Fat Guy

I don't know that either restaurant is a money loser either individually or in the grand scheme of things. The latter, especially, is a complex calculation that involves a number of factors and dependencies. We know that French Laundry is a highly profitable restaurant, and that Ducasse has a global track record of adding value to hotel properties by operating restaurants on premises. Both ADNY and Per Se have what I understand to be favorable lease conditions, yet each brings something -- prestige, traffic, whatever -- to the property owner that may be more valuable than the straight monetary loss of leasing the space to ADNY or Per Se as opposed to Gap Kids.

Molteni and Bonnet island suites are very nice indeed. They're certainly better than most restaurant stoves, and there are definitely some benefits to be derived from having a better stove. But are they better than other excellent custom-built elite stoves, like those made by Montague, that cost half as much? Or are they just for show?

I forgot to mention that the foie gras ravioli were inserted into our menu (a thankful repetition of foie gras) above. Ellen and I did not agree on this dish: I loved it, but she thought the foie gras was rubbery and that ravioli (although I would say they were more accurately tortelloni) are not the best vehicle for foie. I mentioned that we tried the pheasant and the lobster, both memorable dishes. Last year, I believe it was at the ADNY fifth anniversary lunch party and think it was during truffle season (or maybe it was another event -- I don't have the event menus on file, only the ones from regular meals), I had the scallops with Boston lettuce veloute and it was a terrific dish. The single best white truffle dish at ADNY, however, is that egg. You don't find many perfect dishes in life -- when you see the word "perfect" being used five times in a restaurant review, you know it's being used wrong -- but this is one of those candidates for perfect dish. The egg itself is one of the most perfect of foods, and needless to say ADNY acquires damn good eggs and damn good truffles. That, plus expert preparation, brings one very close to culinary nirvana. I would really like to try the turbot. I don't think I've ever had turbot at any Ducasse restaurant, yet it has been a reputation maker for him. The salad with sweetbreads also sounds interesting -- I hope someone here springs for it and lets us know how it was. Or maybe Frank Bruni will.

I like the Molteni and Bonnet islands as objects of beauty, and even of engineering, but are they really worth the money? What's the point of a New York restaurant spending so many hundreds of thousands of dollars on a French stove that has to be schlepped around and serviced and installed by flown-in laborers when you can get a perfectly good product from Montague, a California manufacturer that has been in business 145 years, that cooks just as well and is a lot easier to install and service? It's still a great custom product from a venerable manufacturer. I just don't think food tastes better for being cooked on a Molteni or Bonnet stove, and I don't think the benefits to the brigade are enough to improve the overall quality of the kitchen's production efforts. I can justify to myself paying extra for most of the trappings of haute cuisine, but a fancy stove?

Needless to say, they edited out the part of the letter challenging the statement that "it was an article in this magazine two years ago that almost singlehandedly ushered in today's carbophobia." MarketStEl, I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation in this case or generally. But since I don't have free Lexis/Nexis, I probably shouldn't debate the specific contention that "prior to that story, most mentions of the diet in the mainstream press were usually dismissive or negative. The positive treatment the Atkins diet received in that TimesMag article gave it a legitimacy it had not previously enjoyed in the rest of the press." What I can say is that in general I do not find that the New York Times often fires first in granting legitimacy to underdog causes. In many instances I can recall in the area of food, the New York Times weighs in late, after the groundwork has been laid by other publications. At that point, with so little on the line, it's hard for me to credit the Times as a major force -- I think it more often serves to mark trends that are occurring anyway. It is an important trend marker, to be sure, though. I also think it's not entirely the case that the Times makes anything "acceptable to a broader segment of the population." The Times is read mostly by a narrow segment of the population. Making things acceptable to a broader segment of the population is the job of a lot of media outlets, but not necessarily the Times.

The demand exists, but does the supply? That's why I raised the point earlier about the possibility that we are now in a situation where no investor would be willing to back a New York effort of this magnitude without proof of concept first being demonstrated in another market. The barriers to entry in New York are wildly high: before he could get backing for a grand-luxe bar-raising restaurant in New York, Alain Ducasse first had to establish himself as the world's preeminent chef, and before Thomas Keller could get backing for a bar-matching project he had to establish his restaurant as the consensus best restaurant in America (a consensus with which I disagree, but no matter -- I know a consensus when I see one) outside of New York. Ferran Adria might be another person who could get backing in New York, but that doesn't seem to be his aspiration. Likewise, Charlie Trotter seems not to be interested in going head to head with Keller and Ducasse, and is instead doing something that will likely compete more directly with V and Cafe Gray. So who are the other candidates? Where is the supply going to come from? Rick Bayless?

I think there is a handful of chefs in town that are fully as talented as any chef in the world. For example, Daniel Boulud is highly regarded as a chef by every world-class chef I've ever spoken to about the subject of the American restaurant scene. Gray Kunz, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Bouley, and several others are held in such esteem. What differentiates ADNY and Per Se from Daniel is not that they have better chefs. They don't. Rather, they are a different species of restaurant. They are small enough, with a high enough ratio of staff to guests and with high enough prices, to create the possibility that every customer on every night can have the best the restaurant is capable of producing, and to have it presented in an atmosphere of luxury, refinement, and leisure. That's simply not the case at the other four-star and potential four-star restaurants in New York. At most of them, the best needs to be allocated and the atmosphere is one notch down from the top international category -- you can have a sub-par meal at Per Se or ADNY, but it's a fluke; whereas at many restaurants it's built into the system. Which isn't to say there's no such thing as levels of treatment at ADNY and Per Se. Rather, when you examine the totality of the experience, ADNY and Per Se start where VIP treatment at the other four-star places leaves off.

It's definitely an oversimplification, or maybe even the wrong word. I also think I mischaracterized the desired result. Let me try again: what I'm trying to say is that, as in the best competitive scenarios, each establishment has something to learn from the other. Likewise, each establishment will be a better establishment for what it learns. Yet, if the new knowledge is properly integrated, there is no danger of homogenization. The restaurants should and do have different personalities, directions, and visions, yet they can still benefit from each other's examples. I have no fear that Delouvrier will come back from a meal at Per Se and try to make ADNY more like Per Se. But maybe Delouvrier will come away from Per Se with the realization that ADNY, to be successful with the New York audience, needs to make concessions to approachability and perceived value. Likewise, I'd love for Keller to dine at ADNY a few times (maybe he has, for all I know) and have the "less is more" principle reinforced a bit.

One of the most unusual aspects of the ADNY - Per Se comparison is the participants. We are, after all, talking about the two best restaurants in New York. While there may not be an objective case to be made for one being better than the other, I do think there's a compelling case to be made that the gourmet consensus would be heavily against you if you argued that any of the other four-star restaurants is on the same level as those two. They are the four-star-plus category, because they represent something that didn't exist in New York until ADNY opened, and that hadn't been duplicated in New York until Per Se opened. So why is that unusual or interesting? Because neither is a New York restaurant. While both ADNY and Per Se have made adaptations to New York, they are both branch offices of restaurants from elsewhere. Are we looking at a new phenomenon, then? Is it no longer possible for a home-grown restaurant to be at the top? Is it necessary, before successfully opening at the top level of luxury in New York, to first earn your credentials elsewhere? Or is a sample size of two not large enough to support any conclusions? Another point on the ADNY - Per Se comparison: Per Se is certainly the bigger crowd-pleaser of the two. It seems to me that Per Se has been designed from the ground up to appeal to a broad spectrum of people. It's very user-friendly and accessible. It's also quite overt about defending the value proposition: it's very expensive, but people feel they get good value because the indicia of value are so prominent, especially in the sheer number of courses. ADNY is more along the lines of something you work up to, and the value is not immediately apparent because it's mostly to be found in the labor-intensive preparations, quality of ingredients, and other things that represent being the best at the margins, where the principle of diminishing returns means you have to charge a lot to get a small improvement. ADNY also seems to be oriented towards a certain clientele of internationally oriented, well-to-do diners who already see the value in Ducasse's restaurants -- there's no attempt to sell a value proposition, because it's assumed. The crowds at the two restaurants are very different in that regard, and while both are of course upper-middle-class or higher, the ADNY crowd is more upscale than the Per Se crowd. As consumers, the benefit to us is that both competition and cooperation will be good for both restaurants. From a cooperative standpoint, the success of both is important from the perspective of fine dining in New York, because ADNY and Per Se are alone staking out a category that needs to be staked out in order for New York to have a credible claim to being a world dining capital. And I would like to see competition between the two push each in the direction of the other. To oversimplify, I'd like to see Per Se be more serious and ADNY be less serious.

Milla, yes, the post-dessert was a coupe of ice cream with peeled grapefruit sections. And then there were all the post-post-desserts from the cart. MonsieurSatran, I think we're talking about a very rarefied level of restaurant, and so it's entirely reasonable to pick one or the other for various reasons. I personally would choose ADNY over Per Se, because I think the food is better and, more importantly, I prefer the overall aesthetic of the cuisine. I don't think it's wrong for someone to like Per Se better than ADNY; I do, however, think it's sad that there's so much buzz about Per Se relative to ADNY when ADNY has a strong claim to being the better restaurant.

Some other things I think about when I see scenarios like this: What can we as consumers do to help fix the problem? Most restaurateurs, save for the really idiosyncratic stubborn ones, will adapt to consumer behavior. If consumers behave negligently, it's not entirely pragmatic to expect a business not to take advantage of that. I can't tell you how many servers have told me, in response to one question or another about why an item is priced a certain way, "People just don't seem to care -- we keep raising the price and they just don't care." In that situation, of course they're going to keep trying to figure out ways to separate consumers from their money. So as consumers we can do our part by asking a lot of questions about what things cost and then saying we think those charges are ridiculous. If a lot of people do it, I can assure you it will come up at the 4:45pm staff meeting. Most restaurants, like most businesses, are short-sighted. It's very difficult to incorporate long-term thinking into the decision matrix of a business that is always worried about paying the next month's bills. (Not to mention, most service staff don't view what they do as a career.) But there are ways to carve out long-term relationships even under the umbrellas of businesses that are largely short-term in their approaches. The best example is repeat business. You can protect yourself from predators by being a desirable customer: if you come often, and you represent profit to the restaurant, and you tip well, yet you draw firm boundaries with respect to what you will and won't accept in terms of upselling, you will be the king of the castle. The restaurant experience is somewhat at odds with itself from the standpoint of finances. On the one hand, you have to pay for your meal at the end of the meal. On the other hand, you want to live out the meal as a fantasy removed from everyday concerns of cost. Well, that's a recipe for disaster, because if you live the fantasy you'll pay dearly for it afterwards. So I think what the consumer needs to do is just learn to accept that there will be a certain amount of economic intrusion into the fantasy. We're talking about how restaurants are short-sighted; well, consumers can be short-sighted too. They don't want to be bothered with asking what things cost, yet they care a lot about what things cost -- that's the very definition of short-sighted; it's almost Promethean.

None!

I'd like to note for the record that any chef is welcome to repeat the following ingredients in any tasting menu designed for me: foie gras, truffles, caviar, lobster . . . Seriously, though, I hear the repetition objection all the time: that an ingredient has been repeated in a meal and that this is poor form. One thing I can guarantee, though, is that the ADNY waitstaff and kitchen didn't repeat the lobster without thinking about it! Every server and every cook there is trained in classical French cuisine and there were probably six people who noticed the double lobster and they all probably said it's better to have both dishes than to sacrifice one for the sake of form. The dishes are also so different, and the lobster so differently transformed in each, that it's really hard to make the case that there's enough similarity to constitute repetition in any sense other than vocabulary. I think the repetition objection in general is a holdover, form-over-substance point of order from the days when fine dining was much more regimented and rule oriented. In recent years I think the standards have evolved away from the formalistic view towards one of flexibility, where the standard is "is it delicious?" and not "does it conform to certain rules?" To use the example of Moby's meal, unless you are Alain Ducasse himself, that lobster amuse and that lobster main plate could easily be the two best lobster dishes you eat in your life. I would much rather have them both than have the kitchen send me a substitute amuse -- like whatever the vegetarian amuse for the evening is -- just to avoid repetition of lobster.

When I hear a lot of people complaining about the same thing in a restaurant, I think of it as an opportunity. To use an example from another area of human endeavor, look at movie theaters. Movie theaters don't even break even from ticket sales. They make a profit because of a combination of concession sales and ticket sales. The concessions are outrageously overpriced at most every movie theater -- a movie theater is just about the only place in the world where a soda costs more than it would from a fancy hotel's room service menu. Now, you can yell and scream about how overpriced the concessions are. Or you can see an opportunity: the high price of concessions keeps the price of tickets down, therefore by purchasing a ticket and not purchasing concessions you allow other people to subsidize your movie experience. Same thing at a baseball game: the tickets are cheap because everybody else is spending $5 on a hot dog. So if you buy tickets but eat your own food before and after the game, you allow the other 50,000 fans to subsidize your day at the stadium. Restaurants are the same way: to simplify, assume they have to make a certain amount of money. If so, they're either going to make it by charging $X for food, or they're going to build a check average of that same $X through a combination of basic menu price, beverage price, and nickel-and-dime extras. So let's say that amount is $100 per person. The restaurant could just charge $100 per person and include everything, like bottled water and basic wine pairings, in that price. Or it could charge $50 per person and build an average of $50 per person in extra charges. Me, I'd rather do without the extras and take the opportunity to eat the meal for $50 with tap water, without coffee, etc. Now, to get back to the point about concealment and bad restaurant conduct, there is no doubt that there is some predatory conduct in the restaurant industry. Some of it is waitstaff driven, because we have this hopelessly flawed system whereby tips are predictably related to only one variable: the total check. (Tips are not predictably related to quality of service provided.) And some of it is restaurant driven, because the restaurant designs award and incentive programs -- either express or implied -- to encourage aggressive, over-the-line upselling. At the same time, at least half the time when I hear such a complaint I suspect there has simply been a communication problem. There is the matter of regional variation, for example. It is totally normal to charge for bread in New Zealand, and it is totally abnormal to charge for bread in New York. With regional variations, I believe it is mostly the customer's responsibility to learn the standards of the regions to which he travels. That seems pretty obvious to me, that it's not the region's responsibility to explain the way things have always been done there. As well as regional variations, there are variations at different levels of dining: the generally expected process at a middle market chain restaurant is not the same as at a top haute-cuisine place. Then there is the matter of the "regular and customary" price range of a product in a similar restaurant. Here I think it's important to be careful to evaluate a number of factors before concluding that the customer has been hoodwinked. For example, what is actually being charged for? Some restaurants are now charging $10+ for bottled water but only making that charge once. In other words, it is a water charge for however many bottles you drink, rather than a per bottle charge. This is actually preferable, although in the end I have little sympathy for anybody who gets burned on bottled water -- in fact I think people should be charged a penalty of a thousand dollars for ordering bottled water in any region where the tap water is just as good, like New York City. In addition, what really is the standard at a given restaurant? Let me assure you all that, for example, at ADNY there are a lot more customers who would be annoyed at being interrupted to be told that the Champagne costs $42 than there are customers who will be annoyed by paying $42. With most such decisions about what to communicate and what not to communicate, some percentage of customers fall into a communication gap. This happens even in the most non-predatory environments -- it's just life. That being said, I do agree that ADNY's Champagne charges (and wine prices in general) are too high, and on Wednesday night I confronted both the chef and the sommelier about it, telling them they should take the slight loss of revenue in order to build some good will. They certainly listened and considered, but I have a feeling they may be limited by their balance sheet and their target audience.

The pheasant was quite mild for pheasant. There was no risk of clash; the greater concern was that the sauce and truffles together could have overwhelmed the pheasant. This was something Delouvrier commented on when we were chatting: he has been thinking about that balance and trying to push it to the point where the pheasant has been seasoned just enough to bring it up to the same volume level as the other components of the dish. The whole business of cooking game requires a lot of tasting and adjusting as the supply is inconsistent day-to-day and also may evolve throughout the season. I've twice had a similar Ducasse dish that they do with chicken -- I've had it in both white and black truffle versions. Why? Because occasionally I get invited to a press or corporate luncheon at ADNY (the restaurant is not open for normal lunch service but will open specially for a lunch event) where they do a banquet style meal, and those chicken dishes are mainstays of the ADNY banquet menu. Now, I assure you, you will hardly ever have banquet food as good as the banquet food at ADNY. But both times I had that chicken dish I felt the chicken was drowned out by the sauce-truffle combination. It's a loud sauce. I'm not sure if Delouvrier is using the exact recipe from Ducasse's Atelier book (page 155 if you have the English edition I have) -- my guess is no -- but just to use the base recipe as an example it contains Cognac, Madeira, and white Port in addition to the foie gras, cream, and truffles. I imagine that both of those dishes, with pheasant, would have been just right. One nice thing about that dish was that it was built at the table. The plate comes out unsauced so you can admire the pheasant. The captain then spoons sauce over the pheasant, essentially enrobing it in the sauce because it's a very clingy sauce. Then he shaves the truffles over that, creating a second layer of concealment (by the way he puts on white gloves before handling the truffles). For me at least, watching the assembly process heightened my awareness of the interplay of the three components as I tasted. Our captain admitted, upon cross examination, that the Albufera sauce is his single favorite item produced by the ADNY kitchen -- and that's saying something.

Last night at Delouvrier's invitation we had an extended tasting of fall menu items in the “aquarium,” which is the private room adjacent to the kitchen. It was the first day of the restaurant's white Alba truffle season. I won't recite every dish or go into too much detail, especially since some have been described clearly above. As has always been the case when we've done tasting menus at ADNY they gave us individual menus to take home so I'll scan those in and post them below. Some highlights, though: The presentation of variegated scallops (no, I didn't know what that meant either and it was fun hearing the French guys try to pronounce it, but I googled it and it's a type of scallop) in their shells, raw and marinated in lemon and olive oil, topped with “clear” osetra caviar was, as Moby said above, a dish to remember. The two shells were positioned hinge to hinge on a rectangular plate and opened like two amphitheaters facing away from one another -- an ambidextrous dish. These were the nicest scallops I've had in ages, just terrific. For two of the subsequent courses, the kitchen did two variations on the same main ingredient. So, for example, I had sauteed foie gras with purple figs and a Banyuls sauce, and Ellen had terrine of foie gras with apples and quince. Later, we had two presentations of lobster, one with leek, potato, and tarragon emulsion (the same as Moby described above), and the other with cardoon gratin and white truffles (sorry, Moby, but this one was better). There has been some interesting discussion on the Italy forum about this year's truffle harvest. All I can say is that what I saw at ADNY were some really big, gorgeous truffles, and that they tasted as good as any I've had in any year, and better than most. Skipping ahead, the apex of the meal was the last pair of savory courses, both based on Scottish game. This is Delouvrier's forte of fortes. He's definitive with a lot of things – foie gras, shellfish, truffles – but nothing so much as game. I had hen pheasant with Albufera sauce. This is a sauce Ducasse has developed and turned into something of a signature – it's a reinterpretation of the traditional sauce that Careme devised as a tribute to Marshal Suchet, who defeated the British at Lake Albufera in the Napoleonic Wars. The Ducasse version contains foie gras, cream, truffles, and I think Cognac – maybe Delouvrier has tweaked it a bit, because it was not exactly the same as the example I had a couple of years ago. A very rich sauce yet light in texture. And, get this, white truffles shaved atop all that. The dish would have been outstanding without the truffles and was even more so with. The other game illustration was partridge poached in a broth with a whole lot of cabbage and foie gras. As you might imagine, it was delicious and also had a certain lightness despite the high specific gravity of the ingredients. The dessert presentations at ADNY remain, in my opinion, the best in town. A new dessert to me, I particularly loved the “pineapple two ways, refreshed by green apples,” served in a huge martini glass in layers of chopped, pureed, foamed, and dried pineapple and apple variants. The menu desserts were, as usual, followed by several other dessert items, everything from macaroons and chocolates to ice cream (this time with grapefruit slices) and the exhausting selection from the candy cart. The menus: A few additional notes: Yes, the 1993 Gaja was pretty damn good. We were able to snag pours from about 2/3 of a bottle that had been left behind by people too rich to care, and Andre the sommelier (my favorite sommelier in New York even before he gave us this) shared it with us and some of the staff. As far as I know, everything we ate was available on one or another of the menus. So you could order the exact meal we had, if you wanted to, and the kitchen would happily prepare it. I'm sure it would be expensive. Delouvrier was not present during most of the meal. He was participating in an event at Daniel. His sous-chef, Sebastian, was running the kitchen and, from the looks of things and judging by the food, running it very well. As should be the case at any world-class restaurant, the absence of the chef during the service did not make a difference. Delouvrier arrived later in the evening and visited various stations in the kitchen, checked up on everything, toured the dining room, and spent a little time chatting with us over dessert. He seems very happy working with Ducasse, he enjoyed a meal at Per Se recently, he's so busy he never gets to use his condo in the South of France. Every table in the dining room was occupied, which represents an upturn in business from a couple of months ago when the room was more like 2/3 full. There is a plan to go back one afternoon to take some photographs. Ellen will post those if it happens. The “aquarium” private dining room is a trip, and doubly surreal when only two people are dining there. I would think that for a super-important corporate function or very high number anniversary or birthday it would be a most exquisite place to dine. This was my fourth visit to ADNY under Delouvrier, with each meal incrementally better than the last. I continue to be impressed with the Ducasse-Delouvrier integration. Things felt efforless, dynamic, and authoritative last night, and I was especially happy to be alive.

The word "homework" is a loaded term, and folks are reading a lot into it. A reading of what I've been saying, however, should make clear that "homework" doesn't mean you have do do your homework in the sense of doing anything to serve the restaurant, it doesn't mean you have to choose your wines in advance, and it doesn't mean you have to accumulate wine-geek facts-and-figures on the average percentages of Merlot in different regions (although I happen to find that interesting, and participated on that thread). But there's also no way and no reason to sugar coat it: an ignorant diner gets less out of a restaurant than he would if he took the time to acquire some knowledge of food, wine, dining, and personal tastes. Some people don't want to hear this. They want restaurants to do everything for them. And that's fine -- good restaurants will do everything they can do for you whether you help them or not. But you have the choice to help them help you by bringing more information to the table. If that's homework, fine. It's homework in the sense that reading the libretto before you go to an opera is homework. You don't have to read the libretto. You can just go to the opera. But the opera is likely to be more enjoyable to you if you've read the libretto. It's like learning about a medical condition before going to see the doctor: you learn what questions to ask and the conversation goes much better. It's like being prepared for any given event in your life: for the most part, it helps. Specifically with respect to wine, the more you know and the better you can relate your knowledge to your preferences, the better you can do in restaurants. Otherwise we should just let computers choose our wines for us: enter what you ordered and what you want to spend on wine, and the computer will tell you the bottle that has been scientifically determined to satisfy the greatest number of people within those parameters. With that system, most restaurants could get away with having 30 or so wines. No need to have these lists of hundreds or even thousands of wines -- those wines are only of interest to the people who do homework, and who wants to do that?

Assuming the correctness of that point, is is nonetheless beside the point. The best way for the diner to fulfill his responsibility to himself is to have some knowledge. You don't have to do homework for the restaurant's benefit; you should want to do it for your own benefit. Because as a great man once said, "if the New Jersey diner is interested in maximizing his/her wine/food experience, it doesn’t hurt to have a little bit of basic knowledge." Even assuming the world's best sommelier, people's tastes are not uniform. If the customer contributes nothing to the dialog, the best the sommelier can do is make generic choices. I happen not to like a lot of the generic choices. For example I gravitate towards red wines whenever they can possibly be argued for. This is something I've learned by paying attention, aka doing my homework, listening to my own tastes, and acquiring experience. So I can increase my enjoyment of a meal by telling the sommelier -- again assuming a really good sommelier like you'd get at Nicholas or Ryland Inn or wherever -- that I'm looking to go to red earlier in the meal than the generic pairings would indicate. I've also accumulated a long list of wines that I do and don't like. My preferences don't correspond to conventional wisdom. There are wines with high scores from every reviewer that I'm just not crazy about, and there are wines with low scores from every reviewer that I find quite enjoyable. So I'm able to guide the selection process towards a result that works better for me. If you truly have straight-and-narrow generic tastes, and you work with a really good sommelier, you may be able to get away with a non-participatory, know-nothing approach. But if your tastes diverge from the norm at all, and if the sommelier is anything less than a genius, you are going to be very well served by doing some homework. For yourself, for your own benefit.

Seriously, it's the same as with just about anything that requires volition above the level of intravenous feeding: if you educate yourself you'll reap the rewards. Fine dining, fine wine, and the enjoyment of cuisine in general are things we work up to. These activities are laden with acquired tastes and conventions, and though they have become less regimented in recent decades there's still a learning curve. Heck, I've just written a whole book, Turning the Tables, devoted to helping people along that learning curve. Sure, you don't want to think of it that way, because the enjoyment of cuisine is supposed to be hedonistic. Just like you wanted to believe you were great in bed, intuitively and with no experience. But, we hope, you learned otherwise. So, sure, you can defer all judgment to the sommelier. But even a great sommelier, like a great lead in ballroom dancing, can only do so much. You need some basic knowledge of the enterprise, some basic self-knowledge, and some basic skills before you can take advantage of a great lead. Once you have the foundations, a great lead can help you dance several notches above your individual ability. That's what a great sommelier is supposed to be able to do for a customer. Of course, most restaurants don't have sommeliers, and most restaurants that have sommeliers don't have particularly good ones. So, ironically, you actually need to know more about wine to get by in a bad restaurant than in a good one.

How about a tall boy in a paper bag?

Should there not be a "Straphanger"?

You shouldn't have to do homework before you go out to eat, but you should want to!

I went to Dos Caminos on Park Avenue South last night, and I have a new favorite Mexican. I've got to hand it to the B.R. Guest restaurant group: they may not operate any restaurants that deserve four or even three stars (Fiamma was pushing that boundary, but they seem to have pulled back), but they are exceptionally talented at running zero, one-, and two-star level places with a high degree of professionalism, consistency, energy and panache. Dos Caminos is a great looking and stylish place, packed full of people, with efficient service and terrific food. It's not fancy as such -- it's about as fancy as some of B.R. Guest's other holdings like Blue Water Grill, and less fancy than Fiamma -- nor are the prices -- less than $10 for most starters and $20-$25 for most of the mains. I warn you, be very cautious about consumption of the prickly pear cactus frozen margaritas. These have several times more alcohol in them than you'd think. I was thrown for a loop by just one of them, and I'm a big guy. My plan was to have one of those (because it is somewhat talked about in the dining network) and then try a real margarita made with one of the approximately 150 tequilas listed on the annotated tequila list, but in order to preserve my equilibrium I reverted to water after that cactus thing. It's probably not possible for guacamole to be any better than what I had last night: it's made tableside in a stone bowl, with very ripe avocados and lots of fresh herbs, and hand-chopped and mixed to a barely chunky consistency. Tortilla chips are served warm. Twelve dollars for a portion meant to be shared by two but more than enough for four people as a palate awakener. I could certainly see all the places where the authenticity police would squeal about such-and-such not being the way it's done in Veracruz or whatever, so if you're part of that faction I'd suggest not bothering with Dos Caminos, but from a more generalized level of what tastes good I thought the food was excellent. I had red snapper ceviche with tomatoes, Spanish olives, Serrano chiles (quite a heavy dose, actually) and a lime-tomato marinade. I might have gone a little lighter on the marinade/sauce but the dish was vibrant overall. Also tried the calamari, sauteed with chorizo and piquillo peppers. Nice, and I can see where owning multiple restaurants and purchasing in bulk can give you the leverage to charge less for larger portions of better seafood and still make more money than the average single-operator establishment can. Really superb carnitas tacos with tender roast pork, green chile salsa and cotija cheese, served on very good handmade corn tortillas and with three sauces on the side. The one starter that kind of sucked was the one that sounded like it was going to be the best: "Oaxacan Chipotle Meatballs, served steaming in a cast iron pot with queso fresco, tomato salsita and warm handmade tortillas." Just not a good dish -- very tightly textured and rubbery meatballs with not a whole lot of interest added by the other ingredients. Nice presentation in a mini-chafing-dish, but ultimately a failure. Probably the best main -- it was a close call -- was the big pile of Niman Ranch slow-roasted pork ribs with chipotle sauce, black bean-chorizo chile, and cumin-braised cabbage. Very tender but not disintegrated meat, with nice enhancement provided by the sauce. A rather large portion to boot. Remembering that the tuna at all the B.R. Guest restaurants tends to be very good, I went with big eye tuna with a crust made of avocado leaves. This came with papaya salsa and coconut-ginger jasmine rice. The tuna was a beautiful specimen, cooked rare as requested, and the crust definitely worked. The papaya salsa was too sweet and the rice was boring. The mains are divided into "PLATILLOS TRADICIONALES" and "ESPECIALIDADES DE LA CASA." The one thing I tasted from the traditional plates was a chicken enchilada, which I thought was quite good. Desserts were competent but with some defects. There was a clever white-and-dark chocolate fondue with various interesting things to dip in it (mini churros, teardrop-shaped marshmallows, baby brownies, et al.) but the fondue itself was weak and not hot enough even with a dedicated burner under it. The crepes were better, though also out of whack due to insufficient filling. The dessert menu reads well, but there seem to be some execution issues. In any event, the star of the dessert show is the dessert amuse, a little glass of Mexican hot chocolate topped with Mezcal-infused whipped cream. One amusing note on B.R. Guest corporate-speak: apparently nothing in the whole restaurant is deep fried. Instead, deep fried dishes are described by waitstaff as "cooked crispy." If you ask whether that means "deep fat fried" they answer yes, uncomfortably, as though they've been caught.

Thanks for the excellent reporting. I've got to say, this thing of serving the clams in the shells is just about the stupidest ergonomic decision I've ever seen in the restaurant world. They also do it at Otto, where I was a few weeks ago, and I was just astounded at the idiocy of the process. It takes more time to get the clams out of the shells than it does for the pizza to get cold.

Having dined there twice now, I've got to agree. David Burke (or is that "davidburke"?) is simply a brilliant chef. He's one of the few chefs who is a true innovator, not in the avant-garde sense but in the sense of displaying restless creativity and individuality in almost every dish. He may very well be America's most underrated chef-genius. Then again it's not like getting a third star would make any difference. There isn't room to accommodate any additional customers, the prices are already at the three-star level, and the restaurant already has the audience it wants. It would be nice for him to get the recognition he deserves as the culinary intellectual equal of the other two DBs, but it just doesn't strike me as something he obsesses about -- he's probably much more concerned with inventing (and with earning) than with recognition.