Fat Guy

I guess. Doing a story on the Per Se "we did it because every restaurant in New York needs a house cocktail, not because we give a shit about cocktails per se" cocktail seems to represent a fairly plodding vision of what represents "hip, hot, new, now and happenin' for the trendy cocktail aficionado." It doesn't sound as though the writer even liked it or found it particularly worthy of coverage. And what makes it hip? Per Se is anything but hip -- it's a staid, extremely low-key, aristocratic restaurant for rich people and hardcore foodies willing to shell out $500+ per couple for dinner. The trendy cocktail aficionado presumably doesn't give a shit what Per Se or any other four-star-caliber restaurant is serving -- that's not where the cocktail action is.

There's a subset of the audience that seems hell-bent on whining about "the mall" and "the food court," but my experience of Per Se was that it was the urban alter ego to the French Laundry. Both settings are stunning expressions of their genres.

We received some news today from Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) regarding the forthcoming restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The restaurant is to be called Modern, and the chef is to be Gabriel Kreuther. Kreuther is currently the chef of Atelier, where he will remain though June. He will start working for USHG this summer. The restaurant is to open on November 20, 2004, at the same time as the museum. Some details from USHG: "Designed by Bentel & Bentel, The Modern's architecture is harmonious with MoMA's overall building design by architect Yoshio Taniguchi. The Modern will have its own separate entrance on 53rd Street and will feature unobstructed views of the restored Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, the restaurant will include a dining room, a bar, and private dining, also with views of the Sculpture Garden." and "Prior to becoming opening chef at Atelier, Chef Kreuther, a native of Alsace, France, was the Chef de Cuisine and Executive Sous Chef at Jean-Georges. Earlier, he was Sous Chef at La Caravelle, following several years cooking in Michelin-starred restaurants in Switzerland, France and Germany. In addition to being named one of Food & Wine's "Best New Chefs" in 2003, Chef Kreuther has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career."

Well, as you know I'm not much of a cocktail person -- kind of like my man Thomas Keller -- but I found it an entirely approachable mixture. Vodka, Pineau des Charentes, and a touch of Grand Marnier; a sensible, tasty, not-overpowering combination. I don't really understand what the cocktail column in the Times is about. I mean, surely as a cocktail per se the Per Se is nothing remarkable. I guess the idea is that the restaurant itself is important so the cocktail is important by definition too. But surely something like our Flaming Orange Gully, designed by Dale "the king of fucking cocktails" DeGroff, is infinitely more worthy of coverage. In any event, I'll try to pick up on adrober's larger conceptual thread over in the NY forum, but ultimately I don't agree with it with respect to the cocktail or the food. Per Se isn't about elusive or overly subtle flavors. It's about a certain kind of restrained perfectionism. The Per Se isn't necessarily a cocktail-drinker's cocktail per se; it's more of a cocktail to be served in advance of a multi-course tasting menu.

I had 3 of them at a 0% liquor cost at the pre-opening party, and I thought they made for excellent cocktails. The flavors were clear to me, not elusive, and it was a good food-cocktail -- I know this because I was snacking furiously while drinking them and it didn't interfere with the flavors of food the way a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned or something like that would. There's also an interesting post related to the cocktail on the NY Per Se thread, by adrober.

A couple of points before I make a comment. First of all I need to make clear that my work on behalf of Saigon Republic is not in an official eGullet capacity. eGullet is not on anybody's side in this matter. Secondly, I hope you all will understand that I will have to limit my comments here, so I will probably not chime back in after this post. I thought it was a very well done article. When I spoke to the reporter on the phone she had an excellent grasp of the issues, and that came through in the final product. My only wish would have been for the article to contain a quote or two from an impartial source -- such as a law professor who specializes in these matters. Because the first thing I did before agreeing to help out here was to reach out to the people in my network who are impartial experts, and they came back with the conclusion that there is no case here. Obviously, had that not been my conclusion and that of my best advisors, I'd have immediately advised Saigon Republic to change its name. There are also a couple of factual glitches, it seems. The text says "Ms. Tran, who owns the Republic restaurant..." Of course, she owns the Saigon Republic restaurant. The text refers to "a five-point star reminiscent of the Vietnamese flag between the words 'Saigon' and 'Republic' as well as 'Vietnamese' and 'Cuisine' on her storefront," but as the photo shows there is only one star: "Saigon Republic * Vietnamese Cuisine." The "dismiss[ing] of Mr. Shaw's homework" passage only deals (badly) with 2 of the 12 examples I cited in my letter, chosen from 603 registered marks with the word "republic" in them. Serial # Mark ----------- ---------------------- 75010712 REPUBLIC CHAI 75378719 RICE REPUBLIC 75594554 CONCH REPUBLIC SEAFOOD COMPANY 75769433 WINE REPUBLIC 76370148 STRAWBERRY REPUBLIC 76390695 TEQUILA REPUBLIC 78003774 JAVA REPUBLIC ROASTING COMPANY 78073502 PHO REPUBLIC 78327039 SAUVIGNON REPUBLIC 78354270 REPUBLIC OF BEANS 78268998 CHERRY REPUBLIC 78298269 HERBAL REPUBLIC It is also utterly disingenuous to compare the term "Nobu" to the term "Republic." One is clearly not generic. The other clearly is. That could hardly be more obvious. Many thanks to those who have offered to help so far. If there are any other lawyers reading along who would like to get involved in the Saigon Republic legal team, please feel free to contact me about that. Signing off.

That comment wasn't about reservations policies; it was about the double-secret opening. And it's not about press releases; what we're seeing here are mixed signals being sent to customers. I've covered plenty of restaurant openings and can't recall one so shrouded in mystery. Not that anybody cares about most openings. But this is the most widely anticipated one since Ducasse, and is receiving a tremendous amount of media and public attention. It's simply in the restaurant's best interests to be more forthcoming here.

Not a boring story at all. Maybe on another thread I'll bore you with my 10:30 Alain Ducasse walk-in for dessert only. I've preached the gospel of guerilla reservations tactics many times, online and in print. For the purposes of this conversation, however, one needs to distinguish walk-ins, wait-list reservations, cancellation pickups, concierge leverage, et al., from standard reservations. When the book at a popular restaurant gets opened, be it 30 or 60 days before the date or whatever, standard operating procedure in every restaurant where I've been given access to this information (and that's probably at least 10 of the top NYC restaurants) is to hold back all the prime-day/time tables for potential VIP use. Different restaurants define those dates and times differently: for some it might be that they only block out the 8 and 8:30 tables on Friday and Saturday nights. For others, particularly the smaller places, on the busiest nights it might mean blocking out every table except the pre-6pm and post-9:30pm ones. Over time, some of those tables may get released if they're not filling up with VIPs, but there will usually be a few held back right up until the afternoon of the date. As for what Per Se's policy is, I have no idea. If it follows the standard pattern of the top New York restaurants, it does what I've described here and above. If it follows a more "egalitarian" approach, maybe it does something else. Has anybody here been offered a prime-time reservation lately? Or maybe someone who is friendly with Keller can just find out. I think a lot of this speculation would simply go away if the restaurant's management behaved in a more forthcoming manner, rather than with all this double-secret opening stuff.

Welcome to eGullet, Nathan.

Just got a press release saying that David Burke is now serving a Shad Roe “BLT” at davidburke & donatella. The roe is sauteed, piled with pancetta and frisee, chives, and chervil, dressed with tomato mint butter, plus more pancetta, and topped with a quail egg. Served as an appetizer special at lunch and dinner until the end of shad roe season.

I enjoy Patricia Wells's reviews and books, and have in the past assigned them much greater weight than Michelin because they explain themselves. I have never used a Michelin red or green guide to plan a trip in France, nor have I ever purchased a red guide (I own a couple of green ones -- the ones that aren't about food -- but have found them not to be particularly useful). The last three trips I took were all planned using a combination of American travel guidebooks, recommendations from friends, and Patricia Wells's Food Lover's Guides. Those volumes, particularly the France-wide one, are now so out-of-date I'd have no choice but to look to a wider variety of sources in planning a trip for '04, but if she released new editions they'd become my primary resources again. I also like her reviews in the International Herald Tribune, although I'm not sure they're as good as they used to be. In any event, they just don't play the same role as the Times reviews. The IHT reviews run every other week, for a total of 26 per year. They are not all about restaurants -- Patricia Wells may devote the occasional "review" to a cheesemonger. They vary in length -- some are less than 400 words long. And of course the IHT is an international English-language paper. Patricia Wells is afforded quite a lot of respect in French culinary circles, but I'm not sure that many actual French restaurant consumers read her work in the IHT. The Times undertakes a comprehensive reviewing effort that is supported by a larger news-reporting enterprise. Most any significant new restaurant can expect multiple instances of coverage in the Times: a pre-opening blurb in "Off the Menu," a preview in "Diner's Journal" shortly after opening, a full review of 800-1200 words plus an informational box, and subsequent inclusion in occasional trends stories and such. The Times has a massive budget for staff and meals -- I believe back in Ruth Reichl's time she was quoted as saying the meal budget alone was $175,000 and that has no doubt increased. Between the weekly reviews, the "Diner's Journal," and "$25 and Under" the Times runs 156 reviews of New York City restaurants every year (with some repetition), plus there are roundup articles like Ed Levine's surveys of pastrami, bagels, and such, each of which covers a dozen or more establishments, plus there are reviews and food coverage in the regional sections for New Jersey and Connecticut. The Times reviewer in New York visits restaurants almost every day of the week for lunch and dinner -- usually 10 meals out per week. That means multiple visits (3-5 or more) to all restaurants reviewed, plus the "Diner's Journal" visits plus a couple of hundred visits per year to restaurants that aren't being reviewed. The institutional momentum is massive, and nobody else is doing anything like it in scope and ambition. In the industry, all anybody cares about are the Times reviews and the Zagat ratings -- every other review source combined is considered insignificant next to either of those.

Defining the job gets us a long way towards determining what the most relevant training for that job might be. A restaurant reviewer or a food writer who focuses on restaurants does a lot of things in pursuit of that job. Cooking is not one of them. Writing about how to cook is not one of them. The connection, on the cooking front, is an attenuated one: you are writing about the end-result of cooking. Does knowing how to cook really make one better able to do that in such a way as to be helpful to the reader? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Some basic training in cooking can make one more doctrinaire, more likely to criticize a vinaigrette for not being like the one taught in class. Saucemaking today is so diverse and complex, there's no way to master it all unless you're James Peterson and you devote your life to it. So to me the important thing is not to know how to make 1 version of a sauce but, rather, to have eaten 100 variations of a sauce in 100 different restaurants, so you can compare it and place it in its context. On occasion I dine out with restaurant chefs. Their comments on food are always interesting and usually irrelevant to anything I'd write. They tend to focus on minutiae, rather than the overall impact of a dish. If you work for a high-end corporate-owned restaurant and you're the chef or one of the top sous-chefs, you may participate in a dining voucher program, where every X number of months you can spend a couple of hundred dollars on a restaurant meal as part of your professional development. Often these programs come with strings attached: in order to get your reimbursement you need to submit a written report about your meal. I've been e-mailed many such reports, and I have yet to see one that contains particularly publishable material -- and I don't mean writing style, I mean content. I think it's always helpful to hold these theoretical discussions up against some real-world examples. Leaving aside the world of writing about cooking-and-recipes, which I thought had been cut out of this discussion since post number one, who have been the best food writers of the past 15-20 years whose work has focused on restaurant-related topics? Have they been good cooks or not? And if they have been good cooks can we point to specific examples of elements of their writing that have been improved by their knowledge of cooking? To invert the question, is it important for cooks and chefs to be experienced diners? In the real world, most of them aren't.

All material on eGullet is copyrighted. Then notify infringers when they're infringing. Robyn We do. This was not such an instance.

I think the most important thing is for a writer covering the restaurant beat to be an experienced diner. The inherently comparative nature of writing about restaurants makes it extremely difficult for a neophyte diner to write serious reviews or articles about restaurants. We don't look for film critics to be able to make films, we also don't particularly care if they understand the technical aspects of filmmaking although that knowledge can be somewhat helpful in some reviews, but we absolutely demand that they have a deep reservoir of film-viewing knowledge. I don't think someone covering the restaurant beat needs to have an expert knowledge of cooking, such as from a culinary-school education or time spent in professional kitchens. Being totally uninterested in cooking? That's a little odd for someone who devotes so much time to eating the end-result of cookery. But expert knowledge or even deep amateur knowledge, no, I don't think that's necessary. If you start developing that level of knowledge, you actually have to work to keep it in check because otherwise you become like a film critic who obsesses about lighting and cinematography instead of focusing on the story and acting. It can be helpful to have technical knowledge of the subject, but writing about restaurant meals is not particularly related to writing about cooking. I think there was a time, though, when a higher level of cooking knowledge was more relevant to restaurant reviewing: back when most fine-dining restaurants were working from the same set of recipes, the differences among them often had to do with who did a better job roasting a chicken. Knowledge of technique, in that instance, could be particularly helpful.

If you're pre-rinsing the dishes that you're putting into your dishwasher, you're either wasting your time (and water) or you don't have a good dishwasher -- or you have some environmentalist dishwasher that doesn't use enough water (therefore requiring pre-rinsing, which wastes more water overall I'm sure). Any good dishwasher manufactured in the past 5-10 years is going to say right in the instruction manual "you don't need to pre-rinse." And that's true. You hardly even need to scrape the plates, no less pre-rinse them, before you put them in my dishwasher. It has a disposal/grinder unit built in, so you can literally put entire plates of food in -- pasta, vegetables, anything but bones -- and it will rinse the food off in the first cycle, pulverize it in the disposal/grinder, and send the goo out the drain. Not that I do it that way, but I've tested it and it works. And I don't have a super-high-end unit. It's the cheapest KitchenAid.

In Europe, to gain even one star is quite an accomplishment. Zagat, on the other hand, rates hundreds of restaurants, from ADNY to Gray's Papaya. To compare Michelin and Zagat is really apples to oranges---they are doing different things, for very different audiences. I think you miss my point. Look for some very aggressive "competition" . Except insofar as he sometimes disagrees with me and has a tendency to become incoherent, you all should listen carefully when Tony speaks. Don't underestimate the ability of the Zagat empire to apply pressure to the industry. The Zagats' power extends far beyond just getting sycophantic treatment at restaurants. They are heavily plugged into New York City government (Tim Zagat was Chair of NYC & Company, the city’s official tourism marketing agency, for three years and is still fully engaged with that organization), they control which restaurants get chosen for Restaurant Week, they control the terms of the Zagat survey, and they are not the slightest bit afraid to use their muscle and leverage. In France, in London, in Los Angeles, the Zagats are minor players, but New York is their turf. Here, they are the two people most feared by chefs and restaurateurs. Michelin's success in France depends on cooperation from the industry. Don't expect to see much of that here.

I'm not going to say that until I have something like 6 or 7 steaks there, a process that could take me a year or more! All I can say at this point is that I had one full-on Luger-quality steak, and a great overall experience.

That rumor has been going around since 2000. I was in there recently and the room was well populated, and they were doing a private party in the fishbowl. But there were definitely a few empty tables.

You take 9pm reservations at Luger's and you get seated at 9pm? It must be because you're so good looking.

If they sell one copy to everybody who takes road trips around Manhattan, they should be able to move 12 or 13 copies a year. Manhattan Road Trip Log, Day 1 Mile 3, Minute 9: Driving on a curiosly broad way named, aptly, "Broadway," I found myself desirous of a meal. Having never heard of this town, I pulled out my trusty Michelin Red Guide and saw that the restaurant Gallagher's was near my location and was designated by a knife, fork, corkscrew, Michelin Man head, three squiggly lines, a blue triangle, a red square, and a purple pentagon. As luck would have it, the restaurant was open and I was able to secure a table. Mile 6, Minute 143: Driving on an avenue with a park-like median named, aptly, "Park Avenue," I again felt famished. Unfamiliar with my environs, I again relied on the Michelin Red Guide to tell me I was near a restaurant called Gramercy Tavern. What a unique discovery this place turned out to be! It was surely worth a detour, as the guide had promised.

Aha! I found it! Well, it is hardly dispositive, but at least I'm not imagining things: (Art of Eating 48, Fall 1998, p. 23)

I found issue 47. I found issue 49. Where the hell is issue 48? Surely somebody has it.

I prefer to order every dessert.

Does anybody have issue 48 of Art of Eating around? Issue 47 has Ed Behr's article about Luger's where he refers to the stuff as steak sauce, and issue 48 I think contains correspondence on that issue. I can't actually remember what it said, so maybe I'm wrong. But my understanding, though, is that the steak sauce at Peter Luger is the one served with the steak: a mixture of butter and meat juices that collects at the end of the tilted plate and gets spooned over the steak. The Peter Luger Sauce is more like a cocktail sauce than a steak sauce, and in my opinion tastes terrible on steak, shouldn't be put anywhere near steak, and wasn't intended for that use -- nor should a flavor-masking tomato-and-horseradish sauce ever be served with a Prime dry-aged steak. As between what the packaging says and what the Web site says, I view the packaging as more authoritative, but I would defer to what the owners say if anybody gets a chance to ask them.

Lord knows I love ADNY, but it has not resonated with the New York fine-dining population at large. Nor is it selling out every night. I think Per Se will do better, in part because Keller has some New York street cred and in part because it's at least an American restaurant (and there are several other parts as well). But of course it's too early to tell. Either way, I see Per Se as a restaurant operating outside the standard New York system. why can't they do both? They can. The question is why will they bother? What informational value will Michelin offer to an already-knowledgeable New York diner? The already-knowledgeable New York diner derives heavy informational value from the Times reviews, even from the ones with which he disagrees. That same diner finds tremendous convenience in the Zagat guide's layout. Where does Michelin fit in?