Fat Guy

Let's assume for the sake of argument that he's recognized half the time. Where does that leave us? Either it's true that restaurants can make better food for recognized critics, or restaurants can't make better food for recognized critics. If the former is true, and if Bruni is recognized half the time, half of all restaurants have an unfair advantage and get better reviews than they deserve. Whereas, if a critic is recognized 100% of the time, then every restaurant competes on an equal basis in that regard. Then again, maybe critics can recognize when they've been spotted and adjust their impressions accordingly. If so, anonymity achieves nothing. But maybe critics who think they have or haven't been spotted can be wrong, because restaurants can be clever with their counter-spy action, and can give better food and service without letting on that they've spotted the critic. Again, there the best solution -- since it's impossible to achieve anonymity in 100% of cases -- is to forget about the charade of anonymity.

I should point out this is not "my" view but, rather, one shared by any number of food media people, some of whom write about it and some of whom support it by their actions. The first person who ever made the argument to me was Thomas Matthews of Wine Spectator, and he has made the argument in writing as well, both before and after me. Once he laid out the points to me over lunch sometime in the 1990s and I saw that his logic was compelling, I shifted my own thinking on the matter. As well, there have been several critics -- David Rosengarten, Alan Richman, Bob Lape -- who have had histories as television personalities. That's going to happen more, not less, as it is now 2007, when anybody who has anything to say on a subject needs to be fluent across all media. Indeed, at least one of the photos that restaurants have of Frank Bruni is from his television appearance on PBS. You can still see it any day on the PBS website here if you scroll down a bit.

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue based on the Gawker reference, Nathan. What is Gawker "more wired into" "than anyone here"? And what's the support for the contention that she's an "industry shill"? Is it simply that she's not anonymous? If so, Bruni is an industry shill too, as is every other major critic in history, because anonymity at that level is a myth. No matter how many photos of Restaurant Girl appear in the paper, she will likely be recognized less often than Bruni, especially at the top restaurants where the managers are oriented towards spotting him. So she's certainly right when she says, "It's a bit passe and naive to believe that the most important kitchens in New York City can't identify food critics." Gawker can't actually find anything wrong with her review, either.

I think there's enough room for all of us to feel like the Dear Abby of food.

Last night I was eating at a great new place in New York called Anthos, and my wife and I were led to a corner table by the maitre d' (a woman -- what do you call a female maitre d'?). The table had the perpendicular seating configuration under discussion here. So I asked her, "What's the word for sitting this way?" She replied without hesitation, "Catty-corner." She was firm on the point that, even though it's technically incorrect, it's the lingo at every restaurant she's worked at (which includes Felidia, the Italian restaurant owned by Lidia Bastianich). So, one point for "catty-corner."

Our captain (or whatever you call it in an haute Greek restaurant) was great. He was engaging, upbeat and eager to discuss the menu, and was just opinionated enough to be real without being at all overbearing or annoying. I think he steered us towards several good ordering choices. In fact, he steered us away from the baklava trio and towards the goat-cheesecake, and then the kitchen sent out the baklava trio as a comp -- and it was the worst dish we had all night! So that guy was a real pro. Our waiter (the guy who handled a lot of the backup tasks like bread, water, cocktails and other maintenance) was very professional if a bit stiff. The manager who seemed to be in charge of the room was a woman who was also very smooth, and she seemed to have the mother lode of wine knowledge (at some point she told us she used to work at Felidia). The food runners had the standard New York problem of being relatively incomprehensible and not really being able to answer any questions. When we arrived at the restaurant it was fairly empty, so there was a lot of service focused on the handful of tables there. Later, when the place got full, it wasn't as seamless -- we had to do some looking around to get a check and such -- but it was still a strong team, at least it seemed that way to me, on this one visit.

I don't recall a restaurant review where a photo of the critic in a glamourous pose (here) was larger than a photo of the restaurant she was reviewing. It sets up a situation where the critic herself is the story.There are two stories today: one about the restaurant and one about her. It's her first review. The paper has a legitimate purpose in introducing her. It's news. We're talking about it here, right? It's also not "self promotion" when the newspaper does it. In addition, she's pretty. I like the photo. As for the relative sizes of the photos, I haven't seen the paper. Online they scale everything to the same width so portraits always appear larger than landscapes. Personally, though, I couldn't care less about the photo of the restaurant. Whereas the photo of the critic is interesting to me. I especially liked: "I've felt like the 'Dear Abby' of food for years." This is someone who didn't have a blog two years ago. ← She said she feels like the Dear Abby of food because lots of strangers ask her questions about food. Big deal.

What aspect of self-promotion is it that we're supposed to be disgusted by?

If you're writing about Chicago-style pizza in the New York Times, and drawing comparisons between the Chicago and New York dining cultures in that context, then yes, you need to educate yourself about New York pizza. The funny thing is that this is just about the easiest thing in the world to do. Bruni is neither lazy nor stupid, so it's hard to imagine why he couldn't be bothered to get himself some context. Do you think the Mozza story would have been written, by the New York restaurant critic for the New York Times, if Batali hadn't been involved? Of course not. The story existed because of the New York angle.

In Bruni's defense, he was quite enthusiastic about the restaurant, and has been a champion of Psilakis over the course of a few different reviews. I give him credit for recognizing and giving credit to Psilakis where credit is due. But I agree, when you look at the other three-star restaurants, Anthos is serving food squarely in that group. But in general, yes, if talking to my various friends and acquaintances is any indication, this is a restaurant where the foodie buzz has been more enthusiastic than the critical buzz. In most cases, when that happens, the people are out of whack and are just reacting to atmospherics or whatever. But once in awhile you get a restaurant where the public gets it better than the critical community. Not that the critical community has been down on Anthos. But it's a much more important restaurant than you'd realize from reading stories like "Fit for the gods: New York's Greek scene is getting a fancy-pants makeover." I've been to several of the so-called "haute Greek" restaurants and Anthos is in a whole different category.

Oh boy do I hate it when I'm sitting in a restaurant and all of a sudden they turn the lights down so drastically that I can barely see. This may deserve its own topic.

It would have been wildly inaccurate for me to say that, but I didn't.

That's tautological. My complaint is that I'm getting crap tomatoes. So saying that I'm getting crap tomatoes is not an explanation. I shop in New Jersey all the time, and plenty of the tomatoes sold in New York City are grown in New Jersey. No difference. And I've been having the heirloom tomato problem all over -- in probably six or seven cities this summer. Smithy's theory seems more compelling than the "crap tomatoes, go to Jersey" theory.

I had heard so many great things about Anthos that, I figured, it couldn't possibly be that good. While lots of people told me it was great, nobody -- not my acquaintances and not the critics -- ever conveyed to me a compelling storyline about why I should care about the place. Anthos didn't rise to anywhere near the top of my must-go list until, a little while back, I saw some photos of the food in the deeply flawed but also useful magazine "New York Restaurant Insider." When I saw the dishes, it finally sunk in that "haute Greek" was for real. The photos showed food that was beautifully presented and often deconstructed and presented on multiple serving pieces. This guy Psilakis is serious, I could tell, but could the food be that good? Our meal tonight was that good. This is the restaurant I'm going to be recommending to people who want an interesting new fine-dining experience. I wish I had gone sooner. The two appetizers we had were two of the best cold seafood dishes I've ever had. Not only were the presentations gorgeous -- much more attractive even than the photos in Restaurant Insider made them out to be -- but also the ingredients were superb and the combinations of flavors were original and intriguing. The first dish was the "raw meze." If you've had the crudo at Esca you've had a preview of this style of dish: pieces of sashimi-style fish garnished with interesting ingredients, in this case with a Greek inflection. However, while the quality of fish at Esca is on par with what we had at Anthos, Esca will not prepare you for the level of craftsmanship at Anthos. The dish is a show-stopper, presented on a long tray on a series of small plates, each a careful, colorful composition. The menu was printed with today's date, and apparently it evolves based on availability of ingredients. Today's raw meze selection was (you get all of these for $18): yellowtail garnished with artichoke and shredded crispy grape leaf (you'd almost guess it was nori); tuna garnished with sumac, mint and sliced hot chilies (this one had serious heat); salmon with peach, pepperoncini, and watercress; swordfish with summer bean, purslane and hazelnut; and snapper with saffron and pickled pluot. The other cold seafood dish, called "scallop, crab and prawn," (also $18) was presented in three teardrop-shaped shallow bowls. One bowl contained raw scallop with onion and bacon bits; one contained Tasmanian crab with yogurt; and the other contained botan ebi (aka spot prawn) with feta and dill. Then, the server poured a chilled melon soup over each plate: Cavion melon with the scallop, Galia melon with the crab, and watermelon with the prawn. Again, both a gorgeous presentation and a terrific dish. We then had a pasta mid-course. This course was a comp from the kitchen; I had been outed. I never would have ordered pasta -- I guess I'm narrow-minded but I basically won't order pasta outside an Italian restaurant unless there's a really good reason to -- so I'm glad they sent these out because they were fantastic. In some ways the better of the two dishes was the manti: spicy eggplant ravioli with charred vegetables, Graviera (a cheese from Crete), and tomato jus. This dish had a startling interplay of flavors and was a serious vegetable dish -- a vegetarian could easily at this as an entree and not feel deprived. A less risky dish, but delicious, was the hilopita: a single large, flat egg noodle topped with crispy Berkshire pork belly, artichoke and avgolemono. My main was the shellfish yiouvetsi stew. This is a big dish. If you're a big eater, you'll be happy with this one. It's a teeming bowl of mussels, razor clams, other kinds of clams, cockles and a couple of head-on shrimp, in a saffron-fennel-seafood broth with orzo (also cooked in the broth) mingled throughout. A very satisfying dish, not cheap at $36 but worth it. I also tried the roasted black bass with veal cheeks, soybeans and chanterelles, and it was also excellent, and much more of an haute-cuisine-type dish. The rectangular piece of bass was nicely crisped and served with one end resting on a pile of deeply flavorful braised veal-cheek meat. (Also $36 -- entrees run $26-$38). Desserts were in the game with the rest of the meal, a nice surprise. We ordered the bougatza: goat-milk cheesecake with blueberries, goat-milk caramel and kataifi (the Greek pastry that looks like shredded wheat); and also the sesame dessert. The bougatza was a nice, light-textured variant of cheesecake and the blueberries were superb (the fruit changes with the seasons), but the sesame dessert was a showstopper. I don't think I've ever seen so much done with sesame. The plate is quite a composition. There's a thick smear of sesame-and-chocolate ganache leading up to an "encased sesame ice cream," which has a caramel center. There are also various sesame bits and crusts woven throughout the plate. If you're a fan of halva, this is the best restaurant dessert in the category that you'll ever have. If you're not a halva fan, you may or may not like the dessert. Google says that Grub Street says that pastry chef Bill Corbett won the recent Golden Scoop Pastry awards with this dish, beating out Alex Stupak and Will Goldfarb. The third dessert we tried, a comp, was the only one that wasn't impressive: the baklava trio. Sorry, but I've had better baklava at plenty of lesser restaurants. The standard baklava was way out of balance with much too much cinnamon -- beyond any amount that could be justified by preference. The other two variants -- honey custard with brown sugar tuille, and walnut cake with cinnamon ice cream -- were fine, but I think it's a mistake for the restaurant to list this dessert first on the menu, because it's weak. Nice touches: pretty amuses, three kinds of bread all good, two kinds of butter (cow and goat -- the goat wins), some interesting cocktails, good wine-by-the-glass choices, we liked our server. I'm sure somebody has explained this somewhere, but Anthos is to Greek cuisine what Tabla is to Indian cuisine. This is a serious haute-cuisine restaurant using Greek accents to make its food unique. It works brilliantly, and casts Greek flavors and ingredients in a whole new light, at least for me it does.

In the past few weeks I've been in several restaurants that were too cold or too hot by such large margins that even I -- a relatively temperature-insensitive person -- have been bothered by it. How hard is it to get this right? I understand some mom-and-pop place not being able to afford enough air conditioning units to cool an open-kitchen restaurant on the hottest day of summer. But other than that, what's the excuse? Why can't restaurants just pick a temperature and keep the room at that temperature?

This has been a summer of disappointing heirloom tomatoes, punctuated by a few bright lights at a few good restaurants. This has been happening to me for the past few summers and, at this point, the label "heirloom" has been pretty much discredited as far as I'm concerned. When heirloom tomatoes first came on the scene at the market level, they were a breakthrough. The early restaurants serving them were putting out the best tomato dishes I'd had in my life, and every stand at the greenmarket selling heirloom tomatoes was selling great ones. Now, they're usually mediocre. They're colorful, but they don't often have any special flavor. There's even a flavor, the "mediocre heirloom tomato taste," that you don't get with mediocre regular tomatoes. I haven't yet developed the vocabulary to describe the taste, but I'll get it. So I'm pretty much giving up on heirloom tomatoes, unless I have super-reliable information about their provenance. I think I'd rather just have a good regular old tomato than deal with the money-wasting heirloom crapshoot.

I have no idea how you know what "most affluent NY diners" were thinking, however what we do know is that the chef change was well publicized. Not only would you know about it from reading the New York Times, but also if you had ever dined at Ducasse and given your address you'd have received a card announcing the change (Ducasse sent out quarterly mailings about new menus, etc.). The staff were, I believe, instructed to talk about the change -- "We have a new chef, Tony Esnault, who has worked with Mr. Ducasse in blah blah blah." More importantly, the cuisine was quite different under Esnault than under Delouvrier. The Delouvrier situation, as well, has some bearing here because, independently of Ducasse, Delouvrier had been a four-star chef at Lespinasse. He created a hybrid of his own cuisine and Ducasse's cuisine, whereas Esnault marked a return to cuisine much more in the style of Ducasse Paris or Monaco. At Daniel, when there's a chef change, very little changes that anybody but a serious regular would notice. I haven't been to Per Se in awhile so I can't say what they're serving today, but when I went, yes, it was French Laundry with minor variations for local ingredients.

It's a Mario Batali restaurant. The whole reason he was writing about Mozza was because of the New York connection. Bruni's corresponding "Diner's Journal" entry was a New York/LA restaurant-culture comparison. And while the reader who claimed Patsy's was "real Napoletana pizza" was off-base, Bruni's reply was far more clueless because he, the full-time professional critic for the New York Times, was unequipped to say "No, it isn't" and instead regurgitated a generic answer more reminiscent of what you'd hear from an insurance company denying your claim than from anybody with knowledge about a subject: Bruni decided to go down that path of writing about pizza in the New York Times, and making various tie-ins to New York restaurant culture. Did he really think he could go start writing about an iconic food of New York without his lack of context coming back to bite him? He's been doing this job long enough that he should know better. Even a newbie at the job should know that if you're going to say word one about pizza, hamburgers, pastrami, hot dogs, barbecue or anything of the sort, you need to take at least a day and go around to a bunch of places and get yourself educated -- or you need to leave that category to Ed Levine or the "$25 and Under" critic, because those guys actually know the subject matter. Otherwise you just look silly.

To the extent people are saying those pies are modeled after traditional Neapolitan pizza, sure, they're wrong. But if Bruni, the New York Times critic, was going to opine on pizza, he should have familiarized himself with the top few New York places regardless of category. His fundamental lack of knowledge has made him seem out of touch, regardless of the comparability of the styles. And this is one place where it would have been easy for him to acquire the knowledge. He's already lived in Italy. He just needed to visit a few pizzerias and spend twenty bucks at each. It's not like trying to acquire perspective on French haute cuisine, which can take years and tens of thousands of dollars. For a guy who's trying to be a man of the people, he's pretty clueless about the food of the people. He was similarly silly on the subject of hamburgers awhile back.

Per Se. There's no comparison. It's difficult to get Per Se reservations for Tuesday lunch. You can get reservations at all the other places if you plan ahead a little, and often even if you don't.

like who? when it comes to the relative rankings of NY 4-star restaurants (as well as restaurants with 4-star aspirations)...there are as many varying opinions as there are critics. ← Even if you look only at objective criteria, Per Se and Ducasse were in their own category. Substantially higher price than Le Bernardin and Jean Georges (and the other restaurants that wander in and out of the four-star French/New American group). Different approach to sitting (1-1.5 turns depending). A different level of extensiveness in terms of everything from serviceware and serving pieces to dessert, water, you name it. The number of people in the kitchen and the staff-to-customer ration were also categorically different. So even without a subjective analysis that says the food was better (which it was), there are still many plainly obvious bases for differentiation.

Needless to say, there were people dining at Ducasse at the Essex House every night. I think it would be revealing to take a sample of Ducasse's customers and a sample of Per Se's customers and compare them by asking a series of questions to determine which group is more knowledgeable about food, better traveled, more experienced at dining out at top-level restaurants in New York, the US, around the world, etc. The results might be surprising to you, Nathan.

At a bare minimum there are two New York styles of pizza: the very-thin-crust, brick-oven style, and the puffier, cheesier, foldable style served at most slice shops.

Why would it be misleading? He's not writing about the food or anything that would be affected by a chef change. The information was current. It could have been written based on visits in 2001 and been appropriate and not at all misleading. This is standard practice: you call up a bunch of restaurants and ask a question. Anyway, Bruni had already reviewed the restaurant under Delouvrier, so of course he had some contact with the restaurant. That's certainly not a ridiculous speculation. I'm sure that sort of thing happens. However, there are a few issues that make it not all that relevant here. First, if it's true that Delouvrier was replaced by Esnault specifically for the purpose of trying to gain back four stars, it seems unlikely that the restaurant would then turn around and tell Bruni not to review it. Second, it was probably something like a year before there was a concrete decision to close, so again there should have been some "Diner's Journal" action or a visit in that time. Third, also from the department of totally unwarranted speculation, I think it's just as likely that Ducasse and the Essex House would have been willing to keep the place open a little longer if Bruni had been willing to review it -- just as likely as the "perhaps Bruni was asked/told not to bother re-reviewing" scenario is the "Bruni said he wasn't going to re-review" scenario. On a related point raised by Nathan, it's not correct to say that Ducasse's closing is proof of much beyond the fact that it closed. As I understand it, the decision to close had more to do with union and hotel troubles than with business failure. The restaurant was successful for years but, I believe, when it lost its union exemption it couldn't make the math work. The impending loss of the union exemption was a concern from day one, and I think Ducasse just figured if worse came to worse on that front he'd close and move. Ducasse closed his three-star restaurant in Paris and moved to another hotel. It's just not a big deal for him. Not that the St. Regis restaurant will be the reincarnation of the Essex House restaurant. It remains to be seen whether Ducasse will bother with another Michelin-three-star-type restaurant in New York. If he doesn't, the city's food culture will be poorer for it. The definitions of news for a reporter and a critic are indeed different. For the critic, there has to be some substantive relevance that affects the subject of criticism. And here, there was: the cuisine itself was quite different under Delouvrier and Esnault. I'm not grasping the point of the exercise. It wouldn't seem strange to me, but what does that mean?

Thinking a bit further about this concern that, if the Times re-reviews restaurants that change their chefs, it will encourage restaurants to get new chefs after getting bad reviews, I'm starting to think that's a good thing. If, for example, Ducasse really did bring in Esnault as a result of Bruni's review, that's great. It made the restaurant better. That's something to celebrate, not something to be afraid of. Businesses that improve in response to criticism deserve enthusiastic recognition. It would be an even better system in a scenario where the Times critic had a clue. Then we wouldn't have to worry about so many false positives.