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Just because someone has the financial resources to patronize fine restaurants, does not mean they choose to spend their money that way. They could be spending it on golf courses, ski slopes, clothes, jewelry, fancy cars, expensive apartments, private schools, rock concerts, or a hundred other things. So you haven't really identified the relevant population. In another post you said you never dined there, which means you never checked. The available evidence, albeit imperfect, suggests he did not.

A few things, yes. Every Per Se meal I've ever heard of begins with the Salmon Cones and Oysters & Pearls (unless you're a vegetarian, that is). But after the first couple of courses, the menu changes quite a bit—far more than Jean Georges does. It's not as if the restaurant is stalled in a 1990s funk, serving the same few things over and over again. I'm always amazed that Nathan can say what "most affluent NY diners" are keeping track of. How on earth does he know?But even if that were demonstrably true, Bruni obviously would have been aware of the change. As someone who spends practically his entire waking life visiting restaurants, he is supposed to know more than the typical affluent diner. His reviews are supposed to do more than just tell us what we already know. Any intellectually curious person in his shoes should have been motivated to check out the retooled ADNY for himself. If he failed to do so, shame on him. If he did, and could perceive no difference, what does that tell you?

The g/f and I visited Anthos a couple of weeks ago (blog post here). I echo FG's enthusiasm. Frank Bruni missed the boat on this one, putting Anthos into his usual two-star scrum. It's a three-star restaurant.

Do you think this would be parallelled if Beno were to leave per se, or Bruel to leave Daniel? ← The ADNY and Per Se examples are quite similar, Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller both spend the majority of their time—in Ducasse's case, the vast majority—outside of New York. I believe Keller has even said, "Per Se is Jonathan Benno's restaurant now." So yes, if Benno left, I would expect Bruni to pay a visit within the first 3-6 months and report on it.By most accounts, Daniel Boulud still spends the majority of his time at Daniel. Unlike Ducasse or Keller, he's New York based, and Daniel is his flagship. So I wouldn't expect Bruel's departure to be as significant a change as Delouvrier's was, or Benno's would be.

Mozza, by all descriptions, isn't within either of those. ← In the article, he compared it to the NY establishment that he considered most closely relevant. Others (whose opinions I trust far more than his) said that he had failed to identify or visit the best NYC example in that category. That's the omission of which he was guilty.

"Proof" is a strong word. Lots of places close, for a multitude of reasons. Ducasse made the error of choosing a location where union issues torpedoed the restaurant. The other four-star establishments don't have that problem.I do agree that, in relation to the demographic Nathan is familiar with, Per Se has "democratized" the four-star experience, whereas Ducasse has not. But some people subscribe to the view that the NYT food critic ought to be identifying and celebrating excellence, rather than just following the breadcrumb trails left by others.

I never understood that argument. NY-style pizza is a style all of its own...and Mozza is not in that style. Mozza did not need to be compared to NY pizzerias. ← There isn't just one New York style of pizza. Bruni said that Mozza serves "the thin-crust pizza of Naples," and he cited at least one NYC restaurant that (he says) does so too. So apparently he thought the comparison was relevant.Then again, if you're writing in the NYT about a style of pizza NYC doesn't have, that would be rather important to point out. But he wasn't making that claim.

I would be inclined to agree with that. On my most recent visit, I found it even better than my early visits, shortly after it opened.From a reviewing standpoint, it's a bit of an oddity, as it's the only non-NYC restaurant that has gotten a star rating from Bruni. I cannot think of another comparable example rated by his predecessors.

like who? when it comes to the relative rankings of NY 4-star restaurants (as well as restaurants with 4-star aspirations)...there are as many varying opinions as there are critics. ← I think we agree that, with the system we have, there are only a handful of restaurants that could make a plausible claim of being four-star restaurants.(*)I think we also agree that there aren't a huge number of people who visit that class of restaurants often enough to have any basis for making informed comparisons between them. It therefore doesn't take many people making that claim, before you have to take it seriously. "Taking it seriously" doesn't mean automatic agreement. It only means that it merits investigation, and most likely some kind of comment. It really is no different than when Bruni made an uninformed comment about New York pizzerias. There aren't that many real pizza experts, so it doesn't take much effort to figure out what they're saying. If the same pizzeria is named by a whole bunch of different people, it probably suggests that you ought to be taking it seriously. You could argue that his pizzeria error was more defensible, because pizza isn't really "his beat." Yet, he considered it important enough to persuade his editors to pay for an out-of-town trip to an L.A. pizzeria, though couldn't be bothered to properly research the places he was ostensibly comparing it to. (*) I know there are people who believe that the best restaurant of Type X ought to have four stars, even if X = "hot dog stand". But under the system that Frank Bruni is using, there are only 5 four-star restaurants, and probably no more than 10 others—that's stretching it—that could reasonably be considered candidates.

True, but that could be the response to almost every post on this 52-page thread.

I think FG is suggesting this premise: Any NYC restaurant that has four stars, or is a plausible candidate, deserves both a visit and some kind of commentary—not necessarily a full re-review—when it changes chefs. Such changes don't happen all that often. When they do happen, it is inherently newsworthy. Moreover, the NYT critic has an unusual position of authority. His decisions at the four-star level make international news. He also has the budget to spend the kind of money on those restaurants that most critics cannot. But if Bruni saw his job that way FG and I do, he probably wouldn't have demoted ADNY in the first place. To make that decision, he had to conclude that ADNY was no better than the sixth-best restaurant in New York, a verdict that's very difficult to believe.

I don't suggest it's definitive, but I agree with FG that it's extremely likely that Bruni would be noticed at ADNY.

It includes service, but not tax. All other items (e.g., the wine list) also include service, but not tax.

Tennessee Mountain? Maybe with a time machine you can check it out again. Someone upthread mentioned that they've been closed for awhile. ← I went there once, not long before it closed. I ordered and enjoyed the beef ribs, but most 'cue reviewers pooh-poohed the place.

The trouble with these precedents is that we're dealing with a small sample size, and many of the examples are from critics who had a very different approach than Bruni does.My guess is that when Bruni arrived in New York, he dined at all the 4*'s immediately, and found Bouley clearly below the level of the others, a conclusion I agree with (though the review did a poor job of expressing it). That made the re-review a matter of some importance, in his mind. The trouble with the Ducasse re-review is that Bruni just doesn't "get" this kind of restaurant. Even under Delouvrier, I have considerable doubts that ADNY truly deserved the demotion. So if the guy responsible for the demotion didn't "get" the restaurant under Delouvrier, there's a good chance he wasn't going to "get it" under Esnault either. There may also be an unwritten law that the four-star club can't ever grow beyond a certain size. There are five of them now, and I am not aware of a time when there were more than six. Had Bruni awarded 4* to Masa and Per Se without demoting anybody, there would have been seven. By the same token, I suspect that the lack of a "replacement" is the only thing preventing Daniel from being demoted. Four stars is supposed to mean "extraordinary," and his comments about it (albeit in dicta) suggest a lot less enthuisasm for Daniel than he has expressed in his 4* reviews. Incidentally, I suspect that a majority of restaurants that have lost the fourth star have never gotten it back again. As usual, I'm sure Leonard will confirm or refute. The known exceptions often involve a move of premises or a re-naming—a tactic more likely to encourage a fresh look by the critic.

Unfortunately, the various blog posts in "The Launch" started to remind me of my own home re-decorating project. You keep thinking of "just one more thing" that you want, and before you know it, your budget has mushroomed way beyond its original size.

They're different parts of the cow. The porterhouse is the short loin, while the rib chop is...the rib, generally much more fat-laden.By the way, on Friday Frank Bruni weighed in on the topic here. Not surprisingly, he has some of the same suggestions that we do.

That's a pretty generous set of assumptions. If the non-review were a crime, we wouldn't have enough evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. But I think we're operating on a lower burden of proof here. There are good reasons to believe Bruni didn't even pay a visit (i.e. the Esnault interview), which means he wasn't even gathering the raw data to determine whether a re-review was called for.If I were in Bruni's shoes (or had his budget), a chef change at a three or four-star restaurant would be enough to prompt at least one visit. Obviously not all would get a full re-review, but certainly a blog post would be called for. Chef changes at those restaurants are infrequent enough to be inherently noteworthy when they do happen.

RUB is my #1 go-to place for BBQ. In part, that's because it's very good. The other part is that the location is right along the path of my commute, so it's never out-of-the-way. For me, BBQ is a "when I'm in the mood" kind of food, not the kind of thing I plan long in advance. So it's nice to have a go-to place that's conveniently located, and that you can usually get into. I've been to Dinosaur once, and while it was obviously very solid, I wasn't quite smitten enough to make that trek regularly A few weeks ago, the g/f and I tried to go back. At 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, they quoted something like a 75-minute wait. We weren't that desperate, so we moved on. We did the whole rack-of-lamb at Daisy May, which was absolutely superb. But there again, it's rather a long trek. Blue Smoke and Hill Country are on my must-try list.

In the post-Bryan Miller(*) era, no restaurant at the one/two-star level has done a better job at getting itself re-reviewed, although there was a bit of luck involved. In his Diner's Journal piece, Bruni said that he just walked into the place one day without plans, because he was hungry and knew it wouldn't be full. Obviously he liked it enough to make the repeat visits that led to a full review.But by changing the name and repeatedly firing the chef, the owners of Compass created the conditions that made a re-review more likely. With the peculiar exception of Craftsteak, restaurants that make less splashy adjustments have almost no chance of attracting a prompt re-review. * I refer to the "post-Bryan Miller era" because, as Leonard Kim often reminds us, Mimi Sheraton and Bryan Miller typically reviewed two restaurants per week (and occasionally even more than that), a system that allowed for more frequent re-reviews. Also, although we have no way of measuring it, there's a widely held view that there were fewer "reviewable" restaurants in those days. Frank Bruni has revived the double review, but unlike Miller and Sheraton, the vast majority of his reviews are still just one restaurant.

We don't have—and will probably never have—all the information we need to reach a definitive conclusion. I believe it's exceedingly unlikely that Bruni could have visited ADNY unnoticed. But as Nathan observes, it's not inconceivable. If Bruni went there and still felt it was a three-star restaurant, I would obviously disagree with his critical acumen, but clearly in that case a re-review wouldn't be justified.I also recall that, before the closing was publicly announced, it was well known that Ducasse was looking for another location. If Bruni was aware of that, he may have felt that it was better to wait until the matter was settled. Until Bruni files a few more re-reviews (of himself), it will be hard to know his criteria. But I think there are many one-star restaurants that undergo "targeted and consequential changes" after early reviews, and most of them have no prayer of getting reviewed again. What helped Craftsteak was A) Colicchio's very savvy self-promotion; B) The fact that it was a Colicchio restaurant; and C) Bruni loves steak.

The most damning thing about the Ducasse demotion was not merely the fact of it, but some of the reasons given. I tend to agree with Nathan that, having done so, a quick re-review was probably not appropriate.But after Esnault had already been in place for a while, I recall reading an interview in which Esnault mentioned that Bruni had not yet even paid a visit, to the best of Esnault's knowledge (and Esnault almost certainly would know). And that's a visit I think a competent critic was more-or-less obligated to make. My guess is that Bruni had no plans to even try the place again anytime soon. I gave it four on my blog, so I agree with you. I would note, though, that every current NYT four-star restaurant has at least two Michelin stars—and The Modern, as of now, has only one. So while I can say with near-definitive certainty that Bruni missed the boat when he awarded two stars, I can't say that three would have been wrong. Alto seemed like a solid three to me, but there too, Bruni gave it two.

Well, is there (anything that opened since that is as good)? ← Well, it's time to cue Leonard Kim again. As of December, it will be three years since the last new entrant to the four-star club. I'm not aware of any reasonable candidates that are opening this fall, so it will be a surprise if Bruni names a new one by then. My guess is that, by historical standards, that's a fairly long time to go without a new four-star restaurant (or a promotion) being crowned. He inherited a four-tier system, and since Masa in December 2004 he hasn't been able to find anyplace else deserving of that rating. Any intellectually curious individual would naturally ask: why?If there are none worthy right now—and I concede that's quite possible—in a sense, that's news. It makes you want to ask what's going on. Is the category moribund? Why are no chefs trying to reach that level...or, if they're trying, why aren't they succeeding?

As ever, thanks to Leonard. I knew we could count on him!! I think you'd have to say that the standard has changed. Among the five current members of the four-star club, only Daniel had to work its way up from a lower rating. The others were rated at four to begin with. (I am counting Masa in that latter category, since Hesser never actually put a rating on it. Had she done so, Bruni's review almost certainly would not have been written—at least, not so soon.)I do realize that new members of the four-star club come along relatively rarely. As controversial as some of Bruni's ratings have been, I can't honestly say that he clearly missed the boat on any four-star restaurant candidates that have come along during his tenure. There are two or three that some might argue are four-star restaurants, but none are compelling enough for me to say that Bruni definitely got them wrong. (I am not counting his demotions, which are a different story.) My guess is that it's definitely weighing on Bruni's mind. He's now in his fourth year, and there hasn't been a new entrant to the four-star club since Per Se and Masa, both reviewed in the first seven months of his tenure. He's has to be thinking: three years later, and there's nothing new that's as good?

My most recent experience with it was 15 months ago. The server fumbled the ball, but luckily the sommelier recovered.My friend and I asked for a wine pairing at $150 per person. The server replied, with a somewhat haughty tone, "We normally sell the wine pairing at the price of the menu." At the time, I believe that would have been $225 pp (it's now $250). He added, "Perhaps a couple of half-bottles....?" We didn't accept that, and asked to speak to the sommelier. He said, "I can do it for $150, as long as you'll allow me to go anywhere I want." It was a peculiar condition, as it's normal for wine pairings to go "wherever the sommelier wants." So we agreed to that, and he did a terrific job. I think our only request was that we wanted a sauterne with the foie gras, which he duly provided. We had no complaints with the pairings whatsoever, except for the peculiar negotiation it took to get us there. Obviously you're not going to get the same wines at $150 that you'd get at $250, but I don't think Per Se stocks junk wines. Anything they have in stock is going to be pretty good. I don't think two half-bottles would have been better. I'm going to Per Se again next month, so I'll have a new data point to work with.