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I thought that FG provided a great example in Bryan Miller's Four Seasons review. This was pre-blog, pre-eGullet days, but he mentioned that he'd frequently heard complaints about the service there, but for some odd reason, it never actually happened to him.More recently—although it's not quite what you're looking for—Frank Bruni did a quasi-scientific experiment at Le Cirque. He would send his friends in first, 15-20 minutes in advance, and see how they were treated—not well. Once the management realized they were with Bruni, everything changed. I think, though, that the extent of it varies from one restaurant to another. Gramercy Tavern (leaving aside its occasional off-day) gives terrific service to just about everybody, though if you're a regular it is even better. That isn't necessarily true everywhere.

mistake post; please delete

I paid my third visit last week. My two companions—who, to be fair, are not from here—declared it their best-ever meal in New York. Two of my three meals, including last week's, have been business dinners, and I did not feel it appropriate to shoot photos or take notes. The other time, I just wasn't in a blogging mood. But I think the quality here is remarkable. I haven't had a bad dish yet, and many of them are superb. They don't seem to be doing badly, but the restaurant hasn't been full on any of my three visits. This is truly an under-appreciated gem, and it should have received three stars.

It seems to me that there are only two possibilities. The first is that the 20% of the time when he is not recognized gives the critic valuable perspective that he otherwise would not have. The second is that he gains nothing by that 20%, and the outcome would be the same if he waltzed in every time and announced himself as Frank Bruni. Well, if the best argument you can make is that anonymity isn't much help, that's still not an argument for abandoning it. If anonymity were abandoned, the reviews can only stay the same or get worse. They only way a non-anonymous Bruni could improve his reviews is by using his position to obtain "extras" that the average, non-VIP diner cannot get. If he's going to continue to do what he does today — that is, to attempt to dine as the ordinary patron does — then he cannot possibly gain anything by shedding his anonymity.

More on the rest of what you said later, but I think this statement may call for a refresher course in mathematics. Being recognized 80% of the time (and the real number may be higher) does not translate into being not recognized 1 time at every restaurant, even assuming a 5-visit average (which is not the average -- it's probably 3 or 4 at the most). ← Oh, I'm not that mathematically naive (I majored in math). I do realize that the truly anonymous visits are not going to be distributed evenly. He might be recognized 100% of the time at Jean Georges, and 0% at La Sirène. But there's a hefty amount of empirical evidence scattered throughout his reviews (including the L'Affaire ADNY) that even top-tier restaurants miss him sometimes, and the farther down the ladder you go, the more likely this is to happen. Well, I certainly think the only "value" of Frank Bruni's Ago review was entertainment. Would that not, then, be the only value of every Times review? ← Actually, Miller's experience seems to stand for precisely the opposite conclusion. I mean, think about it: enough customers are pissed off that they saw fit to complain to him; and he got enough of those complaints that he saw fit to mention them in his review. Yet, when he visited himself, he found such lapses to be rare. We have only his dubious assurance that he thinks he would have noticed if such lapses occurred at other tables. Because all adults who dine out with any frequency eventually learn that every restaurant has bad nights. Even Taillevent. Even Gramercy Tavern. I've had bad service experiences at both.... The statistically reliable way to rate service is through a mechanism like Zagat, adjusted for Zagat's laughable lack of a qualifying process or a serious audit process. ← Would not that be true of the food, too? I mean, the folks at Peter Luger generally know how to broil steak, but you can have a bad steak at Peter Luger. All adults who dine out with any frequency know that. But just as some restaurants have better food than others, some have better service than others. Even though GT has its bad nights, they are rare, and their typical performance is better than at most places. It's the critic's job to gather enough data to see through that.

So you don't think that, for example, Alan Richman being the former host of a show on the Food Network is a rejection of anonymity? It seems you're saying that all critics other than Restaurant Girl dine anonymously, which is certainly the belief most critics want to hoodwink the public into holding. But surely you know better. My understanding is that no professional critic in town (even RG) reserves under his or her own name, and except for her, no pro critic goes out of his or her way to deliberately call attention to themselves. They don't, for example, walk in the door and say, "I'm Alan Richman from GQ, here to review your restaurant." Since photos of the major critics are readily available, savvy restaurant staffs are likely to recognize them more often than not. But it is pretty obvious that they go unrecognized often enough to get a good idea of how the "ordinary diner" would be served. Even if they get that idea only 20% of the time, it's better than getting it zero percent of the time. I don't think that any of these critics are hoodwinking the public, because they all acknowledge—at different times, and in different ways—that they realize they're frequently recognized. You can do the math: if Bruni pays 3-4 visits before he writes, and if he's recognized 80% of the time, it means that at most restaurants he reviews, he has at least one truly anonymous visit. Richman's face may be more familiar, but he is also a lot less important, so restaurants are probably less concerned about spotting him. It probably evens out. Assuming you believe that service is part of the experience of dining at a restaurant, why are service glitches not a big deal? Since most critics haven't embraced your idea, I admit that there is no statistically provable sample. But it just seems self-evidently true that if the restaurant knows you're an influential critic, you're going to get the best soignée treatment they're capable of, and you'll never get the experience of the average diner. In other words, instead of getting the typical experience 20% of the time—which at least permits intelligent extrapolation—you'd never get it at all. Are you suggesting that when Frank Bruni reviews a place, most of his readers already know whether it's good or bad, and the only purpose of the review is so that they can be entertained by his prose? I would be surprised if that were the case. The readers of this thread are atypical. I assume that most readers of the Times reviews have not assiduously followed the early buzz.

Public "gotchas" on this scale are admittedly rare, I believe for two reasons. The first is that most critics, since they are limited to (at most) one review per week, don't spend much time writing about restaurants that suck. As Bruni once said, it usually doesn't make a lot of sense to call attention to something that you're then suggesting should be avoided. The second is that most restaurants aren't this incompetent.But even in reviews where Bruni awards one or more stars, it's quite common to find mention of service glitches that—although I can't prove it—are unlikely to have happened if he was recognized. I suspect that at a majority of restaurants he reviews, he dines unrecognized at least once. Most of the professional critics in this town follow some version of the anonymity principle. The only one that has loudly rejected it is Restaurant Girl, although she claims she at least reserves under a false name. I suspect most of the critics ignored the place for the reason given above: it's usually not worth wasting a review slot on a place that sucks. The weekly BruniBetting that Eater and I run is "inside baseball." There probably aren't more than 15-20 people who pay any attention to what I predict. I seriously doubt that the typical Times reader already knows as much about the restaurant as we do.My one-star verdict on Ago says more about my limitations as a critic. I visted the restaurant once, and it so happens I ordered the dish Bruni liked best. Unlike Bruni, I'm not being paid to do this, and I don't consider myself professionally obligated to taste the whole menu before I write. If the rest of the menu were as good as the T-Bone, Bruni probably would have awarded a star—service glitches notwithstanding.

So there have been rave reviews from non-anonymous critics? ← The only other review that comes to mind is Richman's, and I believe he has the same anonymity policy as Bruni. (That is, he tries to dine anonymously, knowing all the same that he'll often be recognized.) I am just drawing the pretty obvious conclusion that if he'd walked in and said, "Hi, I'm Frank Bruni, here to review for The New York Times," it's unlikely most of those things would've happened. The food might still have sucked (then again, it might not), but he sure wouldn't have been treated like Joe Bridge and his wife, Martha Tunel.

This just in via Restaurant Girl: So maybe the Kitchen Counter will become something other than a once-a-week three-star restaurant.

The Ago review once again demonstrates the value of critic anonymity. There are about 15 things in that review that almost certainly would not happen if the restaurant realized that Bruni was their customer. Of course, 80% of restaurants would recognize him — if not every time, certainly more often than not — but a critic that sheds anonymity would ensure that such a review could never be written. It also shows that Ago really and truly sucks, because they not only made those blunders, but couldn't even pretend to be good when the city's most influential critic was in.

Bruni has given POOR twice before: Ninja (October 2005) and Harry Cipriani (November 2007). I think both of those were actually more scathing than this one.

Yet, Chang put out the not-quite-believable statement that this was simply due to food costs, and next month the price could go back down again. The textbook profit-maximizing enterprise would go ahead and jack up the price to $250 right now, but for the fact that the PR backlash would be terrible, and it would be embarrassing to have to lower the price after the demand at that level is eventually exhausted. But look at Per Se. The nine-course menu, originally priced at $150, is now $275. That includes gratuity and the original price did not, so the relevant comparison is about $150 to $230. You can expect prices at Ko to rise in similar proportion over time.

This is a common reaction when one returns to a restaurant where one has such fond recollections, especially if the menu hasn't changed all that much.Also, if you went last night, probably half the staff had been up partying till 4:00 a.m. after Chang won the JB award. I'm not suggesting that your disappointing experience was defensible, especially at a $100 cost, but you probably didn't catch them at their best.

Yes, but the statements "the kitchen had no clue how to use proteins" and "seafood [was] often good" are simply inconsistent with one another.

Though one person thinks the kitchen "had no clue how to use proteins," it was the same staff that was praised for those very attributes in the original location. On my most recent visit, entrée prices were in the twenties, with none in the thirties. These days, that's basically mid-priced. I don't really know what that means, since TR was a chef-driven restaurant to begin with. It had no corporate identity other than the identity that the chef, Colin Alevras, gave it. Seafood, by the way, is a protein. No disagreement there, but I'd note that this was really just steps away from the NoLIta/EV border. In terms of walking distance, TR didn't move all that far away from its original location.

On the face of it, this is a move that should have worked. The distance of the move was about four blocks. For this type of restaurant, that's not the type of move that will lose customers, unless there's a significant travel or cultural barrier to cross—and in this case, there wasn't. I never visited the old TR, but from the various reviews I've read, my sense is that Alevras wasn't able to scale his operation to a restaurant three times the size. The concepts are different enough that it shouldn't have mattered if Alevras had been able to keep up the quality.

I don't know about eater, or about roughing up the place so much, but after my first dining experience here, I would never go back - just not good enough, food or service wise, to be worth it. ← The fact is, Eater just loves roughing people up. They've roughed up plenty of non-MPD restaurants, and there are plenty of MPD restaurants they've left alone. Merkato 55 is a train wreck, and they're reporting the story. I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

There are consulting chefs phoning in menus all over town.

I think they're just calling the shots as they see them. It's not the location, it's Marcus's phoned-in menu.

It was reported that he intends to re-open Café Gray in another location, not yet disclosed. I won't be holding my breath, given that Kunz is a notorious slow-poke. One widely floated possibility is that the private banquet space at Grayz would be converted into a proper restaurant.

Actually, I think it was Nathan that had the garlic soup. I was there two nights ago (report here). I had the squash blossom, which I liked a bit less than you did; and the trout, which I loved. They didn't do the pepper-grinder thing, which I agree doesn't belong in this type of restaurant. Actually, they started taking walk-ins a few days ago. Too late now, but there was a 20% discount on the full bill, which I thought was a nice gesture. The paper was off the windows, and it looked for all intents and purposes like a fully open restaurant.

I can't compare it to Biltmore Room (never went), but I think the décor at Sheridan Square is about 100 times nicer than Commerce. The comparison to Bar Blanc is a closer call, but I would give the nod to Sheridan Square.

I walked in at around that time last Thursday, and I was the first customer.

Does anyone know what Geoffrey Zakarian does these days? As far as I know, he doesn't have a cable TV show or a book deal, his only two restaurants are Town & Country, and he's not at retirement age. If he's not at his restaurants, then where is he?

I read that earlier, but he has now been there in excess of three months.