The Morgan Dining Room

Some eateries treat brunch and lunch like practice runs for dinner service, but at the Morgan Dining Room, midday feasting is the main event—and it shows. The restaurant, set in the gorgeous Morgan Library & Museum, is located in the same building as three Gutenberg Bibles, several original Mozart scores and other priceless works. It focuses, not surprisingly, on brunch and lunch; dinner is only available on Fridays. Regardless of when you go, you’ll feel as if you’ve arrived for the most important meal of the day: An impeccably dressed host seats you in the Morgan family’s original dining room—a small, sparely appointed red and white chamber with soaring ceilings. Then the attentive staff takes over; at brunch, delivering bottomless cups of coffee and endless refills of salt-crusted olive bread and mini baguettes—a free Continental breakfast before the meal even begins. The kitchen sends out tasty, sophisticated dishes to go with your tangerine mimosa or stiff Bloody Mary: try the eggs Benedict with crisp, panini-pressed English muffins, Virginia ham and truffled hollandaise or the lightly dressed lobster salad of soft butter lettuce tossed with tender claws, juicy grapefruit segments and crunchy slivers of jicama. When the server asks if you’ll be having dessert, say yes: The sampler platter offers little tastes of peach cobbler, panna cotta and other treats you’ll want to upsize next time.