If “Watch Hillary and Bill Clinton eat dinner” is on your bucket list, Grub’s advice is to go claim a seat with a good vantage point at Upland. Odds are impossibly good lately that you will see at least one of them. Or, had you been there last night, you may have spotted them both:
This is at least their third visit to the Californian-Italian hot spot in Gramercy. In fact, Hillary dined there just five weeks ago with Chelsea, son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky, and media mogul Barry Diller. When she walked in, the dining room apparently burst into impromptu applause.
Bill and Hillary’s visit last night appears to have been a subtler affair (maybe because people were like, Oh, weird, it’s the Clintons … again). Totally by coincidence, we’re sure, Upland’s chef Justin Smillie and owner Stephen Starr also both happened to be in the house:
Bill seems to have done the rounds solo with patrons and staff:
It’s also worth noting that this now means that every member of the Clinton and Obama families has visited Upland, in some cases several times: Sasha and Malia ate there with their dad in 2015, and he returned in 2017 with Michelle and Bono from U2. Please, nobody tell these people about Le Coucou, Starr’s other big chef-driven megahit in Manhattan. It’s already hard enough to get a table there.
