"Wild Cherry is an intimate, devastatingly glamorous restaurant set inside the lobby of the Cherry Lane Theatre, a famously scrappy West Village playhouse that was purchased, in 2023, by the indie-film production company A24. The new owners oversaw a top-to-toe upgrade of the century-old venue, sprucing up the seats and revamping the lobbies and bathrooms down to the tiniest detail."
"The theme isn't subtle: the restaurant is a clubby little boîte, gussied to the nines in haute-theatrical fashion, with fern-frond wallpaper, checkerboard floors, and marquee lights dotting a proscenium-shaped archway. The old-school pizzazz extends to the bottle-green leather of the banquettes; the way the barrel-vaulted ceiling grasps and releases the light fixtures' glow; the fuzzy glimmer of a zinc-topped, U-shaped bar that takes up much of the room; the enormous, bathtub-like booths against opposite walls that call out to host a splashy, celebrity-adjacent dinner party."
Wild Cherry occupies the lobby of the century-old Cherry Lane Theatre, renovated after purchase by A24 in 2023. The restaurant is run by chefs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr and sits in a former windowless black-box space. The decor is intentionally theatrical, featuring fern-frond wallpaper, checkerboard floors, marquee lights, bottle-green banquettes, a barrel-vaulted ceiling, a zinc-topped U-shaped bar, and oversized bathtub-like booths. The menu mixes Italian-American social-club dishes, Midwestern veterans' lodge touches, Old New York ritziness, and French bistro influences, with standout items including frogs' legs and a highly praised cheeseburger.
Read at The New Yorker
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