Max of Eastman Place

The Restaurant

Max of Eastman Place opened inside the Eastman Place mixed-use building at 25 Gibbs Street - directly across from the Eastman Theatre and a one-minute walk from the Eastman School of Music - and has remained the city's most-considered pre-and-post-theatre dining room for two decades. The dining room seats approximately one hundred and ten across two linked spaces: a main ground-floor room with French-bistro architecture (warm-toned wood architecture, brass-and-marble accents, banquettes upholstered in deep-burgundy leather, white-paper-over-white-cloth tables with classical bistro plates and stemware) and a small bar-front section that seats fourteen for a la carte dining and serves the pre-curtain wine-and-aperitif programme. The proximity to the Eastman Theatre - approximately two minutes' walk from the curb-stop to the dining-room door - means the room has built its operating rhythm around the cultural calendar: a tight pre-curtain service window from 5:00 to 6:30 pm that turns the bar room with practised precision, and a quieter post-show service from 9:30 pm onward that handles the slower senior-music-patron register.

The kitchen is classical French-bistro with explicit Mediterranean inflection. The menu runs the senior bistro classics with seasonal updates: a properly-prepared escargot starter in herbed garlic butter, a country pate de campagne with cornichons and grain mustard, a daily-changing soupe du jour that runs French onion gratinee in winter and gazpacho in summer, a classical steak frites preparation with bearnaise and shoestring fries, a rotating moules frites in white wine and shallots, a properly-prepared coq au vin in cooler months, a Mediterranean-influenced cioppino, a rotating fresh-fish preparation that draws on the Atlantic and Lake Ontario catch, an organic chicken preparation that has been on the menu since opening, and a deliberately-accessible prime-and-Angus steak grid. The plating reads as classical without veering into the kind of contemporary-American small-plate format that does not sit well with the pre-theatre dining register.

The wine programme is shorter than the destination dinner-houses' but rigorously well-selected for the bistro register. Approximately one hundred and forty references with explicit depth in Loire whites (Sancerre, Pouilly-Fume, Vouvray), Cotes-du-Rhone reds, a deliberate Cremant and Champagne section that supports the celebration tables, a deliberately-accessible by-the-glass programme that rotates fifteen pours through the seasonal menu, and a small but considered Finger Lakes section. The Sunday brunch programme - eggs Benedict variations, classical croque-monsieur and croque-madame, brioche French toast with seasonal fruit compotes, and a properly-mixed mid-morning Bloody Mary programme - is the most-considered weekend brunch in the East End and consistently books out by Thursday afternoon for any prime Sunday.