Savoy

Eighteen years ago, long before locavore entered the lexicon, Peter Hoffman opened Savoy and started a revolution in the way New York diners eat and think about food. In his warm and inviting two-story restaurant in Soho, Hoffman devoted himself to serving simple but carefully crafted cuisine focused on local and seasonal ingredients. Making full use of the then-nascent Union Square Greenmarket, Hoffman showed New Yorkers that heirloom tomatoes and asparagus from New Jersey, duck from Long Island, and peas from Upstate New York could be turned into straightforwardly delicious meals without any exotic additions or esoteric preparations. Along the way, Hoffman--as a Union Square fixture in his recumbent bicycle--helped the Greenmarket to thrive and inspired legions of disciples who have transformed countless New York kitchens into temples to the region's bounty.

Now, Savoy has settled into a kind of happy middle age. There are flashier restaurants, as well as ones that accompany their devotion to locality and seasonality with greater fanfare, but Savoy hums along. The kitchen turns out honest dishes like Arctic char with snap peas and roasted chicken with asparagus and leeks, and the dining room attracts a discriminating crowd: on a recent visit, we saw artist Chuck Close holding court at one of the ground-floor tables. The revolution has become the orthodoxy, but it's as seductive as ever.

Photo: thanks