Fat Guy

Announcing a new leader in the competition: Barney Greengrass, 1908. V&T Pizza says 1945. Not exactly pre-WWII, but close. So that brings us to: 1908 Barney Greengrass 1917 Cafe des Artistes 1927 Fine & Schapiro 1934 Tavern on the Green 1945 V&T Pizza

According to William Grimes in the New York Times, Cafe des Artistes has been in business since 1917. According to Tavern's web site, Tavern on the Green opened as a restaurant (it had been home to a herd of sheep since it was built in 1870) in 1934. It fell into disrepair -- no surprise here -- in the early 1970s and closed in 1974, to be reopened by Warner LeRoy (at the time best known as the creator of Maxwell's Plum) in 1976. So right now we have: 1917 Cafe des Artistes 1927 Fine & Schapiro 1934 Tavern on the Green Any others?

Al Buon Gusto "Not Fancy, Just Good." I lived on the UWS, on 69th and Columbus, from the time I was born in 1969 (or whenever it was that I came home from Mt. Sinai hospital, probably a day or two after being born) until 1987 when I went to college. My mother still lives at the same address. My clearest memories are from when I was in high school in the mid-1980s because that's when I was dining autonomously, but I remember a lot of restaurant experiences all the way back to preschool. Boy do I miss a lot of those places. I'm also still very interested in finding out the names of the oldest restaurants in the neighborhood, like anything pre-WWII especially. There must be a bunch of them around, since there are so many pre-WWII buildings in the neighborhood that were obviously designed for well-to-do people to live in. Most such places would have likely been wiped out during the UWS's Dark Ages of urban decline, but surely a few other than Fine & Schapiro stayed in the game through those times.

But that doesn't make decor more important than food. One way to think of it is to say that concerns of decor and service operate at the margins: you need the foundation of food to bring you up to the category threshold but you need the other bits to push you across into the next category. Although, I think of the system as more holistic than that in practice. But it's not "my" system anyway. I'm describing the system that exists, not only for the New York Times but also for Michelin and pretty much any major organization that has devoted the time and effort to developing a star-based rating system -- it always comes out the same way. You could design a different system where you could get four stars for serving great food on paper plates, and you could like that system better, but it wouldn't be the system. Now it so happens that I think the system, in addition to actually being the system, makes a lot of sense -- it's no coincidence that whether you're Michelin, the Times, Mobil, or AAA, once you approach this sort of thing institutionally over time you wind up with similar systems. And as a result I know that a NYT four-star/Michelin three-star/AAA five diamond/whatever restaurant is going to provide a certain level of experience: a luxury package of food, decor, and service. I don't have to worry that I'm going to show up at a four-star restaurant and it's going to be the All State Cafe with Jean-Georges's food. Not that it would bother me if I did, but radical foodies like me are not any successful business's target audience. And since no such restaurant exists, we don't currently need a system that describes it. The closest thing we have is a restaurant like Masa, which presents a quirky challenge to the star system, but such an example doesn't justify uprooting the whole system, which works for most restaurants that are likely to be the subject of review -- indeed the (questionable) strategy thus far has been to review Masa but not to give it a rating at all. Then again in 1968 Peter Luger presented a challenge (best-of-its-kind food served unartfully) and seems to have been given four stars despite its non-decor and at-best-utilitarian service, but from a normative standpoint I have to think that rating was a glitch and has to do with the system at the time being under development and lacking in institutional precedent. Either that, or Peter Luger was a very different restaurant at that time, surrounded by a context that's even more different than I'm giving it credit for. I've tried to be a well-behaved manager of content by splitting the Upper West Side restaurant history issue off into its own topic. In terms of the star system, I'm dreading what will happen to me when Sam Kinsey wakes up and finds another star system debate on a topic that wasn't supposed to be about that, so I better duck out of that one except insofar as the 1968 versus 2004 sub-issue is concerned.

Are you certain that Al Buon Gusto took the SQC space after closing on 72nd? I though at that time the space was Peretti's, though maybe I'm not properly coordinated as to the date ranges. Also, for double bonus points, can you tell us what Al Buon Gusto's slogan was?

I believe it was called Susse Chalet, in the Hotel Olcott building, which then became Dallas Jones BBQ, then Dallas BBQ, and now everybody just calls it BBQ -- there are also quite a few branches around the city now, at least 5. I don't know if there was continuity of ownership, but the basic food has always been pretty much the same. There doesn't seem to be a history/about page on the web site: http://www.bbqnyc.com/

Inspired by the 1968 thread, I wanted to start a separate topic to discuss Upper West Side restaurant history. I'll contribute the first informational tidbit: the venerable Fine & Schapiro delicatessen on 72nd Street apparently dates to 1927. Not sure if the location has changed or not. Upon learning this tidbit, I checked it against Zagat's historic restaurant list and didn't find it. It almost didn't occur to me to look at the Zagat entry for Fine & Schapiro to see if the date is noted there. Much to my surprise, Fine & Schapiro turns out not to be in Zagat.

I don't see it as "more critical." The food always forms the baseline. You can never make bad food into four-star food by improving decor and service. In this regard stars can serve to distinguish restaurants with equally excellent food but with variance in service, decor, culinary aesthetics, etc. As I've mentioned a few times on eGullet, it's best not to view the stars as a value judgment about one thing being morally superior to another. Rather, the stars are a classification system that attempts to be communicative. It is no insult to be a one-star restaurant if you offer a food/decor/service package at a certain price point and level of ambition. Under those circumstances it's high praise to get a star, because it means you've succeeded at what you set out to do. In terms of four-star Chinese restaurants, I see two levels to the inquiry. First, there is the matter of recapturing the level of Chinese dining that existed at Shun Lee Dynasty, Uncle Tai's, et al. -- in other words just getting back to the level we were at 35 years ago. Second, there is the matter of context: 35 years ago the four-star bar was simply lower. So if Shun Lee Dynasty could be imported in its entirety from the past to today, it would probably at best get one star less than it got back then. In order to push it to four, it would need to have an additional uptick in food and service -- although they could still use the Russel Wright tableware. I agree with Oakapple that a paradigm shift of sorts would be needed to get to a four-star Chinese restaurant. But to be clear the paradigm shift would need to occur among restaurateurs and consumers. The critics are and have long been completely ready to give four stars to non-French restaurants. Craig Claiborne did it. Ruth Reichl wanted nothing more than to do it but couldn't find a serious candidate (she nonetheless pushed all bounds of credibility by giving three stars to places that deserved one or none), and Frank Bruni has explicitly indicated a willingness to consider any and all cuisines for four stars. So I think sometimes when people suggest that the star system is rigged against non-French restaurants they put the cart before the horse. It seems to me that the non-French/non-nouvelle-American four-star restaurants just aren't being built, not because restaurateurs think they won't get enough stars but because they think that no matter how many stars they get they won't be able to fill a $150 per head Chinese restaurant every night. Sure, there are plenty of Chinese restaurants like Oriental Garden where it's possible to spend $150 a head, or even $1000+ a head if you get into exotic ingredients like the various levels of abalone and shark fin. But st most of those restaurants you can also have dinner for $25 per person based on entrees that range from $8 to $18, not to mention you can get a $5.95 General Tso's chicken lunch special with choice of white rice or brown rice, soup or egg roll. The question isn't can you spend $150 at a Chinese restaurant; the question is can a Chinese restaurant succeed if everybody who walks through the door has to spend $150 or more. I have no doubt that a Chinese luxury restaurant would sell less wine than Daniel does, but it could sell a decent amount of wine through an ambitious wine program. It could also make up the shortfall in other areas: just as in any given luxury dining room most people are spending less than $100 on wine and a few rich folks are spending $5000, in a Chinese luxury dining room you can have most people spending $150 on food but a few rich folks spending thousands of dollars on abalone and the like -- and of course a luxury environment encourages that sort of spending one-upsmanship. It will be interesting to see what happens if and when 66 hits its stride and gets re-reviewed, preferably by a critic with a clue. With improvement, 66 could no doubt be a three-star Chinese restaurant. At that point, once the template for three-star Chinese dining circa 2005 is created, it's mostly a question of money and ambition to modify that template in order to push across into four-star territory. I do think that if we have a four-star restaurant between now and 2010 it will be more like 66 than Shun Lee Dynasty, and that if we have a four-star Japanese restaurant it will not grow out of Sushi Yasuda and Kuruma Zushi (which I think may have reached the apex of that genre unless one thinks Masa should get four stars) but, rather, out of a modernized version of Sugiyama or Inagiku, or a smaller and more disciplined version of Megu.

Working on it.

I've never studied S&W's aging facilities so I wouldn't want to make factual assumptions specific to that establishment, but speaking generally about the top-level steakhouses the answer to that question is almost always no. The double-cut strip is typically cut from the same shell as the single-cut strip, but that's about as far as it goes. Steakhouses do not typically traffic in sides of beef, or even quarters, and in many cases not even sub-primal cuts. As far as I know the filet is rarely aged at all and is usually purchased as tenderloins. A typical restaurant delivery covering strip, filet, and rib would consist of just that: whole shells, whole tenderloins, and whole rib sections. These could easily vary in quality within a given steakhouse: the demand for the short loin cuts (strip, filet, porterhouse) is significantly more than the demand for rib cuts. This is so predictable, in fact, that as you go lower in the pecking order of steakhouses you should almost always order the rib because the second- and third-tier places just have a much better chance of getting good ribs than of getting anything good from the short loin. Also, from the short loin, you will find very few USDA Prime filets because of the demand for porterhouses -- so the filet, to the extent you'd even consider ordering one, is only likely to be really good at the very best steakhouses.

For porterhouse I'd choose Luger's or Wolfgang's depending on how much travel and discomfort I'm willing to endure. Not that I had the porterhouse at V, but given the reports it may be months before I even try one and what are the odds it's going to be comparable to what Luger's has? For a ribeye or filet based on my experience last night I'd choose V. The only reason I'd go to S&W would be for a double-cut strip, although they do have a nice ribeye there as well (not as good as the one I had at V, though). Sparks, although it serves a good boneless strip, just doesn't make my short list most of the time. But I'm not always the only person who needs to be accommodated in a steakhouse destination decision. Most people in the dining public care a lot more than I do about things like decor and service. The decor and service at V are so far and away superior to those at the other places you've mentioned, there's just no non-ridiculous argument for considering them to be in the same category. It's not just a nicer place than any steakhouse; it's one of the nicest restaurants out there. It's fabulously spacious and comfortable and has an incredible panoramic view of Central Park and Columbus Circle. I mean, maybe Victoria Falls would be a better view, but for an urban restaurant in America this is about as good as it gets. In addition, there is actual cuisine being served at V, you know, like real restaurant dishes that would be designed by a chef like Jean-Georges Vongerichten. We're not talking about just good examples of steakhouse sides and appetizers. We're talking serious modern haute cuisine, plus Niman Ranch steaks cooked in brick ovens.

Finally made it to V last night, after rescheduling about a million times. The joint was packed on a Thursday night in August, the energy in the room felt great because it was palpable yet didn't lead to noise (good acoustic design) or crowding (well-spaced tables). Like oakapple I enjoyed the room, which wasn't to my taste as such but was attractive and very comfortable. The service was superb, aside from a couple of newbie backwaiter mistakes -- none of that bothered me, both on account of the newness of the place and, more importantly, because of the positive attitude of everyone we dealt with on the waitstaff. On the much-maligned deconstructed dishes, I thought some worked and others didn't. The deconstructed onion soup accomplished what I think such an exercise should accomplish: it improves the experience of the dish and provides a degree of amusement and intrigue. It is essentially a first-rate cheese-and-caramelized-onion fondue served with croutons and crisps and a wonderful beef broth on the side. What could possibly be objectionable about that? It's delicious, it's fun, it's attractive . . . it is in my opinion better than onion soup done the traditional way because the bread isn't soggy. I also thought the shrimp cocktail construction was very special -- to answer Frank Bruni's question, "Are the idea and effect of shrimp cocktail enhanced by making the shrimp warm and setting them adrift in a horseradish consommé?" Absolutely, after tasting the dish I think the answer is yes. Later on, I thought the lemon meringue composition was less successful -- again to answer Bruni's question, "Does a lemon meringue "composition" that comes in a half-dozen unhinged pieces represent a bold culinary advance or merely a brash intellectual diversion?" I think the answer is the latter, though it's not the intellectual diversion that bothers me but, rather, the feeling that there was less satisfaction in lemon meringue pie broken into components than in a nice piece of lemon meringue pie. The problem, for me, was that the pastry department, in attempting to mimic the successful deconstructed appetizers, missed the point: unlike the appetizers, which presented interesting contrasts of texture and temperature, and which were presented in whimsical and engaging ways, the lemon meringue composition was a series of soft-textured (even the parts that were supposed to be crustlike were quite soft) room-temperature lumps of goo and mush artlessly spooned around a bowl. It doesn't inspire any hostility in me; it just wasn't a good dish. On the steaks, I thought they were fantastic. We had the Niman Ranch ribeye for two and the 12-ounce filet. The ribeye was right up there with the best ribeyes I've had, and the filet was thankfully un-filet-like in that it had actual deep beef flavor and wasn't just all about soft mushy tenderness. I especially liked the balance between the flavor contributed by a little char on the exterior and the need to treat these delicately flavored steaks gently. These specially designed brick ovens that V is using are very successful at preserving the integrity of the steak while enhancing it with just the right amount of moderate char. Both steaks were cooked exactly to order. Side dishes, condiments, and a few other savory items we tried were uniformly first-rate. The pastry situation was not as successful. Though the molten-center chocolate cake with salted caramel ice cream was as good as can be, the other two desserts we tried were, I felt, very weak. In addition to the lemon meringue composition being, I think, a dud, the almond cake with figs was almost worthy of being sent back -- the figs weren't even ripe. Red wine is gloriously kept at 58 degrees; this was such a relief because the past half dozen times I've dined at restaurants at this level I've had to ask for the red wine, which was certainly into the 70s, to be chilled down for 15 or so minutes. In all, a very impressive upscale creative variant of a steakhouse meal. In terms of the star rating, of course the steak has to form the core of the food component of such a rating. Certainly, the reports here indicate that there is inconsistency in the quality of the steak. But to be entirely clear, this was never cited by Frank Bruni as justification for his one-star rating. To the contrary, he had nothing but praise for the steaks, and based his low rating (low for an establishment of this level of ambition, both culinary and otherwise) on his clueless critique of the style of the deconstructed appetizers and such: Again on the steak: I believe the above represents the entire universe of what Frank Bruni said about the steaks at V. So when looking at oakapple's contention that "a steakhouse must be judged mainly on the quality of its steaks, and V fails to deliver the goods," it appears that Frank Bruni disagrees with both clauses: he believes V steakhouse does deliver on its promise with regard to the steaks, but his review amply demonstrates that he doesn't believe a steakhouse should be judged on its steaks.

Mr. K's is a good example, however, of form over substance. A three- or even borderline-four-star dining room, geared up for a potential level of service and opulence that could have competed with the Shun Lee Dynasty and Uncle Tai's type places of old, but without culinary ambition. I think it was David Rosengarten's review -- someone correct me if I'm wrong -- that was all about how Mr. K's was great so long as you ordered nothing from the menu. I believe that if Mr. K had combined the form of his restaurant concept with the substance of truly great Chinese cuisine he'd have had a three-star restaurant on his hands. Murray's I can certainly believe has remained just about unchanged since opening day. It definitely feels that way. The others, though, are I think mostly creations of the 1970s and forward, driven by the renaissance of the Upper West Side that resulted from the construction of Lincoln Center. Fairway is I think a post-war establishment -- something like 1947 -- but that's only a question of technical ownership of the original produce shop. The Fairway we know today didn't come into existence until I was in the first grade (1975), when Howard Glickberg, Harold Seybert, Dave Sneddon took over and reoriented the place towards being a Zabar's competitor but with the addition of produce. Zabar's dates to 1934 but, again, it's not until the 1970s with the opening of the mezzanine and the Murray Klein era that it became what we today consider Zabar's to be. Citarella, although the corporate name dates back to 1912 and the Sugar Hill store, didn't come into Joe Gurrera's hands until 1983 -- there I have a clear before and after memory of two different types of operations: a small traditional fish market versus something much more ambitious. The point being, to address both your point and oakapple's response, these markets in their current conceptions are not too terribly old and are more personality-driven than most people might give them credit for. In terms of the neighborhood's restaurants, that situation has to be looked at in the context of the neighborhood. How could there possibly have been a successful fine-dining restaurant on the Upper West Side around 1970, when most of the neighborhood was borderline in terms of safety and prosperity? It's barely possible to sustain such a restaurant there today, when it's one of the wealthier and safer neighborhoods in the world. Likewise, with gentrification one sees turnover in the types of establishments that service a neighborhood. A food market can adapt; it's much harder to adapt a restaurant. So the old red-sauce Italian place gives way to a more upscale "Northern Italian" place with a sidewalk cafe -- which may very well have the same owner but no way in hell is it going to have the same name. Meanwhile, there do seem to be plenty of hangers-on at the low-end in the neighborhood: I recognize several of the same bars and diners that were there in the early 1970s (my earliest memories) and they already seemed old then.

There are no dim sum baskets as such, and also no carts, at China 46. It's a totally scalable meal because if you're 10 people they'll bring you 10 pieces of each thing and if you're 1 person they'll bring you a couple of pieces at a time. Also, you won't likely find most standard dim sum items -- I don't recall seeing beef tripe or chicken legs or feet, though they do have plenty of stuff that's exotic to Westerners. There hasn't yet been an organized outing to the Sunday brunch, has there? We've just had a bunch of informal groups going and reporting back. I'd be up for a larger-scale event, maybe in mid-September -- can you say eGullet Society fundraiser?

We've asked to have that feature added to version 2.0 of the software.

Carrot Top, while I certainly agree with much of that sentiment, and while I favor cultural explanations over economic or demographic ones in most areas, I'm also swayed by the numbers: I just can't imagine that it's any coincidence that the urban-area population statistics and the rank-order of top restaurant cities in America are almost entirely lock-step, and that when they aren't lock-step there's a very good reason for it like Las Vegas's status as major tourism destination or New Orleans's uniquely rich local culinary tradition.

Countless commuters live in Baltimore and travel to DC every day by car, MARC, etc. People traveling to DC often fly into the Baltimore airport. Although I'm not a regular follower of urban planning literature, I have seen many references to Baltimore and Washington as being one urban area, and a so-called "consolidated urban commuting market." Although Baltimore is certainly a city in its own right, there is also a part of its character that pegs it as a DC suburb. Baltimore and Washington are 35 miles apart, roughly the distance between New York City and suburbs like Greenwich, CT. I don't have familiarity with all the units, but they weren't just invented randomly. Having been to Miami plenty of times, though, I'm confident that the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale designation is correct. Driving along that stretch, you'd be forgiven for thinking you never left one city and entered another. Of course the important question is do the people in these metro area circles support the restaurants at the core. I think in terms of business commuters, the answer is usually yes for quite a few of them. We have some Washington, DC, restaurant people on eGullet who could probably tell us what kind of business they do with Baltimore residents. I assume enough to make Baltimore pretty important to high-end DC restaurants' business plans. Or maybe not.

You'll get a list that conforms more to your expectations if you use urban-area population, not city population as such. If you just look at city population, you give a major promotion to a city like Houston, which has defined so many of its suburbs as part of the city, and you demote DC and San Francisco, which have smaller city populations but are actually two of the five largest urban areas in the US. http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/U...tropolitan-area

There are also more and less urban cities. If there is no downtown to speak of, or if the downtown is not the focus of the dining scene, the better restaurants will of necessity position themselves in suburbs or parts of the city that are nearly indistinguishable from suburbs. Los Angeles and New York, the two largest urban areas in the US, are quite different in their layouts. Los Angeles has many of the features one would typically assign to suburbs, such as general lack of walkability and limited public transportation. Nonetheless, Los Angeles has, to me, a tangibly urban dining scene. I think the critical mass and concentration of population may have more to do with the dining scene than the way an area is organized. I don't think it's a coincidence that if you look at urban-area population statistics the five largest cities in America are also the five that would most commnly be held out as the nation's top five dining cities: New York, LA, Chicago, DC, San Francisco. And if you look down any top-50 cities list by population, it correlates pretty well to a list that gourmets would make, though there are exceptions like New Orleans and Las Vegas, both of which are smaller cities that have managed to occupy unique culinary niches.

On the larger issue of suburban versus urban styles of dining, I think there are both actual and perceived differences. The actual differences, being part of the fabric of reality, are not exactly subject to debate based on whether or not they insult or upset anyone. For example, that it's harder to find qualified servers for high-end restaurants in the suburbs than in the large cities is simply a factual, documentable statement. The perceived differences between urban and suburban dining, however, tend to be personal and heavily colored by whether one is a partisan of suburbs or cities. As a lifelong urban dweller and partisan of Manhattan, my perceptions of suburban dining are just that. All I can say is that I try to maintain an open mind about all restaurants, and I try to judge them on their own terms not based on where they happen to be located. I have a car and do more reverse-commuting for suburban dining than probably 99% of New York City residents -- that would be true even if you only counted my visits to China 46 in New Jersey. That being said, my perception is that there is indeed a significant difference between the urban and suburban restaurant scenes beyond that which can simply be documented by looking at menus, balance sheets, etc. There are exceptions to those rules -- certainly the Asian food scene in Northern New Jersey is second to none -- but the exceptions are just that. I have nothing but the utmost respect for those who have chosen the suburbs for reasons of economics, liveability, and especially family life (schools, safety of children, manageability, etc.). However, I would say if one chooses the suburbs for culinary reasons one is probably quite mad. Perhaps if you have the means to dine at the French Laundry every day, and you would enjoy doing that, you could make a case for living in Yountville instead of San Francisco. But really, come on, trying to argue that a given suburb, or even all the suburbs taken together, offers the level and range of dining options of the major cities like New York, San Francisco, DC, et al., is just an exercise in sophistry. There is no urban or suburban cuisine as such. But I do think it's safe to say that the urban/suburban dichotomy in the culinary arts is similar to the urban/suburban dichotomy in most any other sphere of creative arts-type endeavor: the large cities are the focal points for a million reasons. Is it possible to eat well in the suburbs? Yes, just as it is possible to see excellent arts performances in the suburbs. Do the suburbs offer the range and depth of dining experiences that the major cities offer? Of course not, just as no suburb has five opera companies or opera performances most every night. Unlike opera, however, which is something one can make do without, everybody has to have food. So into the suburban depth/breadth gap flow the chains. Not that all the chains are bad. I say it not as a value judgment but as a statement of the general suburban dining reality. There are better and worse chains, and some suburbs have a lot of good ones. The problem of drinking and driving is also a major issue with respect to suburbs, where most every restaurant must be accessed by car. This creates an economic issue that limits the ability of fine-dining restaurants to thrive in areas without good walkability and public transportation. There are workarounds, but designated driver situations can impede festivity (especially insofar as couples are concerned) and most suburbanites are more likely not to drink, or to drink just one glass of wine, than to use a taxi service. Perhaps the most interesting perceptual issue, to me, is that of the self-hating suburbanite. It seems to me that there are many suburban dwellers who dine out all the time in high style, spend tremendous amounts of money on wine, etc., but do so only in the cities. They would never spend that kind of money in the suburbs. They see the local restaurants as the places where they take their kids, ask for sauce on the side, and dine in 45 minutes. The celebrations, the business entertaining, the date nights . . . these all occur in the city while the kids are home with a babysitter. There are I think many suburban dwellers who see living in the suburbs as a sacrifice they made for family-oriented reasons. I think if they looked around more carefully and had a bit of an attitude adjustment, they'd find some interesting food closer to home -- or they'd create the demand for it, as is happening more and more these days.

The Post's review of Per Se strikes me as reasonable in its analysis of the particulars. If my own meal at Per Se is representative, and even if there have been some improvements (and I'm sure there have), the restaurant can be faulted for many things and I find many of Cuozzo's comments to be more convincing than what we might call the gushing consumer baseline. Where I have problems with the review is in the meta-dialog about the opening, the star rating, etc. Because, simply put, if Per Se is not a four-star restaurant then there is no such thing as a four-star restaurant. To me, Per Se defines the four-star genre, not vice-versa. A four-star restaurant needn't be perfect. Perfect restaurants don't exist. It's possible to experience many imperfections and inconsistencies yet still embrace a four-star rating. Anybody who has dined at a given Michelin three-star restaurant (shifting gears for a moment from the prevailing four-star concept in New York to the Michelin three-star system) on, say, five occasions will likely have stories to tell of dishes that just weren't all that great, of the occasional service misstep, etc. At some point, if the sum total of such imperfections is great enough, yes, it means a star must be taken away. But Per Se strikes me as, unequivocally, a four-star restaurant with some kinks to work out, not a three-star restaurant that may someday become a four-star restaurant. Of course the star system in play at the Post is essentially Mr. Cuozzo's personal creation, so whatever he considers to be a three-star restaurant is by definition a New York Post three-star restaurant. But if that system gives three stars to Per Se, it is an indictment of that system and not of Per Se, which is one of the most remarkable New York restaurants to come along in my dining lifetime. The only two establishments that I'd place in the same category are Gray Kunz's Lespinasse and Alain Ducasse New York. Each of which, incidentally, started out with three-star ratings from the Times and then graduated to four. There is perhaps a reasonable argument, especially under an institutional system like Michelin's where the top restaurants are re-ranked every year, that a new restaurant can never get the top rating in its first year. That, fundamental to the nature of restaurants, is that it takes at least a year to work out the basic kinks. I think, however, that in a newspaper rating system where restaurants are only revisited as needed, an early review needs to include an anticipatory component. Is there any sane person who questions that a four-star rating for Per Se is, absent the physical destruction of the restaurant or Thomas Keller, inevitable? There may also be a fundamental problem with the 20-course shotgun approach to dining, which seems to inspire so much forgiveness even if 5 of the dishes are weak. Nonetheless, without forgiving the approach, I would view it as something to discuss within the four-star context, just as I would call Pierre Gagnaire a Michelin three-star restaurant even if I disagreed fundamentally with Gagnaire's approach to cuisine. One wonders, finally, about the meaning of some of Mr. Cuozzo's comments. Is he really giving three stars for the imperfections? Or is the not-so-secret agenda really driving the withholding of a star? When I see language like "Per Se might be on its way to the four stars it seems to regard as its birthright. But Keller is making himself oddly scarce around the joint," I wonder whether the cited imperfections aren't more along the lines of a pretext, and whether what we're really seeing is a repeat of some of the resentment-driven reactions to Ducasse.

One needn't agree or care about the differences between urban and suburban dining in order to understand what a person who says "not too suburban" means. When a person uses "suburban" in its pejorative sense it means unexciting, lowest common denominator, bourgeois and conventional. So it's not hard to figure out what David's client means on the level of vocabulary. The challenge is translating that desire to avoid boring sameness into a menu that isn't driven by a desire to avoid boring sameness (in other words a menu that's defined by what it isn't) but is, rather, driven by a real sense of creativity and excitement (in other words a menu that's defined by what it is). Chefette is right on the money here, as far as I'm concerned. I'd also suggest bearing in mind that a menu is a whole document, not just a collection of dishes, and that the food itself is served in a context. Chicken wings served at TGI Friday's present one context; chicken wings at Spice Market present another. There is always room for departures. And sometimes small alterations to presentation or even just description can do more to further a menu's mission than 40 ingredients from around the world. You can serve short ribs with "mashed potatoes" on a plate, or you can serve short rib meat layered with "potato puree" in a cocktail glass.

I'm surprised that, a couple of months into this venture, the NYBC people still apparently haven't changed their approach to making those patties. I was pretty sure, back at the beginning of July, that it was just going to be a matter of tweaking before we saw a far superior burger. The restaurant's concept is a good one. The beef they're using is first-rate and flavorful, and the fat content seems right, so all the tools are there. This seeming lack of progress, then, is something of a disappointment. I suppose the lunch rush has been so intense of late that there hasn't been much impetus or time to do anything except work within the already established system. Luckily, there's still plenty of time to fix the implementation.

I wonder what percentage of businesses in general last 36 years, though. My conscious memory goes back more like 30 years but when I recall the Upper West Side just north of Lincoln Center (which itself wasn't completed until 1968 -- in 1962 my father said to my mother, "You know, they're building this thing called Lincoln Center and we can afford an apartment near there; maybe if we get one now it will be a nice neighborhood in a few years," and that's the only smart economic decision he ever made -- my mother still lives in that same rent-controlled apartment) I can hardly remember any businesses that are still there today. A walk up Columbus Avenue from Columbus Circle to 72nd Street, for example, takes you past about a hundred commercial establishments only a handful of which were around in the early 1970s. Small businesses that survive the retirement or death of the original owner are the exceptions, and if you figure most people don't start their own businesses until they've acquired some experience and capital and are into their thirties then a 30-40-year lifespan for a typical successful small business makes sense. A franchise or a generic establishment can of course just be transferred and operated by another person, but a business with the owner's personal stamp on it is a lot less durable. My sense of Chinese food is that two things have changed. For one thing, the grand, palatial, luxurious Chinese fine-dining establishment no longer really exists in New York. There are a few such places remaining, and every once in awhile somebody tries to open one, but they feel tired. Chinese food, and indeed all non-Japanese Asian food, has migrated firmly into the middle and lower tiers of the market. For another thing, the relative quality of Chinese restaurants has changed. When you consider that in the 1960s and 1970s places like Le Veau d' Or were thought to be the best Western restaurants in New York, and at the same time you had Chinese places like Shun Lee Dynasty with its Russel Wright-designed china and serving accessories (take that, Grant Achatz!), it's no wonder there were four-star Chinese restaurants. Today, however, what Chinese restaurant compares in luxuriousness and culinary ambition to Per Se? More generally, it seems that in the 1960s there weren't many restaurants at all that conform to current notions of a four-star restaurant, where the cuisine and all the trappings need to be first-rate. Peter Luger, presumably very similar then to now albeit with the waiters being several decades younger, was probably perceived in a totally different light than it is by today's educated dining public. In addition, restaurants that truly served outstanding food based on the best and freshest products were in that era exceptional -- in 1968, what percentage of the fish and vegetables served at then-four-star La Caravelle and La Grenouille were not frozen, who knew the name of any chef, and who dined out for the food? Restaurant reviewing itself, moreover, was a completely new discipline. Nobody had really done it, in the modern sense, before Craig Claiborne. He created the system without much in the way of references or precedent, so it reflected much more of his personality than an institutional and precedent-based system. It seems to me that Bryan Miller was most mindful of institutional considerations -- both at the New York Times and in the restaurant context in general -- and that the critics since Miller have been less cognizant of that sense of historical continuity.

Ridiculing the Avant-Garde: Chef G, it occurs to me, looking at your incredibly ambitious plans for service pieces, which I assume will be echoed in the boldness of every other aspect of Alinea, that a lot of people -- especially media people who see themselves charged with representing average tastes -- are going to think it's all completely ridiculous. And they're likely to rake you over the coals, call you and your restaurant weird and bizarre, and have a lot of fun at your expense. What can we do here, in terms of explaining what it is you're trying to do, to help preempt some of that kind of anti-creative thinking and behavior? Let's make sure the message of the culinary avant-garde gets out loud and clear. How do you explain yourself to the most jaded, cynical doubter?