Frog Club

Is Frog Club a gag?

With its Tutti Frutti sherbet sundae extruded like spaghetti and $1,000 option to kiss the chef, it's obvious the secretive West Village restaurant is not entirely serious. Frog Club wants you to have a good time, and there is some fun to be had. But even if the place winks heavily while it cosplays Old New York for the bicoastal set, Frog Club is ultimately another sceney downtown restaurant where the main appeal is exclusivity. If you care about food, the joke is on you.

Channeling the speakeasy spirit of the previous tenant Chumley’s, Frog Club has no signage, no phone, and no info on its website. A deadpan doorperson guards the entrance, behind which a twilight-dark space unfolds across two small rooms with maroon carpets, velvet booths, and cartoonish murals of Jazz Age frogs. Between trips to the bar to collect rounds of cosmos, servers in white chore coats stab at a fireplace with a metal poker, while Barry White and the Village People egg them on. We'd show you pictures if we could.

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

Photos are verboten. A very big no no. (The person at the door places stickers over the cameras of your phone.) But for a spot that aspires to be hush hush, Frog didn’t make a quiet entrance. Early publicity swirling around LA it-spot Horses brought up accusations of felicide, and a set of stringent house rules caused further grumbling. No touching the memorabilia, no lying about your birthday, no cancelling a reservation more than thrice.

With so many regulations, it’s fair to expect a memorable meal. You’ll get one, but for the wrong reasons. Emaciated chicken wings leave you picking at bones that look as if they were donated by sparrows, and shrimp scampi arrives with a small pyramid of rice that tastes like it came out of a box. Not to be outdone, a $27 spinach soufflé quickly deflates into a gummy frittata the color of a shrink-wrapped pistachio muffin, and a green pepper dip sports six melancholy baby carrots.

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

photo credit: Bryan Kim

Seeing as how Frog Club’s menu isn’t huge—14 dishes, plus any specials—these misses hit hard. But not all is lost. Lobster pierogies dissolve in your mouth like buttery time-release capsules, and the practically weightless banana chiffon pie is a daydream in a daydream, with a supremely crumbly crust.

There’s promise at Frog Club. In the pie, the pierogies, the cocktail menus shaped like Grand Marnier bottles, and the loud, lively dining room, where plates and paintings hang from the ceiling. This place checks many of the boxes of a cool, classic, New Yorky night out, but it skips the most important one. The restaurant needs an additional house rule: No food that tastes like it’s making fun of you.