Photos: Inside The Monarch Room, Where Batcave Meets Mancave

Take a look around the flashy yet tasty restaurant and bar The Monarch Room, which opened in a dramatically renovated '30s-era warehouse on West 15th Street last month. (Technically that's Chelsea, but it feels very Meatpacking District.) Designed by the highly sought-after team Roman and Williams (The Standard High Line), the extremely monochromatic restaurant feels like a speakeasy dining club hidden away inside a forgotten tunnel, or maybe a bank vault, somewhere deep under Gotham. Bruce Wayne and the Penguin would both feel at home in one of the corner banquettes, and judging by the current clientele, so would Patrick Bateman. You won't be surprised to find that a Meatpacking District restaurant called The Monarch Room a little over-the-top, but for the most part Chef Michael Citarella delivers the goods.

Once you make your way past the small army of hosts and hostesses and bouncers and coat check attendants, the doors swing open into a big, buzzing room that, due to the color scheme, is packed with Technicolor humans in a black-and-white background. A 20-foot mahogany bar swirling with men on the make and skinny wastrels is found over on the right, and beyond that is the spacious dining room, decked out with upholstered banquettes under chandeliers resembling slide projector trays. Everything is grayscale except for a redemptive splash of color delivered by a large abstract painting halfway up the grand staircase, which leads to the bathrooms and private dining rooms.

The whole bustling endeavor is so emblematic of the "sexy" Meatpacking District that it might make your head spin if you're not accustomed to the exotic vapors of Panem's Capitol, but the people-watching is a hoot, and the food is legit, if our experience during a recent media preview is to be trusted. An oyster bar in the back seats ten, and from its shallow depths waiters produce towers of raw delicacies from the sea. Do try the Raw Scallops with cucumber, meyer lemon, and coriander seed—it comes elegantly plated like a living painting and tastes impeccably fresh, as does the Hamachi with radish, mustard oil, basil, as if the fish was retrieved from some unpolluted secret ocean set aside for the one percent.

The pork shoulder arrived as a Borg-like cube of pulled pork, fried on each side until the meat was dark brown and crunchy; the accompanying grits were creamy and smooth but could have benefited from more heat from the smoked paprika sauce. The menu's highlight may actually be found in the appetizer section, where the colorful Red Pepper Gnocchi hits all the right texture notes, from the pillowy, melt-in-your-mouth dumplings to the crunchy hazelnuts to the pleasantly bitter broccolini and the salty, stretchy stracciatella.

Christian Sanders of Evelyn Drinkery spearheads the cocktail program, and there seems to be a different special glass to match each of his fastidious concoctions, and the wine list features over 500 labels comprised of both prominent producers and rare vintages. All in all, it's very much a "scene," but Citarella, who was chef at Freeman's until a scathing NY Times review led to his dismissal, appears to have set his sights higher than other restaurants in the neighborhood, where the food can seem like an afterthought.

408 West 15th Street (between 9th & 10th Avenues) // (646) 790-7070

The Monarch Room Menu 2014

With Nell Casey