hit Gossip Girl.) We'll know soon—word is they're starting to take reservations for early July.
* Girls in skirts, take note: *The upstairs wine mezzanine—Palmer promises to have 15,000 bottles on the premises—will have a glass floor. Also no word yet on whether he’ll have his Vegas cat-suited wine angels catapulting up to fetch the bottles.

Aureole: the Hard-Hat Tour

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