Fat Guy

According to the Sun, Grayz will close for August and reopen as a real restaurant. http://www.nysun.com/food-drink/kitchen-di...way-east/80186/

Paul, at what stage did it smell terrible to you? To me, nonfat dry milk always (no matter how fresh or how old) smells kind of nasty when I open a packet of it. And if you make milk from it you wouldn't want to drink a glass of it. But when I've incorporated it into the base for yogurt -- which I do sometimes to get a richer end product -- I don't notice any off flavors or odors in the end product. It seems that the heating or some other process neutralizes the undesirable qualities.

"Under Pressure" was also the title of the New York Times Magazine feature on sous-vide cookery in '05. In that piece, the term pressure is used thus:

I saw the site in previews and played with it again yesterday after the public release. It seems like a great resource for culinary professionals. I particularly enjoyed some of the editorial content, like the "10 Ways to Know You've Been a Cook Too Long" piece. Good luck with it, Adam.

There are a lot of problems with that scenario, the most critical of which is that I have no good reason to believe Bruni's interpretation of the events of that evening. Next time you're at Atelier, or if you dined at the Modern during the relevant time period, you tell me if you think Stephane Colling is anything less than a total pro. I have no idea whether the four-to-three demotion hinged on that incident -- maybe the food alone would have earned three anyway -- but it's clear to me from reading that review and from talking to people at the restaurant (I have to check my notes but I think I was in the kitchen either that night or the night right after) that the incident with Colling poisoned Bruni against the restaurant's service team. Later when he was handled by Andre Compeyre it seems he chose to conclude that whatever good service he got from Andre -- who is one of the best working sommeliers I've ever dealt with -- was a charade. When in reality I think the restaurant had two excellent sommeliers and Bruni just had bad chemistry with one of them on one evening. So yes, I think that's a good example of how random anonymity -- especially in the hands of a weak critic -- can produce random outcomes.

I don't think these examples are representative of how the system was envisioned:

Bandwidth problems on your end? It's a very low bandwidth site. A dialup modem should be more than sufficient. The sheer number of users slamming on the server? There are plenty of web services that handle a lot more simultaneous traffic. It only seems like a lot if you're operating on a single, average-capacity server. And the Ko system could be designed to avoid that daily slam in many different ways: a waiting list, a different reservation-release strategy, etc.

And now that they've raised the price of dinner to $100 the old excuses -- that OpenTable is too expensive, that having someone answer the phone is too expensive -- seem even less compelling.

I'm no statistician but my limited knowledge of the subject says you're wrong about that. Happy to hear from someone who knows more.

Actually I don't think it would make sense to look at the "probability of getting four-star service" etc. You never get four-star service at a middle-market restaurant, because four-star service, at least traditionally, is a whole style of service that depends on certain human resources, structures, procedures, etc., that can't just happen idiopathically. You'll notice that in my hypothetical I referred to 3/4-star service. That's because the failure rate (or whatever model you want to use) at the high-3 and 4-star level is going to be very, very close -- meaning you'd need a very large number of visits to expose the difference. You couldn't do it in 4 visits and you certainly can't do it in 1 (which would be more normal for Bruni). That's why instances like the Ducasse fiasco are random "gotchas" rather than statistically meaningful occurrences. But this all backs into an interesting point: you can go into a restaurant -- anonymously or not -- and very quickly identify that it's trying to offer four-star service or one-star service. Whether or not it succeeds is the big open question. And you can't answer that question unless you get a significant number of repeat, anonymous visits under your belt -- which so rarely happens that it's news when it does.

Nathan you have it exactly backwards: the fact that Frank Bruni is recognized 80% of the time give or take -- and that multiple anonymous visits to a given restaurant are, for him, a rarity -- is why his occasional one anonymous visit does so little to distinguish itself mathematically from randomness.

So you must think option three is that reviewers should try to evaluate some sort of average consumer experience. But I think it's already been established that they can't.

I agree with that statement, but I think it has to be viewed in a larger context. We are in the middle of a creative revolution in gastronomy that is transforming the field from a craft focused on repetition to a creative art-form. The Times should try to get ahead of the curve, not be dragged behind it. Were I in charge over there -- which I will never be -- I'd try to hire someone like Colman Andrews as the next critic. Someone who has a sweeping knowledge of nearly all aspects of cuisine, a serious historical perspective, and a strong grasp of the craft-to-art progression that's occurring not only at the high end but also at the Momofuku level. And I'd tell him only to review restaurants that are on the art end of the spectrum. Let some other writer -- one with more of a consumer orientation (perhaps a reporter like Frank Bruni or William Grimes) -- review the steakhouses and such.

But what Bruni (or you, or I, or any normal human) just knows is more than mere random chance can possibly be does not in two or three visits rise to a mathematical level that would actually distinguish it from randomness. Sure, all this reasoning applies to food too. Which is why I go farther than most (or perhaps anyone) in opposing anonymity. I think restaurants should be given the chance, as in the performing arts, to bring their A games to a critic. In other words, they should have a shot at preparing every menu item up to spec. Yes, yes, I know there could be some shenanigans. But they happen now too, and there are plenty of ways to guard against them. But in the end the question is should we be reviewing restaurants at their best or trying to catch them at their worst?

They note performance deficiencies that occur under optimal circumstances: opening night, with the whole cast there (or the first-string lead singer or whatever), operating with the knowledge that all the critics are in the house (because of course the critics are comped), viewed from excellent seats, etc. In other words the critics make a conscious decision to review performances at their best. In addition, performance deficiencies are mostly noted in reviews of performances of repertoire classics where performance is the relevant point of comparison. New material is more often evaluated for its underlying content. But yes, it's all about the nature of reviewing and also the nature of what's being reviewed. If we think restaurant reviews are a species of consumer reporting and restaurants are consumer goods and services then that argues for the undercover, consistency-oriented approach (though the approach is still mathematically nonsensical and is better served by Zagat-type mechanisms anyway). If we think restaurant reviews are arts criticism and chefs are creative artists (or members of some related species) then we should be focusing on content.

One of the many problems with the Ko reservations system is the sense that it just doesn't work right. I've experienced so many glitches of that nature (hangups, error messages, being directed to the wrong page or out of the system altogether) that I have very little confidence that I'll get the reservation even if I'm the first diligent early-bird clicker. And of course in the 10am scenario you get no second chances.

Everyone -- critics and readers included -- who has or learns of a bad service experience at a restaurant gives in to the human instinct to generalize from it. But an accurate statistical model doesn't. If we assume that every restaurant -- even a four-star restaurant -- has incidents of bad service (for the purposes of a mathematical model let's divide service instances into "good" and "bad," though reality is probably closer to a point system, say 1 to 10) then every restaurant has what we could call a "service failure rate." Let's say a busy restaurant with 150 seats has 50 tables (average table size in a lot of restaurants works out to 3 and change, I believe) and does 3 sittings at dinner and 1 at lunch. That's 200 tables served per day. Assuming a 6-day week and some holiday closings we're looking at maybe 300 days of service. So that's 60,000 tables served per year, or 5,000 per month. Just to make this simple, let's define our "period" as a month. Out of those 5,000 tables served in a month, how many are likely to experience service failure? At a restaurant with a superb service team, the number could be pretty low, maybe just a couple of tables a day. Having spent many a full service in restaurants that have won every good-service award, I can say with confidence that it's almost unheard of for a service to go by without some unfortunate disaster or another unfolding. But let's be exceedingly conservative and say the service failure rate for the period (one month) at our hypothetical three- or four-star-level restaurant with excellent service is 50. Now let's say that at a two-star-level restaurant the service failure rate is 150 for the period. Triple the other restaurant's service failure rate, assuming same size and number of sittings. In other words we're defining -- just for the sake of this model -- three/four-star service as a service failure rate of 50/5,000 and two-star service as a service failure rate of 150/5,000. And the one-star rate, let's call that 500. Of course this oversimplifies, but it's useful for the illustration. Okay, so as a visitor taking a random sampling, how many visits do I need to make in order to tell whether a restaurant has a three/four-star service failure rate, a two-star service failure rate, or a one-star service failure rate? I think we can all agree without resort to any high-level math that 1 instance of service failure has no bearing whatsoever on predicting whether we've just dined in a restaurant with a service failure rate of 50, 150 or 500. How about 2 or 3 instances? The one mathematician I asked said: "Unless the good restaurant failure rate predicts less failures than the number of critics visits, not sure how you could assess differences in the rates from that small number. If the good rate predicts less than 2 bad nights per period and you observe 2 or 3, maybe you can sort of say something. But if good rate predicts 35 bad nights and bad rate predicts 70 bad nights, and you observe 3 bad nights, I don't think you can statistically classify into good or bad." Feel free to dispute that, but it makes sense to me. All the same modeling can be applied to certain aspects of food preparation. For example when critics write that such-and-such is "consistently" overcooked, they simply are not rendering a mathematically meaningful judgment as to consistency. Again, if there's an overcooking rate of X per Y at the best restaurant and Z per Y at a mediocre one, your visits at least need to approach X before you can distinguish between the best and the mediocre on the consistency point. No critic makes anything near that number of visits. As I've said before, if you want to judge consistency, use a mechanism like Zagat but with a more serious approach. When you get 1,000 people responding, you get some meaningful numbers on the consistency point. Critics shouldn't be in the business of judging consistency -- it's mathematically not possible for them to do so -- so they should focus on higher-level issues that don't depend on a false concept of consistency. Which is exactly what other arts critics do.

But what you call "the Bruni rule" is not an accurate statement of New York Times procedure. The Times would never hire David Rosengarten, even though Rosengarten is a far superior critic to Bruni, because Rosengarten had a show on the Food Network and is widely recognized in New York restaurants. They wouldn't say "Well, it's okay because he'll just follow the Bruni rule."

There are lots of photos of Bruni in circulation, including a second one that Gawker likes to use as well as plenty of photos from restaurant and hotel security cameras. I remember when William Grimes became the critic and he was dining around the city (before he wrote any reviews) just to catch up because he knew so little about the New York dining scene, the people at Lespinasse figured out it was him and then went through the various lobby security videos at the hotel in order to get a full frontal shot, which was then circulated around to the fraternity of top restaurants. Before he had written a single review. Right. We know that once in awhile he's not recognized and that sometimes he's recognized late. And that he's recognized 80% of the time overall (or perhaps a little more or less). "Quite a bit more data"? He has an arguably useless random sampling that, empirically, hasn't made his reviews any better than when he's recognized every time. "I wonder about Adour" hardly establishes anything to the contrary.

Sure but anonymity has become the tail that wags the dog of the enterprise of restaurant reviewing. At most, oakapple and co. have made a mild case for the occasional utility of anonymity as a tool in the reviewer's toolkit. But to allow that minor issue to dictate or even influence the choice of a critic is totally out of proportion to its best-case utility. Of course I happen to think the oakapple case is wrong and that occasional random anonymity is on-balance destructive. But even if it's right it's such a minor benefit that it can't possibly justify the emphasis placed on it.

Just to be clear, this is easy to do no matter what the critic's status. You can just send your friends on another night, or you can just talk to trusted acquaintances who've eaten at the restaurant. By the way, the top restaurants recognize not only critics and other VIP types but also their frequent dining companions.

I agree, but were it not for the Times's obsession with perpetuating the myth of anonymity we might have had a better critic in the first place.

John Mariani doesn't write for GQ, as far as I know. He writes for Esquire, as well as in his own newsletter and in various other outlets (e.g., Bloomberg, where he's the wine columnist). Have you ever read John Mariani's restaurant writing? Mariani knows so much more about food and restaurants than Frank Bruni it's shocking. You can get this from reading just a few issues of his newsletter, "Virtual Gourmet," which I read every week without fail. Do I think Mariani is perfect? No. Far from it. Do I agree with all his conclusions? No, in fact I'm just working on an email to him about how I think he missed the boat on Benoit (he does, by the way, write plenty negative in his newsletter, for example he was not terribly kind to Benoit). But do I get more out of his writing than I do out of Frank Bruni's? Absolutely. Not only do I find his restaurant writing more insightful (though it usually lacks the multiple-visits dimension of the Times reviews), but also he is a more well-rounded authority, giving equal time to wine, travel, books, etc.

I'm pretty sure what you're trying to say is that my arguments are exaggerated, since the term "straw man" wouldn't make sense in the context of what you're saying. But I the game is destructive, i.e, a net negative for the quality of dining in the city. The myth that all restaurants are out to get us is toxic,in that it pits consumers against restaurants rather than helping them to build good relationships with restaurants. And there's a very clear contradiction: while, when queried directly, Frank Bruni will admit he's often recognized, the New York Times and Frank Bruni are nonetheless quite happy to have the average reader believe he's far more anonymous than he is. Do you really think the average reader of a New York Times review knows that the Times critic is recognized 80% of the time? Of course not. The Times has invested decades in fostering the anonymity myth, from Ruth Reichl's disguises (which didn't fool anyone) to persistent underreporting of the critic being recognized.

And what I've been proposing (among other things) is that even if the answer to Sam's question is "yes" it still argues for leveling the playing field by being either 100% non-anonymous or 100% anonymous. And since we know 100% anonymity is unattainable, the non-anonymity alternative is the best choice by default.