Fat Guy

The issue isn't so much the absolute dollar amount -- even a $2,000 scholarship would surely be appreciated by most any culinary student. It's just that the $27,000 figure is totally out of proportion to what one would expect from an organization the size of the Beard Foundation.

Regarding the library, I found this on the Beard site: "At the House, both the library and its archives are open to members, food writers, and students." There are also a bunch of other worthy sounding causes enumerated on the "About" page, for example: "True to Beard's spirit of helping new talent, the Foundation offers and administers an extensive program of scholarships, volunteer opportunities, and workshops—all part of our ongoing commitment to further elevate American gastronomy." and "The Foundation, in cooperation with other national food and culinary organizations, also works around the country to educate children about nutrition awareness and food appreciation and to introduce them to the world of fine dining."

I agree, Brooks. It seems to me that the Beard Foundation has taken significant steps to right its fiscal situation, and deserves credit for that. But unfortunately, it does not seem that this crisis has caused any introspection regarding the actual role of the organization. It seems the goal is just to get the finances sorted out and then get back to business as usual.

The Beard Foundation's plan for fixing itself appears to be:

I've been in the library, on the top floor of the Beard House, so I can assure you all that it exists. My understanding is that library access is available to Associate Members of the Beard House, that being defined as those who make a $125 annual contribution. Of course higher membership categories also include this benefit.

Vic, that's all well and good as a wish. But what will cause the Beard Foundation to make actual, meaningful change? Surely not this attitude of "it's the only game in town." Monopoly is no recipe for good deeds. The Beard Foundation needs to have its feet held to the fire of competition. It needs to see its members taking their donations elsewhere. And it needs to see an industry that quits kowtowing and starts working towards making other awards, other types of publicity, and other forms of recognition as valuable as anything the Beard Foundation has provided. The industry, the members, the food editors and writers . . . they have all been complicit in supporting the Beard Foundation monopoly, and together they can end it. There should be other options for chefs from around the world to come to New York and other centers of cuisine and cook for the media, the industry, the tastemakers, and the interested public. There's no need for the Beard House's crappy facility if restaurants start hosting such events more often, perhaps with the aid of a coordinating umbrella organization. After all, the Beard House kitchen is so crappy that many visiting chefs do all their prep in a local restaurant kitchen anyway. Most nights in New York City, save perhaps for the holiday season and such, there are scores of unused kitchens and dining rooms, at hotels, in corporate spaces, and more. The Beard House simply isn't needed if somebody can coordinate those other resources. There's so much more that could be done with so much less money than the Beard Foundation has had. They had their chance to operate as a benevolent monopoly. They failed.

There's no point in increasing the number of reviews if they can't get a handle on the reviews they're already publishing. I certainly agree that, even if the Times is spending a quarter of a million dollars a year on the dining budget for food-section writers, increasing that sum should be no big deal by the standards of a company whose revenues are three billion dollars a year (NYSE: NYT). But it seems unnecessary. More money isn't the answer; doing better within the current budget would be far more beneficial.

I'll happily accept that challenge provided somebody wants to subsidize four visits to Per Se for me! Oh, and also one visit to French Laundry. And a salary and benefits so that I can spend an entire week writing one restaurant review. The Times critic has a virtually unlimited budget, the luxury of undivided attention, and the power of the most prestigious pulpit in the world of journalism. The rest of us aren't in competition with the Times critic, because it's hardly possible to compete. What we can do, however, is point to the disconnect between the inputs and the outputs. I submit that, given the same inputs Frank Bruni has, most any eGulleter could do a better piece of restaurant criticism. Maybe it wouldn't be as well written (Frank Bruni is after all a very strong writer, and smart), but it would be better restaurant criticism per se. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

I agree, Todd. Continuity of voice lies at the core of what makes a critic valuable. Critics aren't just writing one review; they're creating a body of work over time -- an oeuvre. Of course, in heavily saturated areas such as film there is a need for multiple critics just to keep up with the volume of new releases that demand review. But each of those critics may write multiple reviews in a given week, so each has an oeuvre larger than that of the restaurant critic who writes one review a week (or two, depending on how you count "Diner's Journal). Not that restaurant reviewers on the whole seem to accept that they should be like real arts critics. They tend to focus on entertainment and consumer advocacy rather than on the cause of excellence in the arts. But to me dining is worthy of real criticism, and indeed when you have chefs of the caliber of Gray Kunz, Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, Charlie Trotter, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Masa Takayama all operating on the same block, the art (or craft if you must) of cuisine deserves no less than the seriousness of treatment that art, architecture, literature, dance, and music get, and probably deserves more than Hollywood does at this point. Let's face it: Zagat does a better job of consumer advocacy, and the New York Post and New York Magazine will always be more entertaining than the Times. What the Times has to offer is depth, quality, and authority. The Times, however, is not providing this in its restaurant reviews.

New York Times critics shouldn't be judged by the "Seventy percent of success in life is showing up" standard.

Not by me. Not by oakapple. By some others, whom he argued were wrong, yes. I thought Frank Bruni did a poor job comparing the two, but totally support the idea of doing such a comparison. I can't imagine a sensible argument that says the comparison between French Laundry and Per Se isn't important. Heck, the whole point of naming the place "Per Se" is a reference to Thomas Keller's reactions to all those who asked him if the New York place would be the same as French Laundry. His stock reply, "It's not the French Laundry per se," gave rise to one of the worst restaurant names in the history of the universe, but it nonetheless underscores the importance of the comparison -- as if we needed anything to underscore what is so obviously an important issue.

I am hardly overestimating the importance of eGullet when I say that a New York Times restaurant review should contain better analysis than the average post on eGullet. And the Times should be judged by the highest standards, not by the standards of second-tier newspapers and magazines. Home-run four-star reviews: Ruth Reichl on Jean Georges "It is tempting to abandon yourself to the sensual pleasure of the place, sink into the comfortable seats and allow the staff to surround you with aroma and seduce you with flavor. But take a deeper look: in his quiet way the chef and co-owner, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, is creating a restaurant revolution. This is an entirely new kind of four-star restaurant." . . . . "The last touch is put on each dish at the table . . . . Mr. Vongerichten has hoarded the scents, saving them to be released in the dining room instead of the kitchen. His food is satisfying before you ever put your fork to a plate." . . . . "If a walk in the woods were translated to flavor, it would be his porcini tart, a rich pastry spread with a deeply flavored walnut-and-onion paste and topped with sauteed mushrooms." That, my friends, is great food writing. Even the typically grouchy and uninspired William Grimes was capable of greatness when inspired by true culinary genius. William Grimes on Bouley Bakery "As a chef, Mr. Bouley has it all -- elegance, finesse and flair. His flavors are extraordinarily clear and exquisitely balanced; his use of seasoning is so deft as to be insidious. Even his most complex creations have a classical simplicity to them. Mr. Bouley cooks the way Racine wrote and Descartes thought. At the same time, although French to his fingertips, he has also been traveling, thinking and assimilating foreign influences. In the most considered way, he has become a more daring chef, and a more exciting one." . . . . "For professional musicians, the real test is maintaining tonal purity and expressive power at the softest volumes. The analogy holds in cooking. Mr. Bouley thrives on bold flavors. His rack of lamb with glazed salsify and chanterelles is potent, with an intoxicating overlay of sage, but he can communicate in the merest whisper. His cod with broccoli puree seems almost like a bad bet. Can anyone hold an audience with ingredients this simple and sparely presented? The answer is yes, and yes again." . . . . "And really, there is no point in saying no to anything at Bouley Bakery. Wiser heads have arranged matters so that the only possible answer to any question is yes." And so is that.

Nobody wants Frank Bruni to succeed more than I, but so far he has failed so miserably at his job that it's hard to imagine what strategy he's going to use to reverse course. The thing is, "good" isn't good enough when you're the Times critic. Passing grades like "concise, well-written, informative and yes, still entertaining" are hardly impressive when you're the world's most important restaurant reviewer -- and I take issue with each of those characterizations as well. The only standard by which his latest review can be classified as a success is the low standard Frank Bruni has already set for himself. A review of a four-star restaurant should be a four-star review, not an amateurish strung-together series of self-indulgent musings. What does this review contribute to the dialog about Per Se? Nothing. It is repetition of what has been available for months to anybody with Google. It contains no insight, no commentary, no theory beyond what an excited consumer might say about how good a meal was. Where is the leadership, the gravitas, the expertise? You can spend all the time you want on the phone with Jonathan Benno learning enough about each dish to make you seem as though you know what you're talking about, but if you don't know what sous vide means you're still going to describe it as "in a tightly sealed plastic pouch" so that only a reader who already knows about sous vide cookery will actually know what you're talking about. Is the writing good? It's competent, I suppose. Heavily reliant on vague adjectives ("The vanilla was a perfect accent, used in perfect proportion"), barely any better than a first-draft journal entry, with more "gee whiz" than serious criticism. Rather than dwell on his faux-populist ("this preening, peacock-vain newcomer"), anti-corporate ("Per Se is across the street from Central Park, in what is essentially a shopping mall"), anti-French ("The service departs compellingly from the traditional French model by mingling formal attentiveness with breezy, even cheeky banter") agenda, he should have either devoted more space to the culinary comparison to French Laundry -- which in its present form says exactly nothing; a pretty lame showing for a piece of research that required a plane flight and significant expenditures -- or offered a better contextual placement of Per Se in the Time Warner pantheon. But of course he has already demonstrated his proclivity to drop the ball on the significance of Time Warner -- the greatest assemblage of culinary talent in the history of at least North America -- perhaps because he sees it as a mall. The review is adequate. It should get a passing grade. It would be good by the standards of a second-tier newspaper. As a New York Times review of a tremendously important restaurant, however, it leaves much to be desired, as do far too many of Frank Bruni's reviews. It's time for the Times to stop appointing reporters as restaurant reviewers. The position should be filled by people who know, love, and appreciate food and fine dining -- people of the stature of Craig Claiborne, Bryan Miller, and Ruth Reichl. The Grimes era was a failure primarily because Grimes was a good writer but a weak critic. You'd think they would have learned. Then again, I guess they couldn't get the first four candidates to take the job, so they went with a company man.

You have quite a few strong choices available: Grace's, Citarella, Agata & Valentina, Eli's, Vinegar Factory, Dean & DeLuca, and some smaller stores . . . . Can you narrow down the geography a bit?

Since this is the general thread I'll keep specific comments about the review off here, but in general Doc I'd say this week he held even, with an acceptable though unimpressive review that contributed nothing to the dialog about Per Se, Thomas Keller, fine dining in New York, restaurant criticism in general, or much of anything else. The thing is, if you can't do a great job on a four-star review then you're almost hopeless as a critic. Four-star reviews should be home runs, not bunts. I feel as though we're celebrating a child learning his multiplication tables. That's certainly cause for celebration if it's your child, but the standard for New York Times critics should be a bit higher.

Exactly right, I think, Jinmyo. And that surely needs to be understood as his operating assumption before anything he says can make much sense to us as mostly non-members of his target audience. In the New York area, our members -- even the ones who rarely or never dine at the starred-restaurant level -- tend to be far more interested in food and food-related substance than the audience he must imagine he's writing for. Even outside of the immediate area, where eGulleters are not typically candidates for going to any of these restaurants on a regular basis, our members tend to focus on food first. While all of us of course enjoy being entertained, Frank Bruni seems to believe entertainment is his mission -- too often to the exclusion of food and other substantive discussion. Indeed it seems that unless a restaurant has three or four stars, he shies away from food discussion -- and what food discussion he does present tends to be symbolic and either in the "gee whiz!" or "this is silly!" category rather than a real critique of food. I'm sure he is under the (mis)impression that we're all just a bunch of food-geek losers and that if he wrote for us nobody in the larger Times audience would be interested. This kind of intentional dumbing-down of content begins with the desire to have increased reach and relevance but ends in dilution and the slide towards British-style restaurant reviewing as sport. A critic needs to lead public opinion, not pander to it. A critic needs to be committed, above all else, to the cause of excellence in what he covers. A critic must believe that what he covers is interesting, and that if people aren't interested enough in the core subject then his job is to make it interesting -- not to avoid it. It's not too late for Frank Bruni to reverse his descent, but every week he digs a deeper hole.

I wonder who Frank Bruni thinks his audience is.

Yeah, Tony hasn't posted in 6 days. What's up with that? For the past several years, this site right here has been one of the only places you could go to read actual criticism and questioning of the Beard Foundation. The tremendous power of the Beard organization has created a code of silence even greater than the one surrounding the Zagats, because while the Zagats are able to intimidate the restaurant industry into silence the Beard Foundation through its stranglehold on the Oscars of the culinary world (the James Beard Awards) intimidates both restaurant industry people and journalists. Not so here. Tony, various other eGulleters, and I have been digging at the Beard Foundation for years (I'm not aware of other Beard Award winners who have been as openly critical, though they may be out there). In May 2003, for example, long before the Daily News (that's where we saw the story, though the Times cites the New York Post) broke this story or the Times researched it in depth, we were asking many of the same questions and noticing some of the same accounting inconsistencies. Tony was asking all the right questions: I noted at the time, for example: We've been noticing, commenting, and trying to be as fair as possible in the process. It's very sad to see the potentially great institution of the Beard House come to this, but it underscores the value of what we do here and the importance of being independent, willing to lose friends in pursuit of truth, and beholden to noone. Ironically, that's part of the reason that, when it came time to secure funding for our organization, we chose the not-for-profit route. This scandal at the Beard House, in addition to the Beard House's long history of institutional defects, underscores the need for nonprofits like ours to be vigilant in how they utilize the funds that have been entrusted to them. It is understandable for a nonprofit to have office expenses, staff expenses, and the like -- it is after all a type of corporation, one without the goal of profit for owners and investors but with corporate expenses nonetheless. But there's a point at which a nonprofit that loses sight of its mission becomes all about feeding the beast and not at all about serving a public constituency. So I hope I speak for all eGulleters when I say that, as we start down the path towards our own not-for-profit form of organization, we let the Beard Foundation be an example of what not to do. Although, to be fair, the Beard House has done many good things as well -- those too should serve as examples.

Dear eGulleters, Last month, we announced that eGullet would soon officially reorganize as a not-for-profit public service organization: the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. We've now implemented software and design changes to reflect our new identity. The eGullet Society now has a new look, expanded features, and a renewed sense of purpose: to increase awareness and knowledge of the arts of cooking, eating, and drinking, and to make further contributions to the literature of food and drink. This autumn will be the most exciting phase in the three-year history of eGullet: our community is at an inflection point. Starting now and continuing throughout the next couple of months, we'll be rolling out dozens of improvements, changes, and new features, including: Our newly designed eGullet Forums, with new software to keep us at the leading edge of online communities A new eGullet Society portal page, bringing together all of our service offerings in one place A new ImageGullet image management system that allows unprecedented flexibility to our users for management of uploaded photos and artwork A revitalized and redesigned webzine, The Daily Gullet, representing the best of eGullet and the world of culinary arts and letters A new semester of the renowned eGullet Culinary Institute Q&A sessions with the leading lights of the food and beverage world, including Mimi Sheraton, Pamela Sheldon Johns, and Andrea Sottimano -- and that's just this month In-depth chronicles of culinary events, such as the opening of chef Grant Achatz's restaurant, Alinea New discussion forums devoted to books, equipment, food culture and history And there’s much more to come. We hope you’ll continue to help us write the eGullet story, as fellow scribes: friends, members, and supporters. If you are not currently an eGullet member, we invite you to read along and join the eGullet Society if you so wish. We will not, however, be accepting any new membership applications for the next 2-3 weeks, while we reengineer our webspace and membership application process. When we reopen our membership application system, we will offer the option of a free membership or several levels of supporting memberships with enhanced features such as larger ImageGullet and Personal Messenger allocations. As we have performed a major technology upgrade and are adding so many new eGullet features in the near future, we ask for your patience and cooperation as our tech team tests, debugs, and modifies. Please visit the eGullet Support & Documentation Center as we add new tech tips, and please use that area for all your support questions. We have assembled a team of knowledgeable eGulleters to answer your questions and brief you on new features. Thank you for your commitment, past, present, and future. On behalf of the eGullet team,

eGullet will be offline from Friday September 3 until Monday September 6 Dear eGulleters, Last month, we announced that eGullet would soon officially reorganize as a not-for-profit public service organization: the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. This weekend, we will have the site offline in order to implement software and design changes to reflect our new identity. We will be back online after the weekend with a new look, expanded features, and a renewed sense of purpose: to increase awareness and knowledge of the arts of cooking, eating, and drinking, and to make further contributions to the literature of food and drink. eGullet is at an inflection point. This upgrade will support us as we: - Improve our service offerings - Relaunch our discussion forums and our webzine - Begin a new semester of the eGullet Culinary Institute - Welcome the leading lights of the food world, as members and special guests - Chronicle events and culinary happenings with unprecedented depth And there’s much more to come. This autumn will be the most exciting phase in the three-year history of eGullet. We hope you’ll continue to help us write its story, as fellow scribes: friends, members, and supporters. Thank you for your commitment, past, present, and future. On behalf of the eGullet team, Steven A. Shaw, Executive Director The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters

A warm welcome to you, Laura. Hope we'll see more of you.

As a fellow Fordham Law alumnus, I salute your effort.

Those of you who live on the UWS or find yourselves there often: maybe you could start getting into the habit of wandering into any restaurant or bar that looks really old and asking for a founding date. We must have dozens of members who live within a couple of minutes of the Emerald Inn, for example. Not to mention all of our members with phones -- but that's pretty ambitious.

Some other memories: The Red Baron -- that was a really strange place; so dark and ominous, corner of 69th and Columbus Sidewalkers -- the crab place on 72nd between Columbus and CPW, I think where Sambuca is now Captain Nemo -- 72nd between Columbus and Amsterdam, seafood What about all the Chinese restaurants on the UWS, especially in the 90s? Weren't a bunch of those around in the 1970s and earlier?

I'm wondering about some of the bars-that-serve-food in the neighborhood. There are several that feel rather ancient, like the Emerald Inn on Columbus between 69th and 70th. I can't remember it ever not being there.