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Not the first: Fiamma had one too.

Let us know how it turns out. I suspect you will get a "corporate" reply written (or ghost-written) by someone in Batali's organization, though not from the man himself.

However, it's a point in LeB's corner that it has several entry prices, and Per Se does not. I also had a terrific meal at LeB in 2008, but I didn't visit Per Se last year, and it may be that Bruni didn't either.Per Se is (I am told) awfully similar to The French Laundry. If EoPandaBear was underwhelmed there, I'd say LeB is the better choice.

There's a randomness about these prizes. Some weeks, the prize is pretty good; the next week, it could be just a cookbook.

I suspect that lenders will be willing to work with restaurants to renegotiate payment terms—up to a point. As long as the restaurant is still able to pay something, the lender is probably better off than if they foreclose and get stuck with a vacant property.

And by the time you eat those great restaurant dishes, they've been tested and tweaked many times—an opportunity the show does not afford.

Of course, notwithstanding that, almost every week someone does fail pretty miserably. In addition to the points you made, the format itself doesn't lend itself to "making something awesome." The challenges are too contrived, the time limits too cramping.

That would be the most interesting final, and it makes the most sense. I am reasonably confident that Stefan is the best chef there, with Jamie and Hosea close behind. It would be a travesty if the final does not include two of those three.However, as I've said before, there is an element of luck, which is why Carla is still there, but chefs better than her are gone.

Overheard last night at the bar at dell' Anima: Customer: "I'd like to settle my tab." Bartender: "That's okay, I'll just transfer it to your table." Customer: "Actually, I'd rather settle it here." That's exactly the opposite of what normally happens at this type of place. Good for them!

I thought what he did was quite reasonable. Fabio's explanation was ridiculous. In any case, it really has nothing to do with the quality of his restaurants. The format doesn't always allow the chefs to do their best. The constraints of the various challenges are sometimes awfully contrived. Fabio was clearly not happy with his lot in the quickfire challenge, but you have to hold him accountable for cooking "oat-crusted eggplant," which sounded like an awful idea from the get-go. In the elimination challenge, he admitted his venison was over-cooked, though his excuse was pretty lame.

I am a bit skeptical of claims that there is a common palette that all New Yorkers share. It's a city of 8 million residents, plus those who commute in for work, plus those who visit from longer distances. They are all potential Benoit customers, and Ducasse only needs to attract a teensy percentage of them. If you were opening a steakhouse, you'd be a fool to make the filet your signature dish, but Benoit isn't a steakhouse.Ducasse's interview was clearly disingenuous. I think there's some truth to the claim that many New Yorkers aren't familiar with classic French cuisine, starting with the journalists who write about it. But the antidote is to serve great food, not to complain about the people eating it. The chef change was clearly an admission that the food when Benoit opened wasn't consistently good enough.

It's a very tough line to draw. The show is about survival, so you try to defend yourself. By the same token, the judges want to see if you understand why you screwed up. Sometimes, a bit of humility helps, but Carla survived last week despite putting up a pretty loony self-defense. There is an element of luck to it. Leah "won" last week because of Stefan's desserts, and he's the guy no one wanted on their team.

I don't quite see the point. Last I checked, filet mignon was a legitimate cut of meat. It's on tons of menus, and you don't have to be a tourist to order it. I could understand the objection if it were badly sourced or prepared poorly, but you didn't actually taste it. Rather, you seem to be raising a conceptual issue that I don't get.As for why they don't serve the ribeye every day, I believe it was a portion for two, so it probably has extremely limited appeal. I would venture to guess that very few Benoit patrons come in with a large ribeye on their minds.

Colicchio's blog entry is posted. He basically says that although Fabio overcooked the venison, the other elements of the dish were good. In contrast, he felt that Jeff's dish was fundamentally misconceived, and could never have been good. It gets tough by this point in the season, because everyone left is a strong chef, but someone has to lose.He strongly suggests that they didn't give the crowd vote much weight, as it seemed to him basically a popularity contest.

Fabio deserved what he got. He was trying to defend the indefensible. I was surprised to see Jeff get sent home, but I assume Colicchio will explain it on his blog later today.

The supporters of the restaurant have experienced it on its better days, which apparently you did not. I don't have enough data to know how often the "bad days" happen, but I've enjoyed Benoit both times I visited.

In the situation as described, it's hard not to blame the manager. If the diner had already declined the first table, and if there were only 5 parties in the entire restaurant, the sensible thing would be to say, "I can offer you a table here, or perhaps over there. Do you have a preference, madame?"

The original A&D was an accidental masterpiece. Various chefs had rotated through the early plans, and when it opened Neil Ferguson happened to be available. This was a guy whom Gordon Ramsay believed could run a four-star restaurant, and he was cooking some extremely sophisticated food on the LES, not at bargain prices, but at pretty good prices for the quality. But once Ferguson left, you had to figure that A&D would regress to the mean. The exact reasons for his departure have never been made public, but apparently he and management didn't see eye to eye.

Just to expand on what Daisy said, it's remarkable how they are not dropping like flies. Really, Fiamma is the only closure "blamed on the recession" that was important outside of its own neighborhood—the only one I can think of that had broad acclaim. I am not so naive as to believe it will be the last one, but I am surprised there haven't yet been more.By the way, I put "blamed on the recession" in quotes because, even in the best of times, there is a high attrition rate in the restaurant industry. If you close today and mention the tough economy, nobody is going to dispute it, but some of these places might have closed anyway. I am not saying Fiamma is necessarily one of them; honestly, I have no idea. Long-standing successes are still successes. It isn't suddenly easy to get into The Spotted Pig or the Momofukus, though the owners may be seeing an impact in terms of fewer expensive bottles of wine sold. Daisy mentioned Irving Mill, but that place was never a tough ticket, aside from the first couple of months. It's a perfect example of a restaurant that might have had troubles even in a hot market.

Unfortunately, I've found that crowd of places rather uneven, to the point where it is hard to discern a pattern.

If there is any info about this, I think we'd all be interested to hear about it.

I guess I don't understand what a "foodie" is, then. Foodies aren't all about the food? ← There are some very good places that simply don't get written about very much on places like eG, MF, Yelp, Chowhound, etc.

I am assuming Gail will be back for Season 6.

There are some very good places that do solid business that the foodies simply do not write about. It is not necessarily correlated with merit.

I don't think there was any health hazard there; it just wasn't very good. She lucked out because in a team challenge a win for the whole team saves everybody. Those have always been the rules.