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I think FG is right. New restaurants open on the UES all the time. But what the UES seldom gets are the "destination" restaurants that are mentioned in the annual fall dining previews. The UES does have a handful of destination restaurants, but they don't come along as often. The restauranteurs who open destination restaurants (or those that aspire to that status) generally seek out neighborhoods that have already proven themselves hospitable to destination dining. Every once in a while, someone takes a chance on a hitherto unproven neighborhod, and if they're successful, a whole bunch more may follow. Once upon a time, the Lower East Side was an example of that. Then came the East Village, and so on. I think the UES suffers from a couple of problems. It's not a particularly cheap neighborhood to go into, but the poor transit infrastructure (just one subway line) make it comparatively difficult to reach.

I believe the lunch and dinner menus at Per Se were originally identical. The option of the shorter (and less expensive) five-course menu was eventually dropped at dinner time, but is still available at lunch. However, that "less expensive" option is still $175. As others have noted, I've never heard of a restaurant charging more at lunch, but Chang is making a career out of doing things no one has heard of. He doesn't have many seats to fill. Given the buzz, I suspect he'll be full for quite a while.

Per Se is a close analogy. They too serve lunch only on weekends. After 4½ years in business, at a much higher price point, it's still a pretty tough resy to get. Not impossible, but tough, and that's with a larger space.

The critical point, though, is that Jean Georges is not popular at lunch. That's the reason why the restaurant is essentially "giving the food away." Vongerichten isn't running a charity. If he could sell the lunch menu for anything approaching the price of the dinner menu, he would. The fact that lunch is the most popular option among the eGullet set simply demonstrates that the eGullet set is an insignificant part of the restaurant's clientele.

Yes, it did have a Michelin star. As I mentioned upthread, I had a meal upstairs a few months ago, after Loughhead had already been there for several months. The menu was a snoozer, and the quality was uneven. We enjoyed several great meals at Country in the past, so we were prepared to give it another chance. A first-timer might not have been so generous. I thought that Loughhead's decision to focus first on the café was a clear blunder, and perhaps an indication that he was in over his head.What I can't assess is how much of this was Loughhead's fault. Was the dining room's decline his responsibility, or something that was happening before he came on board. Zakarian hasn't exactly been forthcoming. After Eater put Country on deathwatch, Zakarian protested that business was booming. Country Steak was announced very shortly thereafter. It clearly must have been already in the works when Zakarian made his earlier claim that the restaurant was in great shape. His explanation for the shift wasn't really believable.

Definitely an "edgier" look than I was expecting, but clearly an attempt to be in sync with the times.

I don't think it's a particularly insightful piece. This is what he says about the ADNY patrons: I'd say he's overflowing with disdain for people who happen to dress extravantly, and perhaps he merely assumes that they're not attuned to the food, because he figures they're not like him. I mean, did he actually ask? More likely it's just an assumption that flows from a lack of familiarity with the people he's looking at. In my experience, limited though it may be, those with expensive tastes are usually more attuned to the quality of what they're consuming, not less. Sure, there are some who just throw money around because they can, but then, not every Momofuku patron is "savvy" either (Bruni's term for them).

I also think it's quite possible that, after 4+ years, Bruni's tastes (or the lack of them) are influencing the kinds of dishes that get put on menus.

I can think of two things right off the bat.Bruni has almost totally missed the boat on the "WD-50-like" cuisine. He gave WD-50 the three stars it deserved, basically because he decided that the experiments at last taste good. But he was dismissive of pretty much every other example of it (Goldfarb, Mason, Ong, Liebrandt). Bruni certainly hasn't missed the boat on David Chang. But did Chang just emerge out of nowhere, or did he have precursors? Has anyone tried to improve on what Chang is doing? If not, why not? If they have, are they succeeding or failing, and why? In his review of Eighty One, he complained that "the high-end New York dining scene is awash in troikas of pork, trilogies of tuna and the like. A meat that does a wholly satisfying turn as a chop, or a fish showcased adequately in a fillet, appears in many guises, as if it’s an actor doing one of those multi-part tours de force." Did this trend actually originate in New York? And is it really such a bad thing, as the review insinuates?

There is a lot of merit to the "consumer reports" side of the job. A lot of the restaurants Bruni reviews don't really lend themselves to any kind of deep analysis. But the Times doesn't have a separate critic who writes "thought pieces" about new developments in New York cuisine and their historical context. Either you're going to get those insights from the restaurant critic, or you're not going to get them at all. Right now, you don't get them at all.

Funny, but I thought that was the point of a restaurant review...I agree with you that the evaluation of the restaurant itself is the main purpose of the review. But the essential difference between an excellent professional review and an amateur food board post is the quality of the insight, and that's what Bruni often lacks. The problem with Bruni's digressions is that they're so often irrelevant. They don't illuminate the restaurant in any particularly compelling way. For instance, here are the first two grafs of his Bar Q review:

I am not so sure he actually did that. Both Mimi Sheraton and Ruth Reichl gave high star ratings to non-Francophile restaurants. Sheraton, for instance, gave four stars to Hatsuhana and three to Sammy's Roumanian. Reichl ranged far and wide in her three-star ratings. The difference is that Sheraton and Reichl understood the French model too, and I am not convinced Bruni really does.

Rosanjin's existence counts as an easily google-able fact. What I meant was, what have you learned something about cuisine from him? Obviously, every week you're getting one man's opinion about whether a place is good or not. We are not in an era of great food criticism.

For those Bruni supporters out there, when was the last time you learned anything from him — not counting easily goggle-able facts such as the name of a chef, the date a restaurant opened, etc.

What you don't get from books is "taste experience," and I think Bruni has that for Italian cuisine. But that experience doesn't necessarily translate into the ability to write about it. What FG's post demonstrates is that Bruni is an awful food writer, with his Italian reviews being the better of a bad lot overall.

He clearly has the perspective of having dined extensively in Italy. It's the only cuisine he writes about where you get the sense of broader experience than just eating out a lot in Manhattan. I suppose it's possible that he ate all those meals in Italy without learning anything, but I give him at least that much credit. Obviously, it's all relative. He's not the world's greatest expert on Italian cuisine, but to the extent he's knowledgeable about anything, he's knowledgeable about that.I suppose his Italian expertise, however limited it may be, helps make his reviews of those restaurants more informed. It also has a warping effect, because non-Italian restaurants are at a disadvantage.

I think it's the latter.

But I didn't really sense "bitterness" or "jealousy" in his comments, and I would be curious to know what quotes from that article gave you this impression? Yeah, he may not have liked some things that other critics liked, but normally one chalks that up to reasonable disagreement among professionals. Inaccuracy is a whole other matter, and I'm not defending him on that score.

Why would you assume that? Here's a guy who has spent decades writing about restaurants. Sometimes, he's just not going to like something as much as you or I do. One need not invent subtexts ("bitter", "old", "jealous") to explain it. Anyhow, he didn't dislike it; he just failed to "love it" as much as some other people. That's why I say marvel at the amazing excuses given whenever anyone is the least bit critical of David Chang.

It's one thing to disagree with Sokolov on whether those other restaurants are comparable, but these comments seem to suggest that there is something wrong with people who choose not to join Chang's "club":

From what you've written, one would think he hated Ko, which isn't the case at all. It seems that when a critic shows less than the requisite level of rapture with one of Chang's places, people think the critic "just doesn't get it." Well, maybe they do get it. No chef and no restaurant is loved by everybody. Doesn't happen. His complaints (the backless stools, the reservations process, etc.) are certainly not new. Many critics, both pro and amateur, have made similar complaints.

I think there are two certainties. Yasuda isn't going to say, "You're right; I'm cheap." He's also not going to say, "You're right; I'm stubborn."

The similarity to Kefi is tenuous at best, especially in that one is Greek and the other Italian.

There has been no word, but Nieporent has a reputation for opening places on time. It was promised for August, which would be perfect timing insofar as a fall review cycle is concerned.

I don't think Chang ever deliberately set out to open a restaurant where service sucked. He was trying to re-think the model for this type of restaurant. Anytime you do that, you're going to make some mistakes. At Ssam Bar, he has been credited (in approving tones) with "shattering" the model for the traditional restaurant. I always thought that was a bit of an exaggeration. But in any case, if you're going to have a business model that thrives on experimentation, you can't expect all the experiments to be instant successes.