Romera Will Serve Its Last Meal Tonight

After a scant six months, the death knell has rung on Romera. The restaurant that may have been too pretentious even for New York will close after tonight.

Conceived of by Dr. Miguel Sanchez Romera — a neurologist who apparently decided that knowing how the brain parsed sensory data made him a master chef — the $5 million restaurant in the Dream Downtown hotel opened last September to massive hype and awful, awful reviews.

The New York Times' Pete Wells gave the restaurant a single star and gamely admired the restaurant's visual elements. He admired the décor. He admired the painterly flourishes of the plating. He didn't have anything nice to say about the food.

Romera called his cuisine "neuro-gastronomy," and it was originally only available in a $245 tasting menu. After the terrible reviews started coming in, the restaurant attempted damage control by offering less expensive tasting menus that cost only $185 and $125. Clearly, that didn't help either.

Frank Bruni even returned to the ring to take a swing at the restaurant in an op-ed column titled "Dinner and Derangement," where he reported that the dishes had names in Latin and Greek, and were accompanied by flash cards. Bruni's waiter encouraged him to "make a memory" of the food. Bruni remembered better food.

"Romera demands notice mostly because it's such a florid demonstration of just how much culinary vanity we've encouraged and pretension we've unleashed," he said.

"I met Dr. Romera awhile back and thought he was remarkably self-obsessed," said food writer Bret Thorn, who once had to sit through an interminable lecture on the doctor's "gastronomical philosophy, his own epistemological notions of how we perceive taste, I think from some sort of gastro-historical perspective."

By the end of February, rumors were circling of the restaurant's imminent demise. The New York Post's Steve Cuozzo reported that the hotel was looking for a new chef to take over the space and Romera would be out as soon as they found one. At the time, however, a spokesperson for the hotel told Cuozzo the rumor was "absolutely false."

Romera's reservations line confirmed that the restaurant would close after tonight. In the smallest of silver linings, it appears the restaurant will at least have a full dining room for its last night on Earth, as the reservationist said there were no seats left available. She offered to call back if something opened up, but no one's holding their breath.