Fat Guy

Teddy's has one of the most wonderfully bizarre histories of any New York restaurant. For fear of getting the details wrong, I'll simply refer you all to an outside source: It gets better: For the full Teddy's eulogy, see: http://www.tribecatrib.com/newsjune04/crown-jewel-down.html

The plan is for the Shake Shack to be open year-round.

It's nice to see that sort of historical context in a restaurant review. While I don't always agree with Lape's conclusions, I think he's the most grounded of today's reviewers in that regard: he has a strong sense of the past, present, and future of fine dining. I wonder, though, if I'd concur with "creative French cuisine" as a description of what Per Se and French Laundry are serving. Perhaps the boundaries of creative cuisines are so difficult to define these days that it's silly to argue for distinctions, but I have to think that while Keller's cuisine certainly shows French influences it could not be found in France. It's no more French to me than the cuisine at Charlie Trotter's. It seems significantly less French than Bouley. That there are French and global influences is a given. But I'd be more inclined to call Keller's cuisine American.

There's no way to say enough good things about the C46 Sunday brunch. The value is incredible: you pay $11.99 and they feed you exceptionally high-quality and varied Shanghai, Sichuan, and Cantonese cuisine as though the world is coming to an end. At C46 at dinnertime, assuming you're a hearty-eating eGulleter, you'd pay $25-30 per person for the same meal. At any Shanghai-type place in NYC, you'd pay more like $40 per person and it wouldn't be as good. The printed-menu dim sum selection alone -- unlimited amounts, made to order in the kitchen -- is worth double the entry price. The cold Shanghai appetizer buffet is a welcome relief from steam-table sameness. In the actual chafing dishes, quantities are kept small and dishes come out in rotation so the food stays vibrant. Soups and dumplings are made to order at a hot food station. Little treats emerge from the kitchen throughout the meal. It's amazing. With tax and tip, $15 per person.

We have a flash movie involving mutant gerbils in the works, but we're going to focus on text and images for the time being. Later on, we'll see what we can do within the limits of our resources and technology. If a good reason to use media outside our current repertoire -- such as the imminent need to document the comings and goings of mutant gerbils in real time -- presents itself, we'll try to pursue an appropriate course of action. But primarily the depth and breadth we're striving for are in the types of information we plan to present. Anybody can talk about a restaurant opening: we see it on Food TV, we read about openings in magazines and newspapers. But that's not true documentation. We're going to be a primary source, not a secondary source. This isn't a TV show or an article about the Alinea opening; this is the Alinea opening. We're looking to go deeper inside than anybody ever has before. We're going to live through this whole process with Grant Achatz and his team. Again, though, talk is cheap: watch and see what happens.

Maggie, while restaurant openings have been chronicled in various ways in the past, I'm quite sure nothing of this scope, depth, immediacy, and variety has ever been attempted. But talk is cheap: watch it develop and be amazed. Chris, you're probably navigating through "New Posts" so you're missing the forum we're in. Start reading here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=49670

This is my mother's recipe for lemon squares, honed over many years making thousands of lemon squares. It's very simple, like Wendy's recipe but with a few different minor choices made on the specifics. It's very elegant and produces a more archetypal end product than many more complex and professional-type recipes. +++ CRUST - 2 cups flour - 2 sticks butter - 1/2 cup powdered sugar Melt butter and add sugar and flour. Cook for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F in a greased 15-1/2" x 10-1/2" x 1" jelly roll pan. TOPPING - 4 extra large eggs - 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar - 1 tsp baking powder - 1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice - 1 tbsp grated lemon rind - Pinch of salt Mix together and pour over crust. Bake for an additional 20 to 25 minutes. Cool and sprinkle a very thin layer of powdered sugar over top. +++ I'm not exactly sure what the baking powder does -- I'm accustomed to seeing baking powder coupled with flour, and there's no flour in this topping -- but my mother says it makes the topping "frothy."

In the wee hours of June 4, 2004, Grant Achatz ("chefg" on eGullet) announced the creation of his new restaurant concept: Alinea. After briefing the eGullet community on the planned restaurant's background and introducing the creative team, Achatz threw down the gauntlet: It is my intention to keep up to the best of my ability with this thread. We are also entertaining the thought of documenting the development of Alinea after August 15th on our website. Both in the physical changes to the building as far as design, and the results of the test kitchen and dish development. Maybe we can work something out with egullet to help organize this in a productive way. The eGullet team quickly swung into action. Starting this week we will present a series of reports documenting the opening of Alinea. eGullet Heartland forum host Ron Kaplan ("ronnie_suburban") and eGullet site manager Jonathan Day will be working with the Achatz team and a group of eGullet volunteers to bring you these reports. We'll be starting out nice and easy, with some basic background. As we build towards the opening of Alinea and beyond, we hope to increase the frequency and variety of the reports and seize this opportunity to to push the boundaries of new media and the culinary avant garde. We hope you will join eGullet and Grant Achatz in this encounter with what is sure to be one of the most exciting new restaurants to open in years. The story begins here

I wonder if the various claims that Le Veau d'Or has been unchanged since 1937 are really true. If so, it would be a fascinating case study in how the standards evolve and leave behind the restaurants that don't. From four stars in 1968 to not even being in Zagat and having virtually no foodie footprint in 2004 -- that's quite a slide. Or perhaps the claims of immutability are exaggerrated and Le Veau d'Or was a truly great restaurant 35 years ago but is now, despite its past, just an average-quality bistro. Regardless, perhaps someone would like to track down this Robert Treboux fellow at Le Veau d'Or -- sounds like he's easy to find -- and have a conversation with him, for the purposes of preparing a report for eGullet. I bet he has some stories to tell. PM me if that project appeals to you.

Thanks emsny -- we're becoming quite the archive here! I wish I'd been able to dine at Le Cygne. Is Maurice where Delouvrier was in 1986?

La Grenouille is still in play, same location since 1962.

An eGullet reader named Todd Kornfeld saw the thread Back to the Future: The NYC Restaurant Scene, 1994 and sent me the following information: Thank you Todd.

Just for perspective's sake, I'll try to type up the lists of starred establishments as of the 1994 Times guide, bearing in mind that these are Bryan Miller's ratings mostly from 1992 and before: FOUR STARS Bouley Le Bernardin Le Cirque Lutece The Quilted Giraffe THREE STARS An American Place Arizona 206 Aureole Cafe des Artistes Chanterelle Darbar The Four Seasons Gotham Bar & Grill Jo Jo La Caravelle La Cote Basque La Grenouille La Reserve Le Perigord Les Celebrites Lespinasse Montrachet Park Bistro Periyali The River Cafe The Sign of the Dove Union Square Cafe I'll type up the two- and one-star places another time -- the lists are quite a bit longer. Or if someone is willing to do it I'll fax you the pages. By the way, I stand corrected on my claim above that Periyali was the only "ethnic" three-star. Darbar, an Indian restaurant, had three stars from Bryan Miller as well. I think those two ratings cast some doubt on Ruth Reichl's characterization of Bryan Miller as staunchly anti-ethnic. I think it's probably more correct to say he just didn't quite buy into the Japanese aesthetic. Aside from Japanese upscale restaurants, most of Ruth Reichl's other high ratings for Asian places are very difficult to justify.

Probably no stars. Look at a place like Starwich. They're following a close cousin of that template, right down to redefining the genre and using the Roderick Institute of Hospitality system for staff training, albeit not quite as extreme. They'll never get even a single star. The star system is defined by fine-dining at its pinnacle, and everything else flows from there. No amount of dressing up the concept of a hot dog joint is going to bring it in line with that system. It's possible that, at a grand luxe restaurant, a chef could do some sort of cheeky nouvelle interpretation of the hot dog in a four-star context, just as Daniel Boulud's DB burger is accepted as a menu offering at in his nouvelle bistro context, but that's the closest the hamburger or hot dog is likely to come to having stars. I think it's healthiest to look at the star system as a system for rating fine-dining restaurants, as a way of dividing up the reviewing burden among the staff, and not as a value judgment about the superiority of those restaurants as such. Pizza, burgers, et al., are simply rated on a different system, by different writers, in different formats.

It may be possible for a hypothetical grand-luxe restaurant serving, say, the cuisine of Escoffier, with impeccable service, a tremendous wine list, and a room to match, to get a four-star review. It's not likely, however, because nobody puts that kind of effort behind traditional restaurants in New York. We don't have the equivalent of Grand Vefour here, and our Taillevent-equivalent places -- like Gramercy Tavern -- tend to operate at the three-star level of luxury. There was thought, early on, of pushing Gramercy Tavern to be a four-star restaurant, but they started backing away from that even before they opened and they quickly settled into a three-star groove. The gap between the level of luxury provided at Gramercy and that provided at ADNY, or even at Jean Georges or Le Bernardin, is quite significant. What wouldn't be possible, even hypothetically, would be for Nathan's to get four stars. It's possible to conceive of an entire hypothetical system under which the best restaurant in every category would get four stars, but we don't have that system. Under the system we have, there is no hypothetical situation in which the best example of a hot dog place could get four stars. I happen to support the system, but even if I didn't I'd have to say that the system can't accommodate four-star hot dog joints. The system would have to be completely redefined, and it's not likely that the Times would want to make such a move after 40+ years of doing it a certain way, having readers accustomed to it being that way, etc. Right now the most radical thing you're likely to see is the possible entry of a non-French luxury restaurant into the four-star category, and that's not particularly radical -- it's more of a retro move than anything else.

There have been collections here and there in book form. I have a copy of one published in 1992. But the reviews aren't dated and it's not clear how much editing has been done. The collections are not comprehensive as far as I know. In more recent years the Times has started publishing a Zagat-shaped guide that includes short excerpts from reviews instead of full-length reviews -- in other words they've given up their biggest advantage over Zagat. But to do this project right we'd really need to go back to Craig Claiborne's first review and pull the reviews for every week thereafter out of the Times archive. I suppose it's a simple enough matter to do this for as far back as Lexis-Nexis or some other service has the information. What would that be, around 1996? So maybe phase I of the project is doing that group of reviews, up until today, plus adding the updates every week going forward. If we could get a team of several people working on this, it wouldn't be a huge burden on any one person -- each person could take a date range of 104 reviews (2 years worth) and do the entries on a template designed by the team leader (oh yes, we'd need that volunteer as well). Then phase II could be going backwards in the archive towards the beginning. Surely we have plenty of librarians, research assistants, paralegals, attorneys, etc., on eGullet who are good at this sort of thing, have access to the research tools, and could do it in their sleep.

I'm sure French haute cuisine has dominated the four-star pantheon since the beginning; what I mean to say is that today's French-only four-star pantheon is not something that necessarily existed at the beginning or even up through the 1990s. Until the Quilted Giraffe closed in 1992 (see the other thread running right now, "Back to the Future"), it seems to me there were generally some American and even Chinese restaurants in the group. I don't have the research facilities to get exact dates on all this because I'm not able to get archived New York Times articles without paying for them and I wouldn't know any other way of doing the research, but it sure would be interesting for someone to do a New York Times restaurant reviewer chronology, beginning with Claiborne and going up through Bruni, with years for each, plus a list of four-star reviews by each reviewer. Do we have any research-oriented eGulleters out there? The ideal project would be a complete annotated list of every Times review back to the beginning: reviewer, restaurant name, summary of review, type of cuisine, number of stars awarded. We did something like this already for most of Grimes's tenure, without the summaries, but the really useful report would be the one that takes the, what, something like 2000 Times reviews that are out there and really catalogs them. I think it would be an important documentary history project. And wouldn't it be interesting, each week when the new Times review comes out, to be able to name and summarize the reviews from 10, 20, 30, and 40 years ago for the same week? Does anybody know how to do that without spending $1 per article as required by ProQuest on their 25-pack pricing scheme? I'd be willing to have the eGullet Society fund the project as a public service if there are some expenses, like some kind of unlimited usage of the archive for a short period of time for a couple of hundred dollars, but I don't see an all-you-can-eat option and $2000+ is not acceptable. Maybe this stuff is all available for free at some big public library. I don't know. But if we have a person or people willing to do the work of finding out and then extracting and summarizing the information, please PM me.

William Grimes gave Daniel four stars after first giving it three, but that whole process occurred against a backdrop of Daniel having four stars in the first place. The original Daniel location, where Cafe Boulud is now, opened in 1993. Marian Burros was the interim critic at the time of the July 1993 review, filling in between Bryan Miller and Ruth Reichl's tenures. It was Burros who gave Daniel its first review, three stars. Ruth Reichl later gave it four. Back to three with Grimes after the move to the current space, then back up to four. Daniel has to the best of my knowledge received two three-star reviews (Burros and Grimes) and two four-star reviews (Reichl and Grimes). Mimi Sheraton was the Times critic from 1975 to 1983 and as far as I know did no reviewing thereafter, so she would not have had the opportunity to assign stars to Daniel, Lespinasse, et al. As for Bryan Miller, he would never have had the opportunity to review a standalone Boulud restaurant, though he gave four stars to Le Cirque with Daniel Boulud as chef in 1987 and again around the time of Boulud's handover to Sottha Khunn in 1992 after Boulud had been the chef there for 5 years.

It wasn't a public letter, so it wouldn't be in the Times archive. This is the article from Salon.com that quotes the letter. Apparently larger quotes appeared in the New York Post. http://archive.salon.com/nov96/interview961118.html Manresa, to add to your list of locations, QG started as a small Hudson Valley restaurant before Barry Wine moved it to New York City. The amazing thing to me is how ahead of its time it was. We're talking about a restaurant that got four stars in 1984, yet that on paper at least could easily pass for a totally contemporary restaurant in the Time Warner Center 20 years later. The same could be said of Bouley. There has been a lot of evolution in New York dining, yet the most cutting-edge restaurants from one and two decades ago were exceptionally forward-looking.

To add to the chronology, it was in 1993 that Ruth Reichl took over from Bryan Miller. Also, just for follow-up/backround, it was in 1996 that Bryan Miller wrote the famous anti-Reichl letter to the Times. According to Salon.com: "How do you think she comes off giving SoHo noodle shops 2 and 3 stars? SHE HAS DESTROYED THE SYSTEM that Craig, Mimi and I upheld." (Emphasis either in original or added by Salon.)

Sorry to say 8/21 is off the table for me on account of family and work obligations. My schedule won't really open up again for a whole-day event until mid-September.

It's like how the 2004 Zagat comes out in 2003. Standard operating procedure for guidebooks. This book was prepared and went to press in 1992, but bears 1993-4 as the title. From Amazon: New York Times Guide to Restaurants in New York City, 1993-1994 by Bryan Miller Publisher: Times Books; (November 1992) ASIN: 0812918592

Now all we need is collateral estoppel.

A long-dormant book called The New York Times Guide to Restaurants in New York City 1993-94 caught my eye tonight as I walked past a rarely utilized bookshelf in my apartment. It's a compilation of reviews and comments by then-critic Bryan Miller, who in my opinion was the last Times critic to take the stars seriously. Looking at the front-of-the-book indices, one of which is divided by star rating, it's striking how sensible and unconfused the stars are in this decade-old volume. I also see that the book came out right around the time I was really getting into fine dining, when I was transitioning from law-student summer-associate to attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and I remember how much more reliable it was than anything available today: there was order to the restaurant universe, thanks to a veteran, conscientious, articulate, principled, and super-smart critic. Was he the world's best writer? Certainly not: Reichl, Grimes, Bruni, and even Hesser can run literary circles around the Bryan Miller of a decade ago. But Miller was the better critic. Looking over the introduction, a sense of anachronism with a twist of deja vu set in. It could have been written in 2004. It begins: "New York City's economic woes, which have battered restaurants particularly hard in the past few years . . . ." The four-star restaurants as of publication of the book were: Bouley Le Bernardin Le Cirque Lutece The Quilted Giraffe Three are closed, one has recently been demoted to three stars, and only one retains its four-star rating, though to the best of my knowledge that rating has not been challenged or reaffirmed since Ruth Reichl's tenure. Perhaps most interesting is the presence of The Quilted Giraffe on the list. Reading through Miller's review of The Quilted Giraffe (the full-length Times reviews and Diner's Journal pieces are reprinted in the book almost verbatim), it sounds like the template for Per Se, from the city-of-the-future high-rise aesthetic of "the new room's stainless-steel walls, black granite tables, and Star Trek-style lighting columns" right down to the whimsical New American internationally influenced dishes on the tasting menu, described by Miller as "the $135 Western version of a kaeseki dinner . . . built around seasonal ingredients . . . . The ever-changing repertory . . . is as spectacular as it is culturally illuminating . . . swordfish-and-wasabi pizza, sizzling baby squid with ginger-scented enoki and shiitake mushrooms, smoked salmon over pickled seaweed, and beef seared on one side, nearly raw on the other, with confetti of corn kernels and mashed potatoes. The polymorphic parade rolls on, ending with an assortment of the house's superlative desserts." Lespinasse, still in probably its first year of business, had three stars and a glowing review that seemed to promise four upon conclusion of the shakedown period. Chanterelle, Aureole, Four Seasons, Gotham, Montrachet, and Union Square all had three stars as well. The highest-rated "ethnic" place was Periyali, with three stars. Hatsuhana and the other best Japanese places of the time had two stars, which to me is the primary sociocultural defect of the Miller star universe -- later, Ruth Reichl remedied the situation but perhaps went too far in giving three stars to places like Honmura An. Peter Luger had one star, and was probably better then than it is now even though today it holds a hard-to-swallow three-star rating. Most of the classic old guard French haute places, like Caravelle, Cote Basque, Grenoiulle, and Perigord, held three stars.

Luger's is run-down, loud, and uncomfortable, with capable but often brusque service, a terrible wine list, even worse wine service, and very little else to recommend it except for the best steaks available in any steakhouse I know of. If that earns three stars, so be it, but Peter Luger does not meet my expectations of a three-star restaurant. I think some historical context would be helpful here, because the cuisine scene that we take for granted today is relatively modern, as are the stars awarded with it. But contrary to Bux's assertion, I actually think it is the French-only four-star pantheon that is new. Back in the 1970s it would not have been unusual for a Chinese restaurant to receive four stars. Uncle Tais Hunan Yuan did, in 1973. I bet there were several four-star restaurants in the 1960s and 1970s that I've never even heard of and that were closer in spirit to Peter Luger and Shun Lee (not to mention The Four Seasons, Luchow's, et al.) than to Le Bernardin and ADNY. In September we have Mimi Sheraton, one of the early New York Times critics, coming on for Q&A. I think it would be interesting for someone to ask her how the concept of a four star restaurant has evolved since her time as critic.