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New York Post
6 days ago
- Business
- New York Post
Manhattan's power scene is back in full force at this luxe new Italian restaurant from Michael White: It's Marea 2.0
Midtown has its pre-pandemic swagger back — and People's Exhibit No. 1 is Santi (11 E. 53d St.), the buzzing new modern-Italian restaurant from celebrated chef Michael White. Its nexus of corporate power, great pasta and fun people-watching make it the area's hottest scene since White's Marea opened in prehistoric 2009. After splitting with the Altamarea group in 2021 due to disagreements over the company's direction, White has spent most of his time launching new venues in Florida. (A consulting gig at the Lambs Club on West 44th Street lasted only a few months in 2022.) 10 Michael White is back in NYC with Santi. EMMY PARK 10 The elegant midtown address was once home to White's Alto. EMMY PARK Santi, launched by his BBianco Hospitality Group with business partner Bruce Bronster, marks his triumphant, full-scale Big Apple return. Marea's still going strong and Midtown has other established, excellent Italian restaurants such as Il Gattopardo, Cellini and Fresco by Scotto. But others faded and the scene needed new blood. Santi delivers it for everyone — from shoppers and museum-goers to a Who's Who of Midtown glitterati. Once home to White's aughts-era hit Alto, the venue has overnight became a haunt where the city's prime movers wheel-and-deal over homemade gnocchi and tagliatelle, and cocktails such as the Fifty-Fifty, which features Taggiasca gin, made with prized Ligurian olives. Santi's pleasures unspool through several main areas designed by Michaelis Boyd, gorgeously lit by L'Observatoire International and festooned with luminous portraits from Bronster's private collection. Each section draws a different crowd. The front dining room, a few steps down from a horseshoe-shaped bar for the after-work, sip-and-flirt set, draws movers and shakers to its semicircular booths and banquettes. It's become a canteen for bankers at market-moving investment firm Jefferies Group and its CEO Rich Handler, who work upstairs. On any given afternoon or evening, you might spot Henry Kravis, Barry Diller or real estate mogul Bill Rudin, who's planning a new skyscraper a few blocks away. 10 Midtown power players are flocking to Santi. EMMY PARK 10 With dishes such a succulent veal chop, Santi's food is worthy of the five Michelin stars that White has earned at previous restaurants. . EMMY PARK Boldfaces such as Eva Longoria and Queen Rania of Jordan have popped in, too. Pop star Beck ordered a comfort dish from heaven — hand-folded tortellini ($36) filled with prosciutto, mortadella, pork and Parmigiano Reggiano, finished in a creamy sea of cheese and butter. A circular staircase leads to the slightly more intimate mezzanine, after passing a huge,1800s mirror that Bronster found buried under a Southampton barn. The upstairs area has attracted art and fashion luminaries such as designers Diane von Furstenberg and Michael Kors and painter Kehinde Wiley. The restaurant's noisiest section is the ground-floor atrium, where light globes suspended from the double-height ceiling suggest a galaxy in formation. On my visits, it drew canoodling couples in the corners and noisy groups of guys at middle tables. Fortunately, new wall fabrics and sound bafflers have begun to soften the din. 10 Amberjack crudo is one of many great seafood dishes. EMMY PARK 10 Gnocchi in tomato sauce is a standout pasta dish. EMMY PARK The menu, executed by the kitchen team of Jason Lin and Sol Han, is worthy of the five Michelin stars White earned at his other places. It boasts splendid seafood, both raw and cooked, like tasty, toothsome amberjack crudo ($32) and pleasingly moist halibut ($55) pan-seared on one side and then poached in extra-virgin olive oil. But the pastas — all original, none replicating White's previous plates — are the crowning glory. 'We've been deliberate about not copying expected dishes because that's not fun or challenging, and our guests deserve more than a rehash of old ideas,' White told me. The sautéed Italian breadcrumbs known as mollica, a White hallmark in the past, are mostly absent, letting the pasta and sauces speak for themselves. 10 Some notable guests, such as musician Beck, favor the booths in the front room. EMMY PARK 10 Beyond the front room is the elegant-but-noisy atrium. EMMY PARK Tagliatelle Ragu ($36), which Wiley has ordered more than once,gets my vote. The coarse-ground beef and pork are gently broken down to a velvety texture by a judicious infusion of milk. My favorite, though, was ricotta gnocchi ($28), lighter than the potato-filled variety and bathed in San Marzano tomato-and-basil sauce — a brave statement when too many chefs shy away from red sauce lest their dishes be mocked as Italian-American dinosaurs. 10 A sweeping staircase leads up to a mezzanine. EMMY PARK 10 The mezzanine dining area is slightly more intimate. EMMY PARK But I miss White's legendary fusilli with braised octopus and bone marrow, his heart-stopping, red-sauce masterpiece at Marea. Per Se's Thomas Keller once called his favorite dish in New York. Is there any chance we'll see it again at Santi? When asked, White smiled and said coyly, 'I'm talking to my chefs about it.'
New York Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Woke NYC schools are failing teachers and pupils because they have no discipline — this is why the UFT's Michael Mulgrew must be stopped
Voting is underway to elect the President of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. Michael Mulgrew, who has held the position since 2009, is expecting he can sleepwalk into another term. However, under his watch schools are requiring less and less of pupils, to the point where attendance is essentially optional and almost everyone is handed a passing grade. Brooklyn-based Social Studies teacher Mike Dowd writes why its time for a change and for basic discipline to be brought back. Advertisement Officials love to brag about the 84% graduation rate for New York City public-school students. But if you thought that was an honest measure of how many kids are passing, I have bad news. High-school grading policies have become so corrupt, class credits have become almost meaningless. 8 Michael Dowd in front of the Tweed Courthouse, which is the Department of Education Headquarters in Manhattan on May 2. EMMY PARK 8 Michael Mulgrew, President of the United Federation of Teachers since 2009 is hoping he will be re-elected again, despite the current dire state of education in the city. Stephen Yang Advertisement In recent years, the Department of Education and many individual schools, have adopted 'equity grading' practices intended to benefit disadvantaged students. But by making it almost impossible for such students to fail, even when they don't show up to class, our school system harms the less privileged by discouraging hard work and reliability. Despite the demoralizing effect these policies have on teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, under the out-of-touch leadership of Michael Mulgrew, has failed to make this a public issue. New Yorkers would be shocked to see how far school standards have dropped. Advertisement Although many of us who taught under Mayor Bloomberg remember the pressure to increase passing rates or face retaliation, there was an important check on this practice — the longstanding notion that attendance was a basic requirement for passing. But this constraint disappeared under Mayor De Blasio, whose pursuit of equity involved eliminating 'seat time' as a requirement to pass. 8 Dowd says 'equity grading' practices, which are intended to benefit disadvantaged students, make it almost impossible for students to fail. Christopher Sadowski Thereafter, schools could award passing grades to chronically absent students who didn't deserve them alongside students who worked hard. Advertisement Then, Mayor Adams made attendance completely optional by continuing remote-learning policies that forbade any lowering of a student's grade due to absences. Nowadays, if teachers want to penalize students for cutting, they must give a makeup assignment for each missed day and inevitably accept work — even if it appears to be AI-generated. Meanwhile, many individual schools have incentivized absenteeism through another equity policy — minimum grades. In these schools, a missing assignment or test with no correct answers receives a grade as high as 55 — just 10 points below passing — instead of a zero. Students, therefore, can (and do) miss months of class in a semester and still pass, even without doing makeup work. 8 Attendance at schools has dropped since requirements to be marked in for every class have been eleminated. Not surprisingly, high-school attendance has fallen. But it's even worse than publicized. Because students need only show face at their 'attendance' class to be marked present each day, they can skip other classes and still have excellent official attendance. How often this happens is unknown because the DOE hides this data. The DOE has other ways of de-emphasizing attendance. Advertisement When students fail classes, teachers must select prewritten, explanatory comments for their report cards. But the DOE has removed Excessively Absent (More than 2 days/month) from the list, leaving no appropriate options for chronically absent students. They've even removed Excessively Late, as if to emphasize that old standards no longer apply. So we've gone from defining three absences per month as excessive to denying that absences can even be excessive. Meanwhile, the DOE's attendance app hides attendance records from parents and teachers. As a coach, I no longer know if my wrestlers are attending class and must keep paper records to know my own students' attendance history. Advertisement 8 Police outside of Angelo Patri School, in the Bronx in September 2024, the day after a bullet went through a window, striking a teacher. Matthew McDermott 8 Dowd says the UFT has has failed to make the demoralizing effects of undisciplined school policies a public issue, and blames out-of-touch leadership from Mulgrew. EMMY PARK A culture shift is underway as attending class goes from being a widely understood responsibility to a mere lifestyle choice. Regularly absent students often ask me with complete sincerity how they might improve their grades. Some even request college recommendation letters. As students offer ever weaker excuses for low attendance, it's clear that these new policies are teaching them to surrender in the face of everyday challenges. At a formative time in their lives, our future workforce is losing its self-discipline, reliability, and resilience. Advertisement 8 Dowd writes that new policies are not giving kids the life skills of discipline and reliability they need. Yuliia – 8 Dowd and other teachers are calling on Mulgrew and the UFT to fight harder for more discipline and better standards in classroms. Stephen Yang But the damage goes beyond work habits. Allowing students, especially those with weak academic skills, to miss vital classroom instruction denies them the full education they deserve. In fact, in a recent examination of equity grading, the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, cites research showing 'lenient grading leads to less learning.' Advertisement My fellow teachers and I wonder how the DOE can completely upend longstanding norms of student accountability without public debate and why our union leaders remain silent as our integrity is undermined from above. It's time for Mayor Adams to end these destructive policies or tell us why he supports them. In the meantime, the DOE needs to provide period-by-period attendance data, to show us just how serious our absenteeism problem is and tell us just how many chronically absent students are receiving class credit. And we need to identify the schools at which these problems are most significant and develop plans to fix them. We waited far too many years to address teachers' concerns about student cellphone use. Let's not do the same with lax attendance and grading policies.
New York Post
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Surprise! NYC's new Planet Hollywood restaurant has shockingly good food
It's a shocking twist: The new Planet Hollywood has really good food. The celeb-magnet eatery opened its third NYC iteration two months ago at 136 W. 42nd St., on a corporate block that's nothing like Times Square around the corner. After friends reported having tacky, processed-tasting snacks at an opening party, I was ready to laugh my head off over menu oddities like 'L.A. Lasagna,' an 'icon' from the original Planet that opened on West 57th Street in prehistoric 1991. 6 When Planet Hollywood 3.0 opened earlier this year, no one expected it would have legitimately good food. EMMY PARK Instead, I felt almost embarrassed to enjoy it — and other dishes vastly better than the ones from Planet's early years, when it was a culinary joke, notwithstanding the backing of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Demi Moore. The second Planet at 1540 Broadway closed in 2020. When I first reported in 2022 that founder Robert Earl planned another re-launch, he told me it would be 'more complex and more appealing to New York locals as well as tourists.' We'll see about that. They might be surprised to find that the three-level, 17,500 square-foot venue which cost almost $20 million to build, is almost entirely without the film posters, costumes and other memorabilia that were the main draw at he original Planet Hollywood and version 2.0. The colorful, second-floor dining room and third-floor event space have lots of booths, five-pointed stars attached to the ceiling and lampshade-like overhead lights. Video images of Dua Lipa and Daniel Craig's James Bond randomly alternate with outer-space cartoons and (for no clear reason) pumping oil derricks on screens all around the rooms. The place has drawn bevies of boldfaces, including Alec Baldwin, 50 Cent and Whoopi Goldberg on opening night and cast parties for Broadway's 'Moulin Rouge' and '& Juliet.' But celebs will eat anything when it's free, and the last thing I expected was better-than-decent food. 6 The new spot has limited movie memorabilia but screens aplenty. EMMY PARK It might not rank with nearby Michelin-starred Gabriel Kreuther and fancy steakhouse STK, of course. The more useful comparison is with the area's tourist-jammed venues such as Hard Rock Cafe and Bubba Gump Shrimp. Planet's menu blows them away. There's no identified kitchen mastermind, but Earl wanted to make people forgot the dreary fare of Planets past. He tapped unnamed local chefs to oversee the menu and sources quality ingredients, including meat from butcher-to-the-stars Pat La Frieda. They restaurants delivers what you want from 'fun' food — crispy, crackling mouth feel and sugar-loaded condiments that don't overwhelm the underlying flavors. I have a weakness for this style if it's done with integrity, and the kitchen nails it. 6 'Fun food,' like cheesy garlic bread, is well prepared and satisfying. EMMY PARK 6 A blackened shrimp appetizer was fresh and flavorful. EMMY PARK Cheesy garlic bread ($15) on ciabatta is a mini-pizza with rich marinara sauce, a staple which the house employs well on many dishes. A half-dozen blackened shrimp ($21) — fresh-tasting, marinated and seared with tangy Creole mustard — made me forget the usually wretched bar snack. Baby gem caesar salad ($16) using crisp leaves, Parmesan flakes and toasted croutons was worthy of a classy steakhouse. 6 The salmon entree was cooked to perfection. EMMY PARK Even after such good starters, I had little faith that sesame ginger salmon ($33) would be grilled medium-rare as I ordered it. But the filet arrived perfectly pink under crisp skin, and elevated to serious enjoyment by soy, ginger and sesame glaze. I could take or leave the humdrum chicken pot pie ($23), but the 8-ounce deluxe Wagyu burger ($28) more than redeemed it. The monster needed knife and fork to navigate the (again) properly medium-rare patty, bacon slices, pickles, tomatoes, onions, fried egg, avocado and ranch coleslaw on a toasted brioche bun. 6 The awkwardly named and oddly plate 'L.A. Lasagna' tasted great. EMMY PARK The biggest shock was that L.A. Lasagne ($26). It had no evident Los Angeles influence, nor did it resemble any lasagne I've ever known. But they can call it what they want. Four crispy, parmesan-breaded pasta tubes were filled with ricotta and bolognese-style meat sauce, and served in tangy tomato sauce. Delicious. It's the sort of sinful, guilty pleasure many crave after a night of clubbing, but works just as well at lunch. I hope the folks who work in the great office towers all around the place will forget Planet's old reputation and give its food a chance.
