oakapple

I remember it quite well....he keeps reminding us. It's quite clearly a hobby horse that will turn up whenever there's raw fish on a menu.

I've noted this "tic" in quite a few of Bruni's columns, including some of the Wednesday reviews. He'll say, "In Manhattan these days, we have too much raw fish." Or whatever. I wasn't suggesting that a column on celebrity chefs' spin-offs would be a regular feature. More that a particular review should stick to its focus. If spin-offs are an important enough part of the dining landscape to talk about then, then dedicate the DJ column to that topic on one particular Friday. This review was about Bistro du Vent.

One of Frank Bruni's annoying tics is that he uses his reviews as a platform for making sweeping comments about the New York restaurant industry that have little to do with the place he's talking about. For instance, in today's Diner's Journal, where the subject is Bistro du Vent, he begins: He's three paragraphs into the article, and we have yet to get to Bistro du Vent, the purported topic of the review. In the meantime, he's dragged in Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Tom Colicchio, neither of whom have the least bit to do with that restaurant.If Bruni wants to write a column about celebrity chefs' spin-offs, then by all means he should write one. This wasn't the place for it.

I'm not so sure that an unfavorable review in the Times—particularly of this type of restaurant—can really do very much damage. Dinosaur will succeed or fail on its own merits.

A wicked parody of Frank Bruni's writing style can be found here.

If anything, it ought to be easier to bring top-flight BBQ to NY than it is for sushi or French cooking. The distances are much shorter, and the prices are much lower. A high-end omakase costs at least $100, but no one would claim that you need to charge that much to duplicate the best BBQ experience. Given the crush of people waiting in line to dine at Dinosaur, the demand is clearly there.

I had a business dinner at Chanterelle last night. My only prior experience at the restaurant was a lunch in 1990, which is too long ago to be relevant. Chanterelle is now just over twenty-five years old, with a ten-year stint in SoHo, followed by a move to the present TriBeCa location (2 Harrison Street) in 1989. The restaurant ranks high in New York's culinary scene, but just where is a matter of some dispute. Chanterelle earned two stars from Mimi Sheraton (1980) and Marion Burros (1984), four from Bryan Miller (1985) and Ruth Reichl (1993), before William Grimes took the restaurant down a peg with a three-star review in 2000. I have to wonder about the two-star jump from 1984 to '85—can any restaurant really improve that much in a year? By 2000, Grimes clearly thought that Chanterelle had lost a step, a view many of the web reviews confirm. However, since the Grimes review, the James Beard Foundation has twice lauded Chanterelle as best restaurant in America (2002, 2005). My own experience last night puts Chanterelle close to the top of the three-star range. I cannot say that it is four stars. The menu at Chanterelle changes every four weeks. Many famous artists have designed menu covers for Chanterelle, but if that was the case last night, it wasn't drawn to our attention. Inside, we found calligraphy worthy of the Declaration of Independence. On the left was the table d'hôte three-course dinner at $95, on the right the six-course tasting menu at $115 (with wine parings, $60-85 additional). You can add a cheese course to the table d'hôte for $19. One of the entrées carries a truffle supplment of $20. Otherwise, it's just $95 per person, plus alcohol. As my host was buying, I didn't examine the wine list, although it is notoriously pricey. He found a wonderful Australian red, with which I was quite satisfied. We were served double amuses of chilled squash soup in a shot glass and a small crab cake (shaped like a ping-pong ball). Both were superb. While we awaited our appetizers, our server brought out two different butters for us to try with warm, home-made bread rolls. I started with the seafood sausage, which is well known to be one of Chanterelle's signature dishes. It's a sizable portion, and the explosive taste made it the meal's highlight. Might this be the best appetizer in Manhattan? My companion ordered the foie gras terrine, which he pronounced excellent. Almost five years ago, Bob Lape's review for Crain's New York Business complained that Chanterelle's kitchen doesn't always send out the advertised product. Both my companion and I ordered the "Loin of Lamb with Moroccan Spices, Gateau of Eggplant Lamb Shank." I couldn't, for the life of me, detect any Moroccan spices in the dish that came out. There were four or five beautiful slices of rare lamb loin with a crusty exterior, but they were not Moroccan in any way that I could perceive. The braised lamb shank in an eggplant jacket was clear enough to the taste, if slightly bland. For dessert, I ordered the "Pineapple Fruit Soup with Passion Fruit Soufflé Glace." This was an unusual concoction, but I am positive that there was also grapefruit in it. Now, while I love pineapple and passion fruit, I am not a fan of grapefruit. I finished the dish, but had grapefruit been part of the description I likely would have chosen something else. After dessert, our server brought out two trays of petits fours. At this point, they were just showing off. A table of eight would have had trouble finishing the quantity of sweets that were presented to us. They looked wonderful, but my companion and I were too full to touch them. Our server also brought out a tray of small, freshly-baked cream-puffs, which I couldn't resist. Chanterelle takes a team approach to service. The dining room is small, and it appears that all of the staff perform all of the functions interchangeably. This leads to some service glitches, such as two separate servers coming around to take our bottled water order. Some of the plates weren't cleared quite as rapidly as I would have liked. These are minor complaints, which I would put in writing only because, at Chanterelle's level, I believe service should be practically flawless. I went home happy, but still feeling that Chanterelle is operating a step or two shy of its full potential.

For an upscale Red Lobster, one star is a bit much....or is it? ← Frank Bruni's sloppy writing has got the best of him again. Lure is not serving a "Red Lobster" menu, except in the very narrow sense that both serve seafood. A pity, really, as Frank was doing quite well in this review until he uncorked that blooper. The waves of maritime puns come crashing over the breakwater with ferocious intensity that's almost breathtaking. Then....Red Lobster. Oh, Frank, how could you!

If anyone had the time to research all of these complaints, it's likely that some of them would turn out to be valid. The trouble is, the majority seem to be just sour grapes, and there's no way to find the useful content amongst all the garbage. Overall, the site comes off as a bunch of disillusioned people griping because life done them wrong.

Suzanne, it can't be quantified exactly—as you obviously recognize. This doesn't prevent one from saying, "My gut tells me that I'd have been happy to pay $150 for this experience, but at $225 it felt over-priced." It's obviously an imprecise assessment. Maybe that meal would have felt right at $175; I don't know. I can only tell you that my companion, whose knowledge of fine dining in NYC is roughly comparable to mine, had the same reaction. I reviewed the meal in question here.

Value comes into the equation at all levels of the dining pyramid. I had a rather empty feeling after spending $225 for two at Café Gray, not because it was bad, but because it felt like a $150 experience. I'm not planning to rush back. Most of the people posting on this thread, including me, haven't actually tried Masa. We must therefore rely on critical consensus, and just about everyone who's written about it says that Masa is mind-blowingly good. This presumes you've eaten enough Japanese food to know the difference, and that you can afford to make this kind of investment in one meal. There are probably very few of us for whom that's true. FYI, the lowest round-trip airfare to Tokyo right now is $2,870 on expedia.com. That's a coach fare. You'll also need a hotel. Based on that, if the one thing you're after is an amazing sushi experience, Masa looks like a bargain.

I suggested Gotham Bar & Grill, and I have visited it only once—and that was just recently. However, there's a huge body of critical consensus that Gotham has indeed been consistently great for almost twenty years. That consensus couldn't have emerged if Gotham were somehow "fudging it." Therefore, I have no problem putting Gotham on the list, even though I'm partly relying on other people's observations.

I still think you can't look at it that way. Probably half of Masa's costs, and perhaps as much as 2/3rds, go towards rent, depreciation, utilities, labor, and insurance. He incurs those costs no matter what he serves, and no matter whether he's full or empty. He's open for dinner six nights a week, and for lunch just four days a week. The lunches are very sparsely attended; some days, there's no takers for lunch. He has just 26 seats, and even at night he isn't filling all of them. I'm pretty sure he doesn't turn tables. And this is in a very high-rent building. Now, you turn to ingredients. Every article I've read focuses on the rare species of fish that are flown in daily just for Masa, and how selective he is about what he will serve. I suppose it's possible the media have been duped, and the fish is just ordinary stuff that many sushi restaurants are serving. That deception would be quite a scoop, if any of us could verify it. But for now, I assume Masa's doing what he says he's doing. Any other ingredients are just marginal increases over what is already a high level of luxury, for those rare people with the money and taste to appreciate it. At that point, even if he dropped the foie, caviar, and truffles, Masa would still be priced in the stratosphere. People willing to pay that much generally aren't the types who would say, "I wish they'd drop the foie gras, so I can pay 2% less." If that's your line of thinking, you're probably more comfortable at a place where you can order a la carte.

The whole argument breaks down right there. The foie gras supplement at Per Se is $25, and we've no reason to think Masa is allocating more money to the foie gras than Keller does; indeed, he is probably allocating a lot less, given the relative emphasis of the two restaurants. Here's one site that shows you can get an ounce of black truffles for $26. You can also spend more or less than that, depending on the source. I suspect Masa is serving each customer less than a full ounce, and he surely gets his truffles more cheaply than I could find in a quickie google search. That leaves the caviar. At Petrossian, a single serving of Sevruga is $60, but that's the retail price for a dish where the caviar is central to the presentation. I don't think anyone has said which species of caviar Masa is serving, but even if it's Sevruga, his cost is probably a whole lot less than $60. (He could be serving American caviar, which costs a fraction of Sevruga.) Mind you, it's mathematically possible to spend $150 per customer on caviar, truffles, and foie gras. Heck, you could spend hundreds on the caviar all by itself. But nothing stated in any of the available reviews suggests Masa is doing this, and I think it's highly unlikely.

But practically no one who's dined there has said that "all Masa is offering for $350 is a package deal of fugu, foie gras, cavier [sic], some mixed cooked food and good sushi." To the contrary, the overwhelming consensus is that you're getting these things—and more—meticulously prepared to an extraordinary quality standard. If that's not four stars, then what would be? You can probably have a bad night at Masa, because you can have a bad night anywhere, but there's enough informed critical opinion out there that we can draw some conclusions. And one clear conclusion is that Masa is a lot more than just just good sushi, with caviar and foie gras thrown in to bump up the price. Masa has been a four-star restaurant for all of nine days now, so it's probably a little soon to be drawing such comparisons. That said, it appears to me that the drop-off from Masa to Bar Masa is much steeper than the drop-off from JG to Nougatine. You could say that diners who haven't the time or the budget for JG can catch a bit of JG's reflected glow by sitting at Nougatine. I've seen no evidence that the same is true of Bar Masa. Indeed, most people who've gone there seem to be underwhelmed.

Yes, Pace is just a few blocks away, and owned by the same folks, but otherwise there's not much similarity.

FYI, The Harrison is under reconstruction. All of the tables have been removed, and some some serious work is going on inside. It does not appear that the restaurant has permanently closed, only that they're taking a pause to remodel. The Harrison isn't that old (it opened in late '01 or early '02), so I'm surprised this would be necessary. As mentioned on another thread, nearby Landmarc also seems to be closed for remodeling. I guess the restaurants are taking advantage of the calendar to spruce up during a traditionally slow month for dining out.

Robyn, I don't know what business you're in. In some fields, an expensive dinner would be unseemly; in many other fields, it's de rigeur. I don't want to put out personal info on the Internet, but quite a few of my colleagues have received Super Bowl tickets from vendors we do business with. I haven't been that lucky, but I did go to the U.S. Open Tennis men's semi-final one year. I can tell you that we are very tough on price with our vendors. We negotiate them way down, and they take us out to dinner anyway. If you want to indict Corporate America for this, eGullet is probably not the place to do it, but the fact that you take your customer out to an expensive dinner doesn't necessarily mean that you're price gouging. Obviously you're making a profit overall, but not per se an unreasonable one. To take this conversation back to food, one of my vendors is taking me out to dinner at Chanterelle next week. It's not Masa, but Chanterelle's prix fixe is $95. There are but a handful of NYC restaurants with a higher base price, so his choice is nearly the most expensive he could have made. And it was his choice. I would have happily accepted the invitation to just about any restaurant. It is not the first time this vendor has bought me dinner at this level, and he isn't the first vendor who has done that. I can tell you that all of these jobs are competitively bid. One of them bought dinner for 8 at Montrachet a few months ago, and then we fired them the next morning. (I felt bad about that one, but it wasn't my decision.) I will also reiterate that, contrary to the NYT letter, I tend to doubt that a majority of the diners at Masa are on corporate expense accounts.

I think there's a far better explanation. Everybody knows that the NYT stars are the ones that really count, and furthermore, additions to the four-star pantheon are rare. A four-star restaurant that's Japanese comes around only slightly more often than Halley's Comet. Bruni's award of four stars vaulted the Masa review into a prominence it wouldn't otherwise have, and that's the reason for all of the letters. Depending on your view of the star system (see the Bruni and Beyond thread), this either demonstrates that stars are serving a valuable function (which is my view), or that they are sowing the seeds of our destruction.

Daniel has been around for about ten years or so. How long have Blue Hill and Lupa been around? ← Daniel opened in 1993. Lupa opened in 1999. I believe Blue Hill opened in 2000. They are all fine restaurants, but probably not in the spirit of what Fat Guy had in mind when he referred to "tried-and-true...who have dished out excellence for so long."

The writers are proposing a jury nullification. In their view, Bruni should dock a star because the price is so outrageous. The Times's rating system seems to allow this. The official blurb that accompanies every review tells us that the rating takes price into account. Many reviews have given the distinct impression that stars were taken away because the prices were too high, or bonus stars awarded for offering great food at better prices than one would normally expect. But Masa's price takes on a fresh perspective, when you consider that the face value of regular-season courtside tickets to the New York Knicks cost $330. This assumes you pay face value, and we know that people often pay a lot more, through ticket brokers. Many of those Knicks games are on TV, so you could see the same thing for a lot less money by staying home, but you can only get the Masa experience by eating at Masa. I would guess, too, that Masa's performance is a lot more dependable than that of the Knicks (who are 16-15 so far this season). There are some fans in those Knicks courtside seats who visit many times per season, whereas I doubt there's anyone going to Masa quite so often. Some of the other comments are just strange. One letter said: Why isn't the same writer complaining that the Times has continued to cover Knicks games? Another said: The writer's premise is suspect. To the contrary, I would guess that most diners at Masa are tourists and other well-heeled types with money to burn. Masa has only 26 seats, and it isn't all that hard in Manhattan to find 26 people a night who are willing to spend $500 each for a luxury experience. But even if it's true, who do you think is buying all of those courtside tickets to the Knicks? You guessed it: many of them are bought up by corporations for entertaining key clients.

One of my colleagues told me that Don Imus was talking about Frank Bruni's four-star review of Masa on his radio show this morning. Imus thought that a $350 sushi restaurant is outrageous.

Most restaurants are in business to make money. I doubt that these owners are much different in that regard. Probably they're as frustrated as anybody that none of their re-inventions has lasted very long. The new steakhouse formula might make sense, as there aren't a lot of steakhouses in that immediate neighborhood, and it's an easier format to get right.

Most of the contributions to this thread so far have been at the unstarred level. There's nothing wrong with that, but I thought I'd give a couple of examples at the high end. The website for Gotham Bar and Grill says (on this page) that Chef Alfred Portale has earned three stars in four consecutive NYT reviews (1985, 1989, 1993, 1996). According to the website, no other chef has done that. If so, Gotham would certainly meet the criterion for sustained long-term excellence. Another example would be Peter Luger, which has been widely regarded as the city's best steakhouse for decades.

I think the reality is somewhere between what FG and Bux have said. When the Times reviews a new restaurant, the analogy to "news" is at its strongest. It's just like reviewing a new {film, book, musical, play, opera} when it first comes out. The public expects timely reviews of major new restaurants, and the paper can't reasonably duck from providing them. I'd say that about 75% of the reviews are in this category. The critic has more discretion where he is re-reviewing an established restaurant, or reviewing for the first time a restaurant that is no longer new. In this case, I agree that the paper shouldn't waste precious space on a restaurant that the critic dislikes. Several of the Times's most pointless reviews in 2004 fell in this category. Here, I agree with Bux that an unfavorable review serves very little purpose, unless the restaurant has suffered a decline that is so newsworthy that it demands coverage. Although the DJ column does not award stars, many of them are quite judgmental. Frank Bruni has used this space to deliver some scathing criticism. In some cases this is actually less fair to the restaurants than the main reviews, as these columns are often based upon a single visit not long after the restaurant has opened. Some of these restaurants get a full review shortly thereafter, but others do not—meaning that the less-rigorous DJ column becomes the Times's long-term critical statement on the restaurant—permanently accessible in web searches, and the like.