Fat Guy

One of my many objections to Frank Bruni's review is that he presents this straw man of an unacknowledged restaurant. Yet every time I've been to Szechuan Gourmet -- at least 10 times before he reviewed it -- it has been completely packed. Indeed, for the past almost-a-year (we started this in November or December of 2007), my agent and I have been eating there about once a month together and complaining about how packed it is at lunchtime. We have taken to coming either very early or very late -- because if you arrive at 12:30 or 1pm you can easily get stuck waiting half an hour. If I didn't find the practice so annoying I'd quote from our emails (no mention of wolverine, though). Dinner has required reservations at least since I started going. There has also been plenty of online commentary on the restaurant over the past year. I imagine that's how Bruni got to Szechuan Gourmet, though it's also very close to the New York Times's offices, so anybody there could have brought him. But either way I think it's incredible that he's positioned this review as a discovery when it was already hard to get in and that he has the temerity to lecture the foodie community about its shortcomings and motives when plenty of people in the foodie community had already embraced the place. (Where is this hypothetical foodie who's saying it's not cool to go to Szechuan Gourmet because it's in Manhattan?). At least with Momofuku Ssam Bar he had the sense to acknowledge that he was simply reporting a trend. Another problem I had with the review is that his appreciation of Sichuan cuisine comes down to a one-dimensional experience of spice. Sure, Sichuan food is on the whole spicy -- we get it -- but there's so much more to it than that. He could have at least taken a Chinese-food authority there with him on one visit in order to be able to pretend he knew what he was talking about. He also misses some of the best dishes (though he grasps a few), particularly the razor clams (dish number 1, even, and a good example of a dish that, while spicy, isn't really about the spice). He protests that there are more than 100 dishes on the menu but many of those are variants of one another (X protein with Y vegetable) and others are Chinese-American stuff that doesn't need to be ordered. Once you adjust downwards for that you get a situation where, with the unlimited budget of the Times and four or five visits with groups of four and six people, you can easily go through all the dishes. That's what Bruni could have contributed to the conversation. Not exactly related to the Bruni review, though he does refer to it repeatedly, I went to Spicy & Tasty in Flushing last night -- my first opportunity for a close-in-time comparison to Szechuan Gourmet. I believe Szechuan Gourmet is much better than Spicy & Tasty. The subset of dishes that we ordered where direct comparison was possible (dan dan noodles, Sichuan wontons, the "in fresh hot pepper" dishes that roughly correspond to the "with Napa" dishes, the shredded potatoes that Bruni doesn't seem to realize are common on Sichuan menus) were superior at Szechuan Gourmet.

There's a 9" santoku sold under the Anolon brand name. I have no idea who actually makes it or what its specifications are. The nice thing is that it's cheap. So you could get him that and a chef's knife, so once he gets tired of the santoku shape he'll still have something to remember you by.

That was my understanding as well: that the only difference between sc and snc was whether the service was included in the menu prices or added to the total at the end. But the underlying question remains: are there actually still any snc restaurants in France?

All the English-language guidebooks I've seen still say there's such a thing as s.n.c. in France but who knows if they're all just repeating one another. I'd be interested in specific examples of restaurants still engaging in the practice, if they really exist. I'm also wondering if there was a legislative change or anything like that, perhaps around the time of the adoption of the Euro. The Rough Guide to the Dordogne & the Lot (2004): "Very occasionally you'll see service non compris (snc) or servis en sus, which means that it's up to you . . ." The Rough Guide to the Pyrenees (2004): "Service non compris, snc or servis en sus means that it isn't and you need to allow for an additional fifteen percent." Rick Steves' France (2007): "In the rare case where service is not included (the menu would state service non compris or snc), a 15 percent tip is appropriate."

Just to be clear, there is a contradiction between the information on the phone message and the information on the website. The website notes that an abbreviated late-night menu is available, but the phone message indicates beverages only. An actual scouting report from a Sun-Wed after midnight, or at least an answer from a manager at Ssam Bar, would be needed to resolve the ambiguity. In other news, there's now a special on offer: stone bass. More commonly known as wreckfish (though stone bass sounds more appetizing), this is my new favorite fish. Think swordfish but with the succulence and moistness of cod. The cut they're preparing is about the size and shape of a filet mignon, served over corn and a bunch of other stuff. A new (to me) menu item is also excellent: shrimp and watermelon. A generous helping of raw Maine sweet shrimp in a watermelon broth with some chunks of watermelon, plus the little chickpea-flour pellets that I'm pretty sure used to be with the squid. The whole dish has an Indian-ish flavor profile.

I think it's amazing and unexpected that there's so much variation in whiskey-and-Coke blends. I would have loudly proclaimed, before reading here, that it's a total waste to use a better whiskey in this application -- I'd have said the Coke makes them all taste the same. Now I know it's Old Grand-Dad 114 all the way. I wonder if this can be expanded upon to include other cocktails. I've often heard it said that, for example, good tequila is wasted in a Margarita. But in drinking Margaritas made with better and worse tequilas, I think I've noticed plenty of differences -- albeit never in a systematic tasting format.

He didn't include Cut or Mozza because he covered them in other pieces long before writing this one -- so he was working with what was left. But I think overall he came up with a pretty good list, or at least as good a list as you'd get through basic online research. What's interesting to me is how little insight he gained despite extensive dining and travel on the Times's dime. That, to me, is perhaps Bruni's greatest flaw: when it comes to insight, he's a bad investment. I mean, when you think about the fact that he's probably spending something in the neighborhood of $200,000 a year of the Times's money, it's amazing how little he comes up with in the way of insight. You'd think, dining out 10 times a week at the best restaurants in New York (as well as the rest of the country and world), he'd have unparalleled deep insight. There may be nobody else in the world eating in such a systematic way. But the most I can say in his favor is that 1- he has gotten good, after a very slow start, at figuring out which restaurants are good and awarding them a credible number of stars in maybe 9/10 cases lately; 2- he's prolific and highly motivated (his output is amazing when you consider the online material as well as the print material he produces, all while dining out so often); 3- he's a gifted writer; and 4- like many gifted writers, he notices a lot about his experiences and he's able to milk those details for all they're worth.

Bouley is probably the most ambitious restaurant that routinely stays open late. Yes, Bouley, the regular restaurant, not the casual Upstairs offshoot. Even on a Monday night, Bouley will accept an 11:15 or 11:30pm reservation. Technically, 11:30pm is their latest reservation but I've seen people come in later and I've seen people eating there until well after 2am. In the restaurant's heyday, 4am. I believe the Spotted Pig is open until 2am every day, though I've never personally been there late so I don't know what's offered or when the actual ordering cutoff is. Does everybody feel that the notes above make clear that there are several Blue Ribbon restaurants, with varying hours? I heartily agree with the premise of this topic: it's easy to find places that 1- are open late but only on weekends especially if you count Thursday night as a weekend night, and 2- say they're open late but actually stop serving food earlier or go to a very abbreviated menu. One area also worth exploring is wine bars. I noticed 'inoteca and Bar Veloce listed above without objection, so I assume if a wine bar offers serious-enough food it's okay to list here. And if Bar Veloce is eligible, well, that's not a terribly high bar to clear. One place I think is quite good but has had little attention is Solex, open every day until 2am. Casellula goes until 2am every day and Cavatappo and Xai Xai go until midnight on the weekdays -- that whole stretch of Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen is a good late-night venue on weeknights because of all the post-theater foot traffic. Many of those places start filling up at 10:30-11pm. Bar Milano? I'm not sure of its exact closing times, though. You'll also see, in the Lincoln Center area, several places that have fluid closing times based on when the opera lets out or whatever. Operas can run long and often get out after 11pm -- an 8pm start for a 3+ hour opera is not unusual even Monday-Wednesday. So while some places around there might claim to close at 11pm, they also might not want to turn away a wave of customers getting out of the Met at 11:05pm. So it's worth a call over to those places (e.g., Picholine, Bar Boulud) on any given day to see what they're really doing. I'm not sure what the justification is for excluding Chinese but including Japanese restaurants, except maybe that Japanese restaurants tend to be more expensive and have smaller portions. Like I believe A Fan Ti in Flushing goes until 1am every day, and I'd characterize it as ambitious. Also, as a group, Korean restaurants tend to be open late -- many are open 24 hours -- and most offer a range of cuisine including some that is more ambitious than the average of what's being served at the restaurants listed on this topic.

I think I recall, in the 1990s, encountering menus in France, especially in the Jura region, that had "service non compris" or "s.n.c" written on their menus. Does this practice still exist, or are all restaurants in France now s.c.?

While I think he was a Johnny-come-lately on Chang -- mostly because Chang was at first considered part of the $25-and-Under beat, so that's not exactly Bruni's fault -- I think one thing I'd say in favor of Bruni is that he comes pretty close to getting the whole "new paradigm" thing. Closer than any other critic, certainly. But those big issues can easily be dealt with in Critic's Notebook essays. Unfortunately, Bruni mostly uses the Critic's Notebook pieces to lecture about the minutiae he obsesses about in his regular reviews: patronizing language used by servers, bathroom issues, the egos of chefs, plus various travel and other pieces. He does occasionally comment on real issues of criticism, but rarely. The thing is, it's not a question of "what are the big issues out there?" or of general trendspotting. It's a question of identifying the big issues that make sense to discuss in the context of a given review, as Ruth Reichl did with her Da Silvano review and as Frank Bruni did in neither his Da Silvano review nor his Scarpetta review. So, for example there are many, many big issues regarding sushi. There have recently been two full-length, thoughtful books (Corson and Issenberg) published about sushi, as well as various related books (Morimoto) and tons of articles. And, despite the spread of sushi to every corner of America, American sushi knowledge remains quite low (ditto for Italian cuisine). Ruth Reichl or another real critic would try to use her occasional reviews of sushi restaurants (or Italian restaurants) to move the ball forward on discussing whatever key general points pertain to a given review. Bruni does little if any of that -- he just anchors his reviews by obsessing about whatever strikes his fancy. And because he writes well and is a good entertainer he gets away with it.

The s.c. system (as used widely in France and in a few US restaurants) is essentially a profit-sharing mechanism: when the restaurant's gross is higher, the servers get more, and vice-versa. It sounds like in Japan there's nothing like that -- that it's a purely seniority-based system of compensation. Is that correct?

I've had one tip rejected in the US, ever. It was not at a restaurant, though. It was at a furniture place. A guy helped us load a piece of furniture into our car and I tried to give him a couple of dollars. He said they had a no-tipping policy and that his hourly wage was correspondingly higher than the norm in order to reflect that.

Here's my question: Do restaurants in Japan offer any kind of profit sharing or performance bonuses to their servers at all?

I haven't been to France in a while, so maybe this has now been standardized, but in the 1990s when I was spending time there most every year we encountered both "service compris" and "service non compris." In both cases, service would be part of the bill, but in the latter case it was added to the total, rather than assumed as part of the printed menu prices. So in the s.n.c. places (which seemed to be especially common in the border regions) one still had to do some arithmetic to project the final bill. All the finer restaurants, however, were s.c.

Serious critics offer depth and insight no matter what they're reviewing. For example, a review of any sushi restaurant presents an opportunity to discuss sushi in general -- a subject many readers could benefit from knowing more about. There's so much information on that subject, it can support dozens of reviews in that category. And the same reviews can easily cover all the relevant consumer issues. It's a false dichotomy to imply that it's not possible to combine deep analysis and straight reviewing, or that criticism and reviewing can't happen simultaneously, if anybody is implying that. For example, in Ruth Reichl's review of Blue Ribbon Sushi, she takes the opportunity to discuss Blue Ribbon Sushi -- which is just about the epitome of the opposite of a restaurant supporting any sort of deep analysis of its operations as such -- in the context of the decline of formality in the American sushi culture, or rather the Americanization of the sushi culture. I think she also follows that pattern, successfully, with Da Silvano. Again, not a terribly serious restaurant but she's able to craft a serious piece of criticism by first addressing the higher-altitude issues and definitions, then positioning the restaurant within that context. Bruni rarely if ever does this. When he does begin with general discussion, my take on it is that it tends to be about minor trends or whatever minutiae he happens to notice and try to turn into a hook for a review.

At Per Se, French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's and Chez Panisse service is included in the bill (as in the better restaurants in France). You're certainly not expected to tip, though it's not forbidden.

Christopher, I do think you may be missing Marc's point. I think he's talking about learning as in being educated, not as in finding out 1- simple service-oriented information (a given restaurant has opened), or 2- Bruni's personal opinions (the restaurant is good). An example of learning something -- in the education sense -- might be learning that it's better to sit at a sushi bar than at a table (or that might be mentioned as a general rule in a review of a restaurant that's an exception). Back to the more general points, it's difficult for me to compare what I've personally learned from Ruth Reichl (a lot) and from Frank Bruni (nothing) in a meaningful way because she wrote from 1993 to 1999. That's the period during which I was just learning about fine dining, and her reviews were full of information that, to me, was new. Whereas, by the time Frank Bruni came on the scene, I had much more personal experience and knowledge. In addition, it was a different time on America's gourmet learning curve as well as in the development of both ethnic and creative cuisines. Nonetheless, I think if you control for the variables what you find is that Ruth Reichl's reviews are superior in terms of their educational content. Nathan mentioned that he liked Frank Bruni's review of Da Silvano better than Ruth Reichl's because it "gives you a better sense of what it's like to eat at Da Silvano....which is the point of a restaurant review." I disagree with both halves of that statement, but the latter clause is the one I find particularly disagreeable. Criticism is not primarily about reporting on what something is like. It's about qualitative evaluation of the subject, whether the subject is a book, a restaurant or a performance. Perhaps in writing about cars the idea is to describe how the car drives, but that's low-level consumer reporting not anything approaching arts criticism. In that regard, I think Bruni's reviews are more like consumer reporting or, actually, more like a blog or personal-journal body of work. Whereas Ruth Reichl's criticism is more like traditional literary and arts criticism. So I would expect the former to be more detailed on the first-person experiential aspect of things (though Ruth Reichl did that well too, when appropriate, and sometimes too often) but I strongly prefer the latter and think it's a superior approach. To circle back to the much-maligned statements by Ruth Reichl that Italian food is about simplicity etc., I think she's right on. Sure, this piece of information is well known by many people who post here. But that doesn't make it trite. Indeed, I believe she has correctly identified the key issue in Italian cuisine. I find myself explaining that exact same thing to people all the time. So does, I'm guessing, Sam Kinsey. So what she has done is what a critic is supposed to do: she's started out by talking about an important general aspect of the field in which she writes, and then she has illustrated it in a review of a specific venue. You can see this in plenty of her reviews, and in few if any of Frank Bruni's.

"Assertive" is a worthy flavor adjective, whereas the description "tasted like pet food" is trite even by the standards of CitySearch reader comments. And in books, for even longer. ← So if I catch either of you repeating the notion, any time post-1998, that Italian cuisine is ingredient-driven, minimalist, etc., it's okay for me to label those statements as trite? If so, I think I have an appointment with the eG Forums search engine. Seriously, though, Reichl is not making a claim to originality any more than a critic explaining a basic point in any other field is making a claim to originality. She's explaining a tradition and she's explaining it in an accurate distillation. In other words she's doing her job well.

I don't think her comments are trite under any circumstances. They're still worth repeating, even today, but especially needed to be said as often as possible a decade ago. I think her summary of the Italian culinary aesthetic is accurate and helpful in explaining the problem she's addressing. Again, as has been pointed out already, the audience for New York Times restaurant reviews is a general readership. Educated in general, but not necessarily an all-gourmet audience. The basics are appropriate for such an audience.

Just to put some dates on all this: - The Ruth Reichl review ran in 1998 - Babbo opened in 1998 - The first episodes of Molto Mario aired on the Food Network in 1997 So I hardly think Reichl was writing in post-Molto Mario America, where everybody allegedly knows the basics about Italian cuisine. She was teaching, in a way appropriate to her time and place. Bruni, for his part, is teaching pretty much nothing. In addition, I think Reichl's teachings from 1998 are still not well understood outside of the gourmet community. Outside of a few dozen top restaurants, the Italian-restaurant cuisine that's popular in America today is just as bad as in 1998 -- probably worse when you consider the rise of Olive Garden etc. That's what Americans think Italian food is. So I think Reichl's statements are as true today as they were a decade ago.

Just checking. I completely disagree with those claims, which are actually one claim.

There is no CENYC Greenmarket anywhere near East 67th Street, according to the website.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Reichl has both traveled extensively in Italy and familiarized herself with the written sources. Bruni has done the former (we assume he got out of Rome on occasion) but probably not the latter. My point was not that he's well-read on Italian cuisine but that his 20 or so months there haven't given him particular insight. I didn't think Ruth Reichl was the greatest reviewer ever, but now her tenure seems like the good old days.

Why do you think it's better?

Just to be clear, he was Rome bureau chief from July 2002 until March 2004, in other words about 20 months. And we have no idea what he ate while there, no less if he ate "what people eat every day." We do know he lived in New York City for decades and never learned much about the restaurants here. Did he eat spaghetti with tomatoes and basil often when he lived in Italy? The sentence he wrote allows for once or twice as possibilities. And did he eat the dish in restaurants or did he cook it like some people in Italy do every day? I get the point about his description of the spaghetti being sort-of evocative and certainly competent (nobody has said he's a bad writer) but "however Mr. Conant is choosing and cooking the Roma tomatoes with which he sauces his house-made spaghetti, he’s getting a roundness of flavor and nuance of sweetness that amount to pure Mediterranean bliss" is just lazy. He could have found out exactly how Conant chooses and cooks the tomatoes, by asking. Certainly, there was some discussion with the chef -- unless we choose to believe that Bruni's palate figured out red-pepper-infused olive oil on its own.