Grill Room Visited 4/27/2011 2.75 Forks

Grill Room World Financial Ctr, 225 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281

If you happen to work in the World Financial Center, you know that there is a serious dearth of good food.  Hopefully that will all change soon as the weather gets nicer, there are more food carts moving in outside and there are rumors of a Shake Shack and Blue Smoke opening across the street.  But in the meantime, if you want to have a "nice" sit down meal your choices are limited to the Grill Room or PJ Clarke's.  Strangely enough, I've never eaten at the Grill Room before.

I will give high scores of the setting and ambiance.  It has almost floor to ceiling windows that over look the river and on a nice day it's really a gorgeous view.  I went there for a client lunch, so I was excited to not feel restricted budget wise.  The menu is your usual American style food but that's slightly higher end.  They have soups, burgers, and sandwiches but then they also have pork chops, steak, fish fillets and fancy pastas. A friend of mine had told me that the fish was good (and in the end I probably should have listened to her) but I'm always a sucker for a good sandwich during lunch so I opted for the salmon sandwich ($16).  They didn't ask me how I liked my fish but I had assumed that any good restaurant would serve it medium rare.  I usually love fish sandwiches and the best ones I've had involve thick cuts of fish (almost steak-like).  So when this sandwich came out I was disappointed.  The actual piece of salmon was extremely thin and overcooked.  It came on a focaccia bread that was nice and soft but it was way too big for the piece of fish.  I felt like I barely had any fish and in the end was eating something that was closer to a tomato and lettuce sandwich.  There was a nice basil spread inside the bread and I would have liked more of it.  Given that the fillet of fish was pretty thin, there was no need to put 2 giant leaves of lettuce the size of my head on top of the fish.  The fries were just ok, they were cooked with the skin on it and had that overcooked style to it that I'm not a huge fan of.  The girl next to me had gotten the tuna steak and it was definitely thick cut and looked pretty decent.  All in all, I wasn't thrilled with my food but when you consider what the other dining options are in the WFC it's not that terrible of a place.  But if it wasn't for the business they get from the employees in the building I'm not sure that they would last very long.