Café Carmellini
The crab mille-feuille at Café Carmellini is a tower of thin wafers and sweet crabmeat in a golden Meyer lemon sauce, and Bryan Kim, who liked very little else on the menu, still calls it a fun party trick.14
Why go
Andrew Carmellini opened this in November 2023 inside the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a Gilded Age building recast as a NoMad hotel, after Locanda Verde, The Dutch and Bar Primi.4 The James Beard Foundation made it a Best New Restaurant semifinalist in 2025, and North America's 50 Best Restaurants placed it 39th the same year.56 One dish here carries a name that is not Carmellini's: Scallops Cardoz, seared scallops in a turmeric-tinted, warmly spiced coconut milk sauce, is a dedication to the late Floyd Cardoz.1
Bryan Kim gave it a 7.0 and wrote that a menu leaning this hard on luxury ingredients has too many misses and humdrum dishes to justify a check of several hundred dollars.
4
Order this / avoid
- Order: the table bread, which is free and which Kim rates above the cooking: a small sourdough loaf that pulls apart into rolls, plus cheesy breadsticks the length of your arm.4
- Order: the shrimp colonnata, topped with lardo over a silky white bean puree.4 Ruth Reichl's own picks in March 2024 were
the oysters with green apple, which is not a combination you would think of, to the wonderful risotto and the chicken for two.
3 She calls the pistachio ice cream the best of her life. - Avoid: the lobster cannelloni at $75. Kim calls it
Stunt food in formalwear
and then counts the reasons:There's too much salt. There's too much butter. There's too much caviar, which feels like a very confusing thing to say.
4 - Avoid: ordering wine off the top of the list. Reichl found it built for very rich people with good bottles around $65 to $70, and that pricing is from March 2024.
What locals & experts say
- Ruth Reichl, critic, 2024-03:
I literally loved everything I ate.
She had been twice in the month before writing and liked that the room is grown-up without being stuffy, in a city she found too loud.3 - Bryan Kim, The Infatuation, 17 January 2024, rating it 7.0: the room works and the food does not keep up.
It's quite the accomplishment, and it all feels slightly hollow.
4 - They split on the squab. The MICHELIN inspector has it
pairs rich and rosy breast meat and seared foie gras in a thin layer of pastry
; Kim has the foie gras gushing out when you cut it,overwhelming,
with the huckleberry sauce doing what it can.14 - The restaurant's own billing: Carmellini is a James Beard Award-winning chef and this room distills a thirty-year career.2
Good to know
- The chicken: the Gran Sasso arrives as two courses, breast with a red pepper sauce first, then slow-cooked dark meat with pancetta and potatoes.4
Verdict
should-visit — Andrew Carmellini put thirty years into one room in the Fifth Avenue Hotel and cooks Italian and French off the same menu. The dish that says most is Scallops Cardoz, seared bivalves in a turmeric-tinted coconut milk sauce dedicated to the late Floyd Cardoz. Ruth Reichl loved everything she ate there in March 2024 and named the chicken for two and the pistachio ice cream; Bryan Kim gave it a 7.0 and said the luxury ingredients do not justify the check. It is a booked evening at NoMad prices, and the value on the wine list sits well below the top of it.