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Hopefully they are amongst the first to realize that those measure don't help the bottom line and do look desperate.You increase your cover count meaning you need to keep more staff on the floor. However these covers expect to pay exactly the pri fixe cost (plus an 18% tip) and maybe one wine by the glass. You lose money in the short term. ← I find that excruciatingly difficult to believe. Dozens of restaurants have independently reached the conclusion that such deals are beneficial. You are claiming that they all, in fact, lose more money than if the seats were empty? And apparently they are too dumb realize it? Sorry, I don't buy it.

To the best of my recollection, there haven't been any notable deals coming out of Team Cru, e.g., 3 courses for $35, or that sort of thing. I do not see the usual signs of desperation.

That paints midtown with too broad a brush. Even on CPS, there are expectations that a restaurant violates at its peril.

I've dined at Corton twice and it's extremely good. It fully deserves all three of its stars. However, the food at Gilt was on another level, closer to four stars. Alas, the pro critics didn't see it that way. Also, the restaurant's economic model was out of whack: Liebrandt was serving food far too expensive for the prices they were charging. I believe it was $92 prix fixe, and many dishes carried supplements, so they couldn't realistically charge any more, especially after the reviews came in.So yeah, he dialed it down considerably at Corton. There was clearly no point in trying again with a cuisine that Bruni had hated, and in the current economy a $92 menu would have been insane. Nieporent has admitted that Corton as we know it might not have opened at all, if preparations hadn't been so far along when the economy tanked. Fortunately, he made the right decisions, and the restaurant has been a hit.

I actually think Corton is under-priced for what and where it is.However, the taxi incident is indefensible. Any restaurant on that level should call a cab for you without a second thought.

It was the Feedbag. I realize they don't fact-check, but the one thing they do is hang out with a lot of industry folks, so it's not a totally ridiculous statement.

Midnight would be an odd closing time that purportedly is going to become a chefs' hang-out. Most of the places with that reputation are open until at least 1 or 2 a.m., if not later.

My understanding is that the extended tasting menu is maybe 15 courses, as opposed to the usual 9. A number of the courses are smaller, more labor-intensive, and use more luxury ingredients. So it's not as if you're getting twice as much food, but food that is more luxurious and complex. It is certainly something that I would do if I could afford it.

That seems to be their standard opening bid, but they'll do it for considerably less. I've done wine pairings there twice; the first time for around $100pp, the second time for around $150. The best thing about Per Se's wine pairings is that they're customized to your preferences. Most restaurants have a pre-selected assortment (often not very interesting), which everyone who orders a wine pairing is going to get.

Leaving aside precisely what term is used for that type of piece, we agree that it isn't a review. And I haven't seen an example where anybody was able to write a review under the conditions you have proposed.

It's not a joke; you just need to be aware of what's a special, and what is not. Originally, a lot of the RW deals really were significant discounts off of the usual price. Some (but not all) restaurants kept those deals year-round.

I'm not familiar with all the writers you list or their work, but are they presenting their articles as critical evaluations? What makes a puff piece? Was the article in Sunday's NY Times business section about DBGB a puff piece? ← Yes it was. That doesn't mean it lacked value; to the contrary, I very much enjoyed it. But it wasn't a discerning evaluation of Boulud or his restaurants. It was an almost entirely positive piece in which the writer's perceptions were manipulated by the setting and situations that he was allowed to observe. I wouldn't want to lose such pieces, but they aren't reviews.

Yesterday, I finally got to try lunch at Jean Georges (blog post here). Most of us know the drill: two courses for $28, each additional course $14. They've been offering that deal for quite a while. It is not a recession special. I expected to find a quiet restaurant. After all, if they're serving four-star food for $28, they must be having trouble filling the seats. To the contrary, the room was full. No one should tell Vongerichten, but I have to figure the well-dressed crowd would still have been there if the price were higher. Nougatine was full too, where the prix fixe is just four dollars less. Lunch at JG is an even better deal than I thought, because it includes the full line-up of amuses-bouches and petits-fours they serve at dinner. It's not a dumbed-down menu, either. At some restaurants, the prix fixe offers just soup or salad to start, chicken or salmon for the main course. I counted twenty-one choices, including quite a few that I recognized from the dinner menu. There were a couple of weak spots, as there have always been at Vongerichten restaurants: a chicken broth amuse-bouche that tasted like dishwater; an asparagus appetizer that was pedestrian. But my red snapper entrée was terrific, and the foie gras brulee must be the best foie dish in the city. Because of its occasional misfires, Jean Georges has always seemed to me the weakest of the four-star restaurants—not weak in the absolute sense, but the one least likely to deliver a stellar meal without stumbling. I have to admit it is growing on me.

The lunch specials at Jean Georges and Nobu have been available for a long time, and weren't added just for the recession. They are very good deals nevertheless.

Based on Bruni's known preferences, it doesn't seem likely that L'Atelier remained on his radar after his initial series of visits. One never knows, but it's not a place he ever mentions, even in passing.

There is no doubt at all that they can. Obviously there are many things they cannot change. Red Lobster couldn't suddenly start serving Le Bernardin's menu. But consider, for a moment, the difference between your home when you know company's coming, and your home if someone just drops by unannounced. There are obviously things you change. In my prior post, I listed some of the many things (it's far from an exhaustive list) that a restaurant could manipulate if they knew up-front that the critic was coming. In that case, I have no objection to your proposal, except that you have just doubled the amount of work he has to do, so I don't know how he would fit it all in. In the first place, all that means is that he is recognized at some point during the visit. It includes those places, like the Le Cirque example quoted above, where they treat him like an ordinary guy for the first 15-20 minutes before they realize who he is.And of course, even if they recognize him the instant he comes in the door, they still don't know when he's coming. That means they could run out of stuff, he could come when the GM is visiting Mom in Pittsburgh and an inexperienced backup is in charge, he could come when they're overbooked and his table isn't ready for 40 minutes, etc., etc. See this Eater post for additional examples. For instance, it seems that all three of his Mercer Kitchen visits went unrecognized. At Fiamma: "Every night, he was “spotted.” My GM would send out some extra this, or extra that. If you were a slightly effeminate, mid 30’s, professional looking man with brown hair, and you ate at Fiamma from 2004 – 2006, you got to feel, for a moment, what it’s like to be Bruni." (That same post notes that Bruni looks a good deal different than his known photos; and I have heard that from other people too.) I don't know about strong odds, but it certainly can happen. But if the critic spends a couple of days hanging out in the kitchen, I am not sure how that changes anything. Those two days probably won't be typical either. Of course, this can happen with any discipline that involves a human element: the theater and music critics file reviews of just a single performance.For the restaurant beat, I've advocated more frequent re-reviews. Before Ruth Reichl, the Wednesday column usually covered two restaurants. That allowed the critic much more flexibility to re-review places. Reichl changed the format to one restaurant per week, and although Bruni has revived the double review (one of his few valuable innovations), he only does that occasionally.

That's easy: Eric Asimov, to give but one example. Of course, he's not doing restaurant criticism now, but he's still at the Times and has done the job in the past.

In the first place, a substantial part of Frank Bruni's job is figuring out which restaurants get reviewed in the first place. If each reviewed restaurant is visited three times, and if he eats out 10 times a week, it means that about 70% of his meals do not result in a rated review. We don't hear about many of those meals, but they're an essential part of the job. Here's what Bruni reported in his original review: Le Cirque is, of course, famous for this, but Bruni's oeuvre is full of less conspicuous examples. Obviously, if he calls in advance and says, "I'm Frank Bruni of The New York Times, and I'd like to come hang out in your restaurant for a few days," he's going to be treated like royalty every time. Needless to say, the place will be spick 'n' span, their best people will always be on duty, they will never run out of anything, he'll always be seated at a prime table, he'll never wait for anything, yada, yada, yada. Are you kidding? They'd be delighted. Any restaurant would far prefer to be reviewed under circumstances they control, and are known in advance. The current situation, in which he shows up unannounced and may very well not be recognized immediately, is much more nerve-wracking for them.

The job has a high burn-out rate. I believe Mimi Sheraton lasted eight years, but the norm is 5-6. In the music department, the Times has had critics that lasted 10-20 years, but none of the main restaurant critics have done that. Eating 10-12 big meals a week takes its toll. I wrote an open letter to the Times about this. Basically, I want someone with deep experience in food—someone I will learn from. Although Frank Bruni was sometimes entertaining, he didn't really know (or seem to know) much more about food than I did. Obviously he had the advantage of doing this full-time with a much higher budget, and like any smart person he did pick up useful insights along the way. But his reviews never made me think or expand my horizons, the way good criticism should.

What you've described is not an evaluation, but a puff piece. If you believe the review is tainted once the reviewer is recognized (which I don't), then he'll be extra-tainted when he does this: It's no contest. The former. The latter approach might produce some interesting feature articles, but there's a 100% guarantee that the average diner will never be able to duplicate that experience.Bruni's current approach may have its flaws, but at least it's not 100% flawed, as this one is.

Eleven Madison would be at least double the budget. ← I don't know if I agree with that. I would call and see. ← Well, the cheapest dinner option at EMP is $88 before tax, tip and beverages, so if you drink water you're 62% above the midpoint of their price range, assuming 20% service. EMP is out unless they are willing to spend dramatically more.

Again, I maintain that he had, and lost, his chance there with Daniel. ← My person star-gazing theory is that demoting Daniel would have raised existential questions that Bruni did not want to face. The historical number of four-star restaurants has always been around 5-6, and there are currently 5. He demoted Bouley and ADNY so that he could put Per Se and Masa in their place. To demote Daniel, he needed a replacement and didn't have one. I am quite sure that if another "Per Se" (or a place of that ilk) had opened in the meantime, Daniel wouldn't have kept the fourth star.The meaning of four stars is supposed to be "extraordinary." There are many things that could mean, and it is not frozen for all time: Peter Luger once had four stars. The chance Bruni has so far squandered is the opportunity to put his stamp on the four-star category, the way he has with all the others. In a city of 20,000 restaurants, something is extraordinary. It need not be precisely the same kind of place that was considered extraordinary in the past—though so far, Bruni has seemed to think it did.

I think that somewhat over-simplifies what Frank Bruni has done. It's true that he has "stretched" the fine dining model downward, giving stars to places like Second Avenue Deli and Fatty Crab that were traditionally $25 & Under restaurants, and awarding three stars to untraditional places like Ssäm Bar and Bar Room at the Modern.But there are two things he has not done. He hasn't hesitated to give full recognition to traditional "French model" restaurants when he believed food warranted it (Corton, EMP, Bouley). And he hasn't yet awarded four stars to anything other than a conventional luxury restaurant, either in the French or (in Masa's case) Japanese model. So Frank clearly does not believe that recognizing these traditional luxury restaurants in any way negates the premise of his tenure, which is that luxury matters less than it used to.

I hope it is understood that a Facebook "friend" is not a friend in the conventional sense of the word.

To an extent, the "horse race" is what Eater is about. The basic premise (that Bruni wants that four-star rush one more time) seems to me sound, though I am not at all sure Bruni will in fact find a four-star-worthy restaurant between now and August.