The River Café

The River Café has floated at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge since 1977, a barge-borne dining room with flowers on every table and the lower Manhattan skyline filling the windows like a mural that happens to be real. It was among the first restaurants to champion serious American cooking, and its kitchen alumni went on to define a generation of New York dining.

Dinner is a jacket-required, fixed-price affair, and it is priced like the landmark it is. But there may be no more complete special-occasion room in the city: the bridge overhead, the harbor traffic sliding past, a pianist playing as the skyline comes on. Some clichés survive because they keep being true.