![]() ![]() Aston to open a restaurant with them after tasting his New American fare, but that’s one area in which he doesn’t need his friends. He considers Calliope his “home,” with his mission to make his friends comfortable. “They’re exactly the type of people that I’d like to have because they’re neighborhood people, people who eat out a lot and enjoy food.” He says he knows about 90 percent of his clientele and spends his shifts bouncing from the kitchen to the dining room to check in with his customers. “She has such a fun crowd of people,” Mr. “I walk in, run into friends, say a quick hello, maybe have a drink at the bar, settle into a quiet dinner.” “It’s like Mortimers or Swifty’s,” she said. She said that she and her husband eat at Calliope about four times a week. Aston, who admitted that she “can’t boil water,” has become the restaurant’s unofficial publicist. Aston did get an item planted in the June issue of the magazine Avenue. While it has yet to be reviewed by any major New York publications, Mrs. Dunne alluded, Calliope is more about the “social population” than the food. “He has to be after a certain segment of the social population, and I think young Matt is going to do that.”Īs Mr. Dunne, who said he liked the food and people at Calliope so much that he plans to return soon. “A restaurateur can’t just open a restaurant,” added Mr. It had a nice feel, that place, and I think it’s great that someone’s son went through cooking school.” (“Someone” as in a person of high social status.) “I hope it turns out to be a hangout for him and his buddies. ![]() Dunne, a Swifty’s regular, said Calliope felt “clubhouse-y,” noting, “That’s a hard thing to achieve. Vanderbilt, Steven Schwarzman and Tony Randall) and was in fact picked up by the New York Post ‘s Neal Travis. Aston, where the guest list read like a Suzy item (Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Duane Hampton, Rick and Kathy Hilton, Claudia Cohen, Jonathan Farkas and Somers White, Cece Cord, Ms. So while hundreds of restaurants of Calliope’s size and caliber struggle, Calliope itself is doing just fine, fattening up the Boardmans,Birches and Guthries who are helping to spread the word: Come eat at one of our kind’s charming little restaurant.ĭominick Dunne attended an early tasting dinner hosted by Dr. Aston and his brothers, as well as for their moneyed parents. Aston’s connected family, Calliope has emerged as a starter Swifty’s for Upper East Side-bred twentysomethings who went to the Buckley School or St. Aston’s stepmother, Muffie Potter Aston, chairs coveted committees like the New York City Ballet, and his brother Jay, 26, is a money manager about town known for dating up-and-coming society hotties like Shoshanna Lonstein. Sherrell Aston, the chairman of the plastic surgery department at Manhattan’s Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital and the man behind some of the pertest noses on the Upper East Side. Aston, a spunky brunette with big, emerald eyes, is the son of Dr. But inside, basking in the glow of the peach walls, high-society diners like Wendy Vanderbilt nibbled on the roast Long Island duck in a cassis-plum sauce prepared by Matt Aston, 29, Calliope’s executive chef and co-owner. From the outside, the seven-month-old restaurant on 81st Street and Third Avenue looked as nondescript as its neighbors. On Christmas Eve, when many of the bland restaurants cluttering Third Avenue from 75th to 85th streets had closed their barren dining rooms, Calliope was brimming with lockjawed cheer. ![]()
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