Public Kitchen

This glitzy collaboration between the hotelier Ian Schrager and Jean-Georges Vongerichten is touted as an homage to the diversity and variety of downtown New York cuisine, and the messy, somewhat slapdash result is about what you’d expect. The dinnertime menu includes a confused jumble of professionally made wood-fired pizzas, old deli favorites (the JGV potato latkes with smoked salmon is the one to get), and a variety of misbegotten fusion experiments (calamari with ginger and scallion sauce instead of marinara, pot stickers stuffed with basil and seasonal summer corn, etc.). Some of these experiments may have since been discontinued or replaced on the menu by others, but the hotel breakfast is reliable in a glitzy hotel kind of way, and the cheeseburger — made in the thin “smash” style, with two patties, a messy agglomeration of shredded lettuce, and the Alsatian chef’s first-ever fast-food style “secret sauce,” and a generous sesame speckled bun — is not half bad.