The Dishes — and Drinks — You’ll Want to Order at Sloane’s

Truffled Mozzarella in Carrozza

Alex Stupak: Obviously, the room is a stunner. It really is a hidden gem of a bar, but at the end of the day I still love bar food to be bar food. Whether I’m drinking the fanciest cocktail on earth or I’m in a dive bar, it’s what I want.

Sloane is a person’s name, so I kind of imagined it as a fictitious person. I tried to give them their own made-up backstory: I feel like this person was born and raised in Manhattan. I think this person ate at places like Le Bernardin when they were eight years old, and ordered a grilled cheese and got it. So, the whole idea really came from the idea of, well, “How do we serve a grilled cheese sandwich here?”

The idea here is that we take two slices of soft white bread, and apart from that, we take a mixture of fresh mozzarella and dry mozzarella. We blitz that with a whole load of black truffle and we put that cheese mixture in between the two slices of bread. Then we crimp it together with the blunt side of a ring cutter so it kind of becomes like a very posh Uncrustable.

By encapsulating cheese in bread, it’s a grilled cheese, but it just makes it a lot more elegant. It’s coated in seasoned breadcrumbs and fried in clarified butter, and it gets loads and loads of grated Pecorino Romano cheese on top, served with vodka sauce.

Jacques Picard Les Bénis Blanc de Blancs

Jenny Willing: No one else has vodka sauce in gold-plated china, right? It’s the ultimate dipping receptacle.

As Alex said, we’re a cocktail bar at heart, but I think it would be doing such a disservice not to talk about our amazing wine list. We wanted it to be Champagne heavy. It completely fits within the space, which is so expressive and indulgent, but also interesting.

Michaël Engelmann, the master sommelier, was our consultant on this. He was previously at The Modern and has the most impeccable palate ever. He’s curated a list that has your iconic Champagne houses, whilst always trying to go for an interesting cuvée or vintage with smaller producers, some of which have just hit the New York market.

For me, truffled mozzarella and vodka sauce is just perfect with a bottle of baller Champagne. My favorite one on the list is Jacques Piccard, a blanc de blancs. It’s this incredibly layered, rich oaky Champagne with this oxidative backbone and an amazing crisp minerality. It’s like the perfectly balanced Champagne, and it feels so fitting to be sitting in front of a gilded bar drinking this super interesting, super classic independent Champagne with your friends.

Cottage Fries

Stupak: We obviously wanted French fries here. There’s an ounce of a caviar supplement option on this, and I like the idea of having a $16 dish with a $160 option, but I also like that it truly is optional, and you don’t need the supplement to make it good. That’s very important for me.

I like cottage fries because they’re half crisp and half soft. We make our own ranch dressing, but we decided to deconstruct it a bit: We take the ranch dressing and spread it out on the plate. It gets garnished with lemon zest, Aleppo pepper, and fines herbs are placed carefully on it. There’s chive and cut parsley, chervil, and tarragon. The idea is that you can scoop up the ranch dressing and place it on the cottage fry as if it were a blini.

Sloane’s Dirty Martini

Willing: I’m gonna say that this is almost the better version of a New York Happy Meal. Everyone else is drinking martinis with their French fries, and we have olive leaf dirty martinis and cottage fries and caviar.

This one was a no-brainer. I would pair this with our Sloane’s dirty martini. We’re bucking the trend of the New York vodka martini, and we’re doing something a little bit more elegant, and a little bit more interesting.

It’s a blend of two gins; London dry gives it this classic backbone, but we also have this amazing olive leaf gin from Australia. It almost tastes a little bit like a dirty martini on its own. It just creates this textural, bright, interesting, savory martini, but without this big, huge punch of brine and salinity that overpowers everything. You can go for caviar olives in the martini, too.

Chicken Nuggets

Stupak: I’ve been a chef for many years now, but the feedback that I’ve gotten on this dish is making me feel like I’ve reached the culinary apex of my career. We actually worked really hard to approximate something like a true fast food or McDonald’s-style chicken nugget, which was not easy. The mixture itself is 40% dark meat chicken, 40% white meat chicken, and 20% chicken skin that’s all ground together and coarsely emulsified. It’s seasoned with white pepper and shio koji. You have to form that into little patties and freeze it, and then you have to, basically, make tempura the wrong way, so it’s not quite as light. We roll them in this approximation of that batter, fry them, and then serve them with three dipping sauces: barbecue, sweet and sour, and Sichaun.

The Sichuan sauce is a joke. Are you into “Rick and Morty”? There’s that whole episode about the discontinued Szechuan sauce [from McDonald’s]. I started looking up recipes for that sauce that had this cult following, and I didn’t really think they were all that great, to be honest with you. So, we started looking for actual Sichuan recipes. It’s very heady, it’s very complex. It’s super spicy. Our sweet and sour sauce is made with yellow mustard, like French’s, and fresh pineapple purée, but there’s just a touch of passion fruit juice in there as well, and also a little bit of yuzu. The barbecue sauce is a really good, straightforward recipe that has a shot of bourbon in it.

These are immediately the No. 1 order. It’s a six-piece order. People are ordering them in multiples, so it’s like we’re a chicken nugget restaurant. I think I’ve made 750 in the last two days. It’s the apex of my career. I’ve done three-star Michelin, whatever. This is it. It’s all downhill after this.

Paper Plane

Willing: [The nuggets] are annoyingly good, though. I don’t know why it’s so good. It just is so good. Chicken nuggets are like the quintessential bar snack for me. It’s savory, salty, explorative, delicious, and fun.

I think the Paper Plane for me is a no-brainer. All of our cocktails at Sloane’s are made with amazingly high-quality ingredients, and they’re riffs on classics, but with a fun, explorative house twist.

We’re not tripping over ourselves and making complexity for the sake of complexity, which I think a lot of cocktail bars do. We just want to make really amazing, delicious drinks with amazing ingredients. So, the Paper Plane is not made with bourbon, but it has mezcal, and it’s super zippy, and it’s just the right amount. It’s like a mezcal sour with a bit of smoke, some salinity, and a bit of fruit. It goes so perfectly with the passion fruit in the sauce as well. It’s just fun, and fresh.

Sloane’s is open Sunday through Wednesday from 5 p.m. until midnight, and Thursday through Saturday from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m.

Ellie Plass is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Follow her on Instagram and X. Follow Resy, too.