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Your Hotel Griffou Cheat Sheet

This hotly-anticipated restaurant with stellar downtown pedigree opens for public walk-ins tonight. Here’s what you need to know. Plus: Slideshow!

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The Hotel Griffou opens to the public (officially-ish) tonight.

Hotel Griffou, the hotly-anticipated restaurant with a stellar downtown pedigree, opens for public walk-ins tonight. Here’s what you need to know:

What do we mean by “pedigree,” ‘zactly? The owner triumvirate is as follows: one used to manage Pastis and the Waverly Inn (Larry Poston), one was a founder of La Esquina (Jesse keyes), and one presided over Freemans and parts of the Keith “Minetta Lane” McNally and Sean “Jane Hotel” MacPherson empires (Johnny Swet).
The resto is named, sez Grub Street, after “the 1870s boardinghouse where (per Appetite City, by William Grimes) you could score a multi-course feast, complete with a pint of wine, for 50 cents.”
Rooms like the salon and library are all fine – with décor just kooky enough to be genuinely European – but if you can, score a spot in the be-chandeliered wine vault, which seats 14.
The menu (from Spice Market’s Jason Michael Giordano) has decidedly old-school touchpoints: duck a l’orange, sole meuniere, pork cutlets “from an 1892 recipe.” The prices are new-school: Entrees will run you $17, for the burger, to $42, for the lobster tails with brown butter veloute.
House-menu cocktails are $14; refreshingly, there’s not a sidecar or a sazerac in sight. Best-named cocktail is The Trophy Wife: Matusalem rum, passion fruit, key lime juice, sugarcane syrup, nutmeg.

Hotel Griffou, 21 West 9 Street near Fifth Avenue; (646) 448-4632