Double Crown - Restaurant Review

When John Dory opened immediately following Double Crown, the number of serious restaurants serving British food in New York doubled. It now has halved: John Dory has closed after less than a year. These are telling statistics about the state of British food in the American cultural capital, where legions of restaurants offer dishes from the rest of the world’s cuisines.

Neither John Dory nor Double Crown was conceived, strictly speaking, as a British restaurant. John Dory had a British celebrity chef, April Bloomfield from the Spotted Pig, who cooks seafood; some of her dishes included British accents and a smaller number actually were British, but these offerings in no way dominated the menu. Double Crown, however, offers a bigger selection of British food along with dishes that have some imperial connection from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in Asia. Double Crown is a hot number on the mercurial New York restaurant wheel, although the restaurant side seems to have cooled along with the economy; we got a Friday reservation for eight o’clock on the day before.

It has been much remarked that the designers of the restaurant own it, but that is not apparent from either the food or service once past the front desk. The place (not to mention the majority of its customers) is stunning, but in a rare confluence for this kind of enterprise, the food matches the d