Fat Guy

Michelin doesn't review restaurants. Whatever substantive comments might be made based on the inspection visits are kept secret. For some reason, European audiences are willing to accept that. Some Americans with a when-in-Rome attitude accept it in Europe as well. (I'd be interested to know the numbers, though, given that my wife's guidebook to shopping for furniture in North Carolina has a substantially better Amazon sales rank than the Michelin Red Guide for France.) I find it hard to believe, however, that Americans will accept that method with respect to New York restaurants, where there is such an information-rich food media already in place. Maybe if the inspectors were known to the public and eminently qualified, maybe if the comments were expanded to include actual reasoning, maybe if Michelin could create a perception that it has embraced the local restaurant scene on its own terms . . . maybe under those circumstances the guide could enter the market with an enthusiastic reception. But that would involve Michelin rejecting all the fundamental elements of its system. I don't see how the New York Times guidebook is relevant, except to show how hard it is to compete with Zagat. Whether or not the Times publishes or sells guidebooks, the reality is that New Yorkers speak in terms of New York Times stars. Not just eGulleters, but also the mother-in-law in Connecticut can be heard to say "It got three stars from the Times." Getting people to switch from a familiar and accepted system to "It got two forks and spoons and a little Michelin-man head" seems like a challenge on the order of getting a leopard to change his spots.

Were that the case, there would be more restaurants in New York like ADNY and Per Se. Yet New York hasn't got a single home-grown restaurant in that category. I suspect the average customer at the top restaurants in New York is firmly in the Zagat camp, and that the above-average customer at the top restaurants in New York has zero use for a New York Michelin guide and would much rather read reviews than unsupported symbols.

let's be clear: this is strictly supposition based on one person's interpretation of how he thinks things work. it may or may not resemble reality. I'm not sure what the fundamental difference is between my "supposition" and what you appear to believe is the truth: You know the old dialog attributed to Winston Churchill, where he asks the woman sitting next to him if she'll sleep with him for one million pounds. She says yes. Then, he asks her if she'll sleep with him for one pound. "What do you think I am, a prostitute?" she responds, offended. "Madam," Churchill replies, "we've already established what you are, now we're just haggling over the price." Russ, whether it's 3 tables, 4 tables, every table between 7pm and 8:30pm (which, at Per Se, is probably in the neighborhood of 6 tables, given that there are only 16 tables in the whole restaurant and you can't re-seat the prime-time tables), or even the majority of tables, this is how restaurants work. Is there really any debate here except as to the actual number of tables being held back for VIPs? On that point, I think you're undercounting. At an in-demand restaurant like Daniel, 3 or 4 VIP tables are held back right up until the day of service. But on the reservations book, a month or two out, far more tables than that are blocked out for VIPs. Moreover, you surely know that the VIP concept extends to more than just "regulars--the folks who spend lots of money with them." It also typically includes fellow members of the chef community, selected journalists, some (but not all) celebrities, concierges, payback-favors for other restaurants who have given your regulars hard-to-get tables, etc. That's my supposition, at least.

The shallow charge of arrogance -- "They gave such low ratings to our restaurants, those arrogant French bastards!" -- can easily be dismissed as ignorant. The deeper charge of arrogance -- that it is arrogant to rate our restaurants on a scale designed for France and French restaurants -- is a bit more difficult to rebut.

The consensus is that Michelin yields overall the best ratings for France, where every relevant restaurant is French and where the fine-dining restaurants have some sort of intuitive or perhaps explicit understanding of the items on the Michelin checklist so they pursue those items aggressively in order to achieve given star rankings. Michelin's ratings of restaurants in New York, however, if performed with the same set of assumptions, probably won't seem relevant to anyone outside of France. New York is significantly more "foreign" to France than any of the countries that are now covered by the guides. Transplanting that system to the US will be, I think, a very difficult exercise. And at a time when the top French chefs are looking to the US for inspiration, it seems particularly bizarre to have a French ranking system attempt to enter this market. Moreover, there is no restaurant-reviewing equivalent of the New York Times in Paris. There are restaurant reviewers in France, but they don't have the kind of relevance they have here. Michelin has never had to compete head-on with serious reviews that actually explain their reasoning and with an entrenched establishment of reviewers, nor has it ever had to enter a market already controlled by Zagat. So Michelin may very well be flanked by the reviewers (who can claim greater depth) on one side and Zagat (which can claim greater breadth) on the other. It also strikes me as impossible to imagine that the US media and consumers will sit silently for decades without questioning Michelin's methodology. That top-secret shit just won't play here. The Michelin people will be relentlessly hounded for accountability in a way they can't imagine.

Please elaborate. They are branch offices of out-of-town restaurants, operating in a manner that pursues the Michelin three-star style rather than the home-grown New York four-star style. They don't strike me as incremental improvements over Jean-Georges, Le Bernardin, et al., but rather occupy, I think, a separate category.

The thing is, there aren't any restaurants like Daniel in France. Daniel serves French food but it's an American restaurant. The category of high-volume high-energy fine-dining doesn't really exist in France, other than in the places that are direct responses to American restaurants (Spoon/Mix/Atelier). New York is a different universe. So Michelin's stars, in a sense, miss the point: New York simply hasn't oriented its market towards the pursuit of Michelin stars; it has oriented itself in a uniquely American direction. Sure, places like ADNY and Per Se are super-luxe and slow-paced, like the three-stars in France, but they're not really part of the New York scene. The New York Times system, though it has been diluted by a succession of critics who have been sloppy with their stars, is the better way to represent New York restuarants on their own terms. It's a home-grown system appropriate to this market, understood by people in this market. I'm also wondering what "the Michelin methodology" is. As far as I can tell, they don't visit the restaurants very often, so they're mostly relying on an impressionistic system. It's not like Consumer Reports, where they have an actual documented rigorous system of testing and they produce detailed reports to back up their conclusions. It's much more of an electing-the-Pope system, where a bunch of Cardinals sit in a room and hold secret discussions until the smoke signal goes up.

So the Web site, wich I just found, recommends using it in a margarita. http://keylimejuice.com/recipes.htm Any other ideas?

Do you all think Nellie & Joe's Key West Lime Juice might be a useful ingredient in cocktail-making, perhaps as an alternative to Rose's?

The other thing is, how will New Yorkers handle the truth? I mean, almost every current NYT four-star restaurant should get one or two Michelin stars, and most of the three-stars should get one or none. Maybe, just maybe, Per Se and ADNY can hold legitimate three-star ratings even in light of full-on Michelin inspection, but they're the only restaurants in town that even have a chance. So Michelin will have to choose between grade-inflation and insulting the local population. I can see the charges of arrogance mounting quickly. The green guides are not comparable: they offer actual content. The red guides simply ask us to rely on Michelin's expertise. And who will Michelin use as its inspectors? The same geniuses who pick the Beard Awards? Where's the labor pool for this? I'll note, as well, that there are plenty of Michelin-haters in France. What I really fail to see, though -- and this is less speculation than the rest of the points -- is what Michelin has to offer in this market. In other words, assuming the most favorable circumstances, assuming the same level of quality Michelin offers in France (a longshot, since it has failed to offer that level of quality in any country other than France -- but let's assume it for now), what would make a New Yorker want to buy the Michelin guide for New York?

Wow, you guys are on a totally different consumption schedule from what I'm talking about. About 90% of the liquor in my cabinet is 5-10 years old. Let me start with something very simple: will distilled spirits -- as in vodka, scotch, brandy, etc., as opposed to liqueurs and such -- degrade if left unused for 10, 20, or 100 years? I was under the impression that these items were totally shelf-stable. Am I wrong?

Porterhouse isn't the only option at Wolfgang's. You can also get a strip, a rib-eye, and I think maybe a filet. The odd man out at our table had the rib-eye because he couldn't accept anyone else's doneness requirements. I had a bite and it was delicious. I agree that the Wolfgang salad sucks, with its gelatinous dressing and ill-conceived combination of shrimp, bacon, green beans, and unripe tomatoes. But I totally prefer Wolfgang's sauce to Peter Luger's, only because I don't think anybody in history has concocted a worse sauce than Peter Luger's. Also, a point of clarification: Peter Luger's sauce is not "steak sauce." It's supposed to go on the tomato-and-onion salad. From the packaging, if you buy a bottle of it: "Since 1887, This zesty sauce has been prepared at the world famous Peter Luger Steak House. Traditionally, the sauce is served on salads of jumbo sliced tomatoes and onions."

The hostility against Ducasse had nothing to do with 9/11. It had to do with a French big-shot trying to capture the top of our market with a foreign restaurant. Negative reviews can perhaps be explained by disappointment with food, but the hostility and in some cases outright hate in the early articles about Ducasse can't possibly have been driven by culinary concerns. Alan Abelson in Barron's: Steve Cuozzo in the Post: Rebecca Ascher-Walsh in Fortune: How easily this all would translate to Michelin. Daniel, Jean-Georges, and Le Bernardin are French restaurants owned by Americans. Daniel and Jean-Georges are 100% home grown, and Le Bernardin has fully assimilated. As Jerry Shriver perceptively wrote in USA Today regarding ADNY, "New Yorkers are open to out-of-town talent - the waiting list here is said to be three months long - but you still have to earn your accolades on the home field." As Erica Marcus reported in Newsday, "Colman Andrews, editor of Saveur magazine, concurred that New Yorkers were no doubt offended by Ducasse's 'hubris,' and he pointed out that although both Daniel Boulud of Daniel and Jean-Georges Vongerichten are French, they started out in New York as relatively obscure chefs who paid their dues and rose to prominence here, whereas Ducasse is considered an interloper." Yet even the most beloved New York French restaurants noticed drops in business after 9/11. Anti-French sentiment is running very high in the US right now. Louis Vuitton is already part of our culture, but I think it will be much harder to introduce new French concepts to the US going forward. http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/a...e_united_states

If they're like just about every other high-demand restaurant, the prime-time tables are blocked out for VIPs and are never even offered to the general public. Try getting an 8pm table at Daniel on a Friday night. Those tables are just never put into general circulation.

I'd have to compare the menus side-by-side to be sure, but I think the prices were close, with Wolfgang's being a couple of dollars more on some items. Wolfgang's is probably not looking to make its money by charging a lot more than Luger's for the same items, though. Rather, the strategy seems to be to sell expensive wine and seafood items: the waiter's spiel includes an attempt to sell you a mixed seafood platter that no doubt costs a zillion dollars (there is no mention of price), there are 3-pound lobsters on the menu, etc.

In my opinion knowledgeable New Yorkers are looking for exactly what both Michelin and Zagat have never and will never offer: reviews with substance. After all, knowledgeable New Yorkers don't need guidebooks at all. They use Zagat as a phone book, not for serious recommendations, and they don't need Michelin to tell them the names of the top tier restaurants in New York. That's just common knowledge. If the recent revelations about Michelin are true, then Michelin hardly has a claim to rigorous process. Ducasse would probably disagree with you, as would all the French or even French-appearing chefs who struggled for business post-9/11. And those are restaurant situations, where the French have the most credibility. It doesn't seem clear at all to me that the French have much guidebook credibility, which I see as somthing separate from culinary credibility. Cooking French food is one thing; telling New Yorkers which American, Italian, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants are the best is quite another. In what way do you find it useful, though? Does what you find useful about the Michelin guide in France translate to New York City?

Well, they seated us promptly at 8:30pm, the time of our reservation. Consistency is the hallmark of a great steakhouse. You can occasionally get a Luger-quality steak at a steakhouse other than Luger's. But at Luger's you almost always get one. Now, I've only had one porterhouse at Wolfgang's. So that's not any kind of useful sample. I can say, however, that if Wolfgang's can consistently serve a steak as excellent as the one I had tonight, then I will never, ever go to Peter Luger for steak again. The porterhouse I had tonight at Wolfgang's was on par with the best I've had at Luger's. All the Luger's knockoffs -- the German potatoes, the tomato-and-onion salad, the onion rolls -- were pretty much the same as at Luger's. And everything else about the dining experience was, like, oh, about a million times better than Luger's. The main dining room is breathtaking, with its Guastavino ceiling and vintage bar. (The Vanderbilt hotel, overall, is a hideous mess -- one of the worst mishmashes of architectural styles I've ever seen -- but the restaurant space Wolfgang's occupies has a great interior.) It's loud in there, but certainly not louder than the average steakhouse. And there's a back room, essentially this restaurant's Siberia, that is far preferable to the main room if you like quiet. It has a Guastavino ceiling as well, just not as high, swooping, and dramatic as the one in the main dining room. Service was very friendly, totally knowledgeable, and efficient. There were a couple of minor slipups, but nothing I wouldn't chalk up to the newness of the establishment. The pace -- ah, the pace -- was leisurely. We enjoyed a totally sane and relaxed two-hour meal and paid by credit card. Oh, and a nice thing happened at Wolfgang's that has almost never happened to me at Luger's: the steak was cooked exactly to the requested temperature.

I have a different perspective on the matter. Anybody -- well, pretty much anybody -- can have sex pretty much anywhere. Whereas only 64 people a night can eat at Per Se, and they have to come to New York to do it. I was just hearing today about a group of cooks at a restaurant in Quebec, all gathered 'round their computer screen looking at adrober's photos of the food at Per Se. There are people all over the world who are dying to see photos of and read everything they can about the food at Per Se, and this is where they're coming to do that. So I have to thank adrober, on behalf of the site, for increasing our relevance and providing this service to so many visually hungry people.

Zagat will be a competitor only in terms of short-term book sales. The more significant competition -- the mind-share competition -- is the New York Times. Right now, when New Yorkers who know anything about fine dining speak of New York restaurants, they speak in terms of New York Times stars. They are the New York equivalents of Michelin stars in France, though of course the scales and systems are quite different. The question is, will Michelin be able to get its stars recognized by the relevant upper-end of the consumer population, or will the Michelin stars for New York just be a curiosity like the Gayot ratings. In the long run -- and one assumes Michelin will put enough money behind this effort to build it over a period of years -- that's what will support book sales. My guess is that it will be a total flop, primarily because the Michelin system is ill-suited to a polyglot dining culture. It is has barely even been sustainable, from a consistency standpoint, since the Nouvelle Cuisine era. But it has tremendous inertia in France. It has virtually no inertia here. Americans know about Michelin stars in Europe, but what percentage of Americans who have been to Michelin-starred restaurants in France have actually bothered to buy a Michelin guide, or have ever even seen the pages of one? Michelin's hiding-its-cards, tight-lipped approach will also, I think, be unappealing to Americans, who are going to want a bit more language. And of course there will be the problem of rejectionism, because many Americans will likely say "Who the hell are these Michelin people to rate our restaurants?"

That's about US$0.90, right?

Everything you ever wanted to know about how Peter Luger buys its beef but were afraid to ask, by Mr. Cutlets in The Daily Gullet, reprinted from his book Meat Me in Manhattan . . . Incidentally, Wolfgang's does age its meat on premises, though I have no idea whether the "special secret formula" is in use. Though the son's comment was impolitic, it was also true: ""Luger is a factory. You're seated, then you're pushed out." I essentially refuse to go to Luger's for dinner anymore, because it's just not pleasant to be treated that way: reservations are only theoretical and you often have to wait, you're in and out in an hour, and it's a lot of cash to drop that quickly on a meal. Lunch is the only time when I can really enjoy myself there. Of course, if Cpalms had to wait 90 minutes to be seated, and if that turns out to be standard operating procedure, I won't have much interest in Wolfgang's. I'm going tonight, but if I have to wait more than 30 minutes I'm out of there. Aren't the MarkJoseph guys ex-Luger? It seems this formula has been tried before. How are they doing?

I have no idea where they come from, but if you go to any of a zillion fishmarkets in Chinatown you can get shrimp that are still wriggling in the display bins. Every time I've bought them, they've been excellent. I'll also second Cpalms's defense of high-quality, properly frozen shrimp. Some of the best Gulf shrimp, like the Royal Reds, are caught so deep, with the boats out for days at a time, that they don't really exist in any format other than frozen. The salt-brine freezing method is superb and yields shrimp that nobody would complain about. I'd rather have salt-brine frozen shrimp than live shrimp from a tank.

Waldy Malouf at Broadway Panhandler Saturday, May 22, 2004 3:00PM – 4:00PM He will demonstrate recipes from his latest cookbook, High Heat: Grilling and Roasting Year-Round with Master Chef Waldy Malouf. Tastings and book signing to follow demonstration. Admission is free. Broadway Panhandler 477 Broome Street (@ Wooster) New York, NY 10013 212-966-3434

Unless something has changed in the past few months, Nobu most definitely takes reservations and your friend just called the wrong restaurant. The number for Nobu is 212-219-0500. The number for Nobu Next Door, where it's first come first served, is 212-334-4445.

Okay, so I know most distilled spirits will last forever. At least I think so. Is that correct? What about something like Kahlua? Rose's lime juice? Bitters? Vermouth? What are some rules of thumb for cocktail-ingredient shelf-life and perishability?