Only three years after taking New York City by storm with its single location way down in lower Manhattan near Broadway and Houston Street, around Christmas 2018, Sadelle's sorta Jewish-style deli and bakery took over the Cafe Bellagio space, which closed in August of that year.
Sadelle's is known for hand-rolled bagels that come out of the oven on wooden spindles and are carried aloft through the restaurant by waiters yelling, “Bagels! Hot bagels! Watch yer hot bagels!” (At least that's how they do it in SoHo, though it might be a little ... drastic for a restaurant overlooking a Conservatory.)
Smoked salmon and whitefish, blintzes, babkas, chopped salads, and other imports from Woody Allenville round out the menu. The weekend brunch is one of the toughest tickets in New York; we'll see how it fares in the Land of the Breakfast Buffet, when we review it in January 2019.
This restaurant was reviewed in the February 2019 LVA; some of the information contained in this review may no longer be accurate.
The original Sadelle’s in Manhattan is all the rage, famous for its bagels, smoked fish, and Sunday brunch. But in the cavernous coffee shop behind the Conservatory at Bellagio, the menu is advertised as “signature classics reimagined.” Which is it—a deli or a coffee shop? On the deli front, there’s smoked whitefish, sable, salmon, and sturgeon served with bagels, tomato, cukes, and capers for $17-$24 (get Sadelle’s Seafood Tower with all the above for a mere $125); cheese blintzes ($15) and matzo-ball soup ($14); but no corned beef, pastrami, brisket, chopped liver, kasha, kreplach, etc. On the coffee-shop front, you can get breakfast at all hours, including omelets ($18-$19), Benedict ($19), huevos rancheros ($20), and steak and eggs ($27); a few soups, salads, sandwiches, and a $26 double cheeseburger; plus a few entrées that range from $19 to $39. Too expensive for our taste, and we haven’t even mentioned the caviar plates for $35-$79, oatmeal for $13, and even a $5 extra charge for tomato, lettuce, and pickle for the tuna-melt sandwich.
We ordered the matzo-ball soup (good broth, humungous matzo ball) and a triple-decker sandwich. For the sandwich, you pick two from a short list of meats; we got the beef and bacon. This is a monster that’s made up of eight mini-sandwiches, each three inches tall. We’d say it could have come from Costco, except for the high-quality meat, which makes it a pretty good sandwich. But it’s too much for too much ($31), considering that the cole slaw between the layers turns it soggy if you take out the leftovers. Our bill came to $57 before tip for the sandwich, soup, and a side of asparagus.
OK, we weren’t impressed. But Sadelle’s brags on its “housemade” bagels, so we went back for some takeout. You order at the 14-seat counter/bar (good for skipping the line); it took 20 minutes for the kitchen to stick 10 bagels in a box and they got the order completely wrong—either that or they were out of salt and everything bagels and figured that we wouldn’t notice that they gave us only plain, poppy seed, and pepper (yikes!). On top of all that, the bagels, at $3 apiece—and nary a 13-for-12 deal in sight—were subpar to the product at Bagelmania or even Einstein, which both offer triple the selection at half the price (even though they come in a paper bag and not a fancy Sadelle’s box). At least on this second visit, we were able to (barely) get back within the one-hour grace period for paid parking. All in all, the whole experience left us scratching our heads.