After 34 Years, Gotham Bar and Grill Has a New Head Chef

Alfred Portale, the chef whose name has been synonymous for 34 years with Gotham Bar and Grill, a mainstay near Union Square, is no longer in the kitchen there. He has been replaced as executive chef by Victoria Blamey, who rose to prominence as the executive chef at Chumley’s, in the West Village, from 2016 to 2017.

Mr. Portale, who plans to open his own restaurant, Portale, this fall in Chelsea, left the job several weeks ago, after his business partners — Jerome Kretchmer, Jeff Bliss, Robert Rathe and Richard Rathe — decided to change the direction of the restaurant.

Mr. Portale, 65, took charge of the kitchen in 1985, a year after Gotham opened, and remains a partner. In an interview on Tuesday, he said that discussions about updating the restaurant began a few years ago. “At first I was involved in the process,” Mr. Portale said. “But finally, it did not happen the way I would have liked it to.”

He said he informed his partners in January that he had signed a lease for the new restaurant, hoping that would give him time to train a new chef for Gotham. But then the search for a replacement kicked into high gear, he said, and his partners shut him out of the process.

Mr. Kretchmer, one of the partners, said, “We wanted to make some changes, and Alfred was a little uncomfortable with the changes we wanted. Also Alfred opening another restaurant was not consistent with what we wanted to do.”

It’s not uncommon for a prominent chef to run more than one restaurant. Mr. Portale himself once ran Gotham Steak in Miami Beach.

Still, Mr. Kretchmer said that “the whole thing was amicable — there are no hard feelings.” The partners plan to close briefly in August to make some cosmetic changes to the restaurant. “It will have a different future,” he said. “We’re still working out the details.”

Using an employment recruiter, the partners interviewed a number of chefs before choosing Ms. Blamey, 39. A native of Santiago, Chile, who worked at restaurants in Spain and Australia before coming to New York for stints at Corton, Atera, Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria and Upland. Her work at the renovated Chumley’s drew a two-star review from Pete Wells of The New York Times.

“Chumley’s is emphatically worth going to,” he wrote, “as long as Ms. Blamey remains content to work in that kitchen.”

Ms. Blamey, who has been cooking in pop-ups since leaving Chumley’s, is developing her menu gradually. She said she expected to keep Gotham’s steak and caviar services when the new menu debuts in September.

She also said she wanted to add some multiculturalism to the fare. The restaurant has long been known for Mr. Portale’s often trendsetting new-American cuisine, which Sam Sifton awarded three stars in a 2011 review in The Times.

“This is a multicultural city, so the menu will be a melting pot,” she said. “Maybe some kind of Indian sauce. Or whatever chiles I see in the market.”

Mr. Portale, asked what Gotham Bar and Grill would be like without him, said, “I’ve gotten used to the idea, but most people would find it shocking that I’m no longer there.”

Gotham Bar and Grill, 12 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village, gothambarandgrill.com.