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RESTAURANTS • First Person

All grown up

Café Boulud, relocated and re-opened in December on East 63rd St. just off Park Ave., is a restaurant for grownups. 

The dining room is a warm embrace: plush seating, soft lighting, a striking floral arrangement at center. There’s molding on the ceilings, Galerie Mourlot-curated art between mirror-paneled walls, and green velvet banquettes lining the room. 

Compared to the high drama of Four Twenty Five and Cafe Carmellini, two other high-profile fine dining openings of the season, it’s a study in restraint, an exceptionally well-appointed, uptown Manhattan living room. 

When you’re young, it’s fun to play the part at a place like Cafe Boulud — to get dressed up, and inhabit the fantasy of some other, more elevated New York City. To know that when the night ends, you’ll leave it all behind. But then you reach a certain age, and you look around and wonder if maybe you are, in fact, who this is for. And then what.