Walking out of Tatiana into Lincoln Center, with all those lights and that beautiful architecture around us, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky we were to be having such a terrific night in New York City. I’m Harry Hayman, and I have been in the restaurant and hospitality business a long time, long enough to know how much has to go right for an evening like that. Food, drinks, atmosphere, service: usually one of them falls a little short. At Tatiana, Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant inside David Geffen Hall, none of them did. I put up a short post about the night, and this is the longer version: the room, the chef behind it, the ground it stands on, and what an old restaurant guy from Philadelphia took home.

A Night at Tatiana, Inside David Geffen Hall

Eater’s report on the opening says Tatiana opened for dinner on November 1, 2022, as Kwame Onwuachi’s first restaurant in New York. It sits at 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, inside David Geffen Hall, and the hall itself had reopened on October 8 of that year, so the dining room followed the building by less than a month.

The room is gorgeous, and it is elegant and sophisticated without making a guest feel the need to sit up straight and behave, which, as you can imagine, is important for me. Time Out’s review describes a dining room shrouded in golden chains that cascade from the ceiling, with flowers here and there and cloud shaped lights overhead that glow somewhere between blue and purple. Eater adds that the chef can change the color of those lights from an app on his phone, and that he picks purple, his favorite. Two of my photographs, the second and the last, carry that purple cast.

Then the food. We worked our way through the menu, and in my post I called the tortellini exceptional, the branzino dynamite and the cocktails maybe a little too delicious. Tatiana’s published menu lists one tortellini, an Egusi Tortellini with Dungeness crab and Nigerian red stew, and one branzino, fried and served with rice and peas. The cocktail list in my photograph runs from Always On Time to The Spicy Marg, with a Soursop Sour and a Tatiana Sidecar in between.

The Night in Ten Photographs

The post carries ten photographs, and I would walk you through them in the order they run. The first is the plaza at night, the fountain in the foreground and the tall arched windows of the Metropolitan Opera House lit behind it, with people crossing in front of both. The second steps inside, to a framed photograph of a figure caught mid leap in front of a crowd, hung on a wall of dark tile above a console and a bouquet of orange and red flowers. The third and fourth are the drinks: the cocktail list with a glass of something amber beside it, and the wines by the glass on a dark folder with gold cutlery on either side. Then come the plates. Avocado and tomato over a bright orange sauce. A red plate of crisp, herb flecked pieces with a lemon half and a dish of creamy white sauce. Head on prawns in a pale sauce beside triangles of toast. The tortellini in its red sauce. A whole fish, tail up, under a glossy orange sauce and chives, with a half lime beside it. The last frame is the company, peeking over the edge of the menu, which is where the night belongs. I called the company easily my favorite part of the whole evening, and I would not change a word of it.

Service That Looks Effortless

Here is what really got me, and it was not on the plate. Having spent so many years on the other side of the hospitality business, I notice the little things: how people greet you, how they read the table, whether they pay attention without hovering, whether they seem glad you came. The team at Tatiana was professional, knowledgeable, warm and genuinely hospitable, and nothing felt forced. They made the whole evening feel effortless, and anybody who has worked in this business knows how much work goes into making something look effortless. That is why I called the service out of control in my post, and why I meant it in the best possible way.

I come to that opinion with some history. I have been in the restaurant and hospitality business a long time, long enough to know how much work hides behind an easy evening. So when I say the people at Tatiana made it look easy, I know what I am looking at.

Danny Meyer, the New York restaurateur whose book Setting the Table NPR covered in 2006, drew the line better than I can. “Service is really a way to describe how well the product was delivered,” he said. “Hospitality describes how the recipient of that service feels when they’re getting the service.” Tatiana delivered the product, and delivered it well. What stayed with me is the second half, the way the evening felt while it happened. Eater quotes Chef Onwuachi saying he wanted Tatiana to be the kind of place where “people just feel comfortable, man.” That matches the evening I had.

Kwame Onwuachi and the Story Behind the Name

Tatiana is named for the chef’s older sister. The restaurant’s own story page says she looked after him while their mother worked as a chef in New York City, and it opens with the chef’s line, “This is my love letter to New York.” The same page lists what he grew up around in the Bronx and the old neighborhood of San Juan Hill: Italian bakeries, Chinese takeout, Caribbean roti shops, corner stores and local bodegas. That list explains a menu where an Italian pasta shape arrives in a Nigerian red stew. In an interview with The World’s 50 Best he put the cooking on four pillars of culture, Nigerian, Trinidadian, Creole from Louisiana and Jamaican, telling the story of all the cultures that made New York City what it is.

His own path is on the record. His publisher’s biography says he was raised in New York City, Nigeria and Louisiana, that his cooking began in his mother’s Bronx apartment, and that he trained at the Culinary Institute of America. Bravo lists him as a competitor on the thirteenth season of Top Chef, set in California. He went on to open Kith/Kin in Washington, D.C. The James Beard Foundation names him Rising Star Chef of the Year for 2019, the same year his memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef, written with Joshua David Stein, came out.

Then came the recognition for Tatiana. Penguin Random House’s note on the 2023 list reports that The New York Times put Tatiana first among the 100 best restaurants in New York City, and West Side Rag reported that it topped the 2024 list as well. On the 2025 list it ranked tenth, as West Side Rag reported. Time Out gave it five out of five stars in November 2025. I added my congratulations to Chef Onwuachi and the entire team in my post, and I am glad to do it again here.

Lincoln Center and the Ground Under the Plaza

The plaza I crossed on the way out is Josie Robertson Plaza. Lincoln Center calls it the gateway to the campus, with David Geffen Hall, the David H. Koch Theater and the Metropolitan Opera House facing onto the square, and says the landmark Revson Fountain at its center displays choreographed water shows daily that can shoot up to 40 feet high. The hall itself was redone in a $550 million overhaul. Playbill lists the design team: Diamond Schmitt Architects on the theater and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects on the public spaces. Lincoln Center says the new hall was completed two years early.

Chef Onwuachi has said what he saw when he looked at that land. Describing his pitch to Lincoln Center, he told The World’s 50 Best: “The location used to be San Juan Hill, and the Afro Caribbean community was pushed out so the Lincoln Center could be built. So I said, ‘I’m going to put a restaurant here that would be here regardless of whether y’all were here or not.‘” Lincoln Center tells that history itself on its Legacies of San Juan Hill page, which says the Lincoln Square Development Plan of the 1950s displaced more than 7,000 families and 800 businesses and replaced them with superblocks, Lincoln Center among them. When the renovated hall reopened, WNYC reported, it did so with performances of a new work by Etienne Charles, “San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” which Lincoln Center commissioned.

Culture is infrastructure, and so is the question of who gets to belong inside it. A chef whose upbringing was rooted in and around that neighborhood now cooks inside the building, a guest from Philadelphia walks out into those lights feeling lucky, and the institution tells the story itself.

What Philadelphia Can Take From a Night Like This

Visit Philadelphia’s 2025 annual report counts 44 million visitors to the five county region, about $8 billion in visitor spending and about 187,000 hospitality related jobs, with about 99,000 of those jobs in Philadelphia County alone. The report credits the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the jobs figure. Behind each of those jobs is somebody at a door, a bar or a table deciding whether a stranger feels expected.

Nothing I saw at Tatiana needs a Lincoln Center budget. Greeting people properly, reading a table, staying close without hovering, seeming glad that somebody walked in: that is training, scheduling and a manager who protects a server’s attention. Philadelphia’s best rooms already know it. The work is making it the habit of the whole city, and treating the people who do it as the craftspeople they are. I keep saying that culture is infrastructure, and a dining room that makes a guest feel exactly where they are supposed to be belongs on that list.

I ended my post by asking whether I would go back, and answered in a heartbeat. Then I discovered, mid sentence, that we were apparently going back tomorrow. I did not argue.

Tatiana at Lincoln Center and Service That Looks Effortless