Monday, June 9, 7:00 p.m.
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Daniel Orr has cooked in some pretty spectacular places, among them two Michelin three-star restaurants and La Grenouille, New York’s elegant temple of refined French cuisine. Still, when it comes to spectacular, nothing can match his current professional home—Guastavino’s. With its glorious setting directly under New York’s Queensboro Bridge (the bridge’s tiled underside forms the restaurant’s ceiling), Guastavino’s has been compared to castles and cathedrals, and Orr, according to Wine Spectator, “has created a menu worthy of the space.”

But while his menus are as sophisticated as can be, Orr himself is a small-town guy who proudly notes on his résumé that he was an Eagle Scout. He grew up in Indiana in a household that made its own wine, soap, and vinegar, and grew all manner of fruits. Orr left home to attend Johnson & Wales University, then crossed the ocean for what he later described as “culinary finishing school.” He cooked for two years across France and Belgium; Michelin three-stars L’Espérance in Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay and Restaurant Bruneau in Brussels were among the kitchens he called home. Back in the states, Orr worked his way up from saucier to executive chef at La Grenouille, and somehow managed to find time to write a cookbook, Daniel Orr Real Food: Smart and Simple Meals and Menus for Entertaining (Rizzoli).

But in 2000, Sir Terence Conran’s grand vision of an enormous restaurant under the bridge captivated Orr, and he signed on to run its kitchen. Orr oversees the eclectic menu in the casual Guastavino’s on the first floor (think rotisserie spiced chicken, lentil bisque, and matzo ball soup), as well as the more refined menu in the more formal Club Guastavino’s on the second floor (lemon and brown butter–sauced calves’ brains, or daurade roasted in a salt crust).

The year the two-in-one restaurant opened, it leapt onto Esquire’s Definitive List of the Best New Restaurants in America. Describing the first floor, John Mariani wrote, “The place is alive with the sound of fashionably draped people enjoying themselves immensely gobbling up the luscious international soul food that wreaks delicious havoc on every diet.”

In his Travel, Restaurant, Entertainment & Wine Report, J. Walman praised Orr’s style as “unaffected, sometimes daring, always classic, contemporary and compelling.” Put that together with the stunning architecture, and Guastavino’s offers, he said, “one of the most enchanting dining experiences in New York.”