Ferris

Greg Proechel built Ferris around a specific tension: seasonal New American cooking filtered through Asian technique and flavour logic, served in a basement-level room inside NoMad's MADE Hotel. The combination of address and format could have worked against it, yet New York Magazine placed it in The Thousand Best, a shortlist that covers the full range of the city's serious dining rather than just its most visible rooms. The menu read as compact and deliberate. Dishes such as chicharrones with chicken liver mousse and Iberico pork collar with mushrooms and peppers showed a kitchen comfortable moving between registers — charcuterie-forward European technique alongside the kind of high-low instincts that defined a particular strand of New York cooking in the mid-2010s. An ibérico katsu sandwich placed that sensibility plainly on the plate. Proechel came to Ferris from Eleven Madison Park, Blanca, and Le Turtle, three kitchens that sit at different points on the formality spectrum and collectively explain how his cooking could hold that range without feeling scattered. The room itself was small and open-kitchened, which meant the counter between cook and guest was short in every sense. Hotel restaurants at this price tier ($$$, per NYC Tourism's own classification) often trade on lobby visibility; Ferris operated in the opposite direction, relying on the menu to pull diners down to the lower level rather than foot traffic to fill covers. That approach requires a kitchen with something specific to say, and by the evidence of the critical attention it received, this one did. Ferris is now closed. What it represented in NoMad during its run was a particular kind of New York restaurant: chef-driven, format-conscious, operating at a scale where every dish on a compact menu carries weight. For those tracking where Proechel's cooking goes next, the through-line from Eleven Madison Park through Blanca to Ferris is a useful map of how that sensibility developed.