Markus Glocker connects France with Vienna in New York. His new eatery, Koloman, is currently making waves on both sides of the Atlantic.
A rainy February evening in midtown Manhattan, the subway got stuck during rush hour and I’m late for dinner with my sister, who just arrived from Vienna. We go “to the Austrian”, which is only half true, because the Koloman is actually a Frenchman with an Austrian twist; but almost the whole restaurant team is from Austria and my sister is from Austria and I am from Austria and while I’m sprinting across the zebra crossing on a red light I suddenly look up and I notice that the houses on the corner with the Locally, on Broadway and 29th Street, looks like a cross between fin de siècle Paris and Art Nouveau Vienna, so just like Porzellangasse. I might also hallucinate getting stuck on the subway – not one of my favorites. I think of a glass of Grüner Veltliner, which New Yorkers call “Gruner” and which in the Koloman comes not only from Austria but also from the western United States, among other things, and of my waiting sister, to whom I have to explain why I choose her in New York of all places.
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Markus Glocker has worked for Eckhart Witzigmann, Gordon Ramsay and in Steirereck. (c) Hasselblad X1D
Everyone wants to go
Because it’s like this: First it was a friend in New York, one of the lucky ones who had already gotten a table at Koloman in December; he asked via text message whether carrot schnapps was an Austrian specialty. Then there were friends from London, then some from Vienna, who asked wide-eyed if I had already dined there, at the Koloman. The debate about how to get a table there – maybe a reservation for brunch would be easier to get? —, escorted me from dinner at Kate Telfeyan’s Porcelain in Ridgewood in January (we ate a grilled sea bass peeking out from under a mountain of herbs and freshly chopped chili) to Saturday’s late-night exhibition visit at the Metropolitan Museum (a newly opened show of Danish painting was as they say in English, rather underwhelming, who deserves a dirty martini at Donohue’s Steak House a few blocks south).
