oakapple

There's no question the long-term trend is toward less formality. But "conventionally formal" restaurants continue to open in New York, and quite a few of them aren't easy to get into, which suggests there is unmet demand. The trouble is mainly the larger up-front investment it takes to launch such a place, and hence, a larger loss if you fail. The city's two main critics (Bruni, Platt) have not only failed credit to the effort in many cases, but indeed, practically resent it.In today's review, the "nice things" Bruni had to say about this kind of dining were arguably back-handed. He said that Café Boulud was "no less fun to visit," hardly a marquis quote that the restaurant wants to market itself by. He repeated his past statement that CB is "the most consistently enjoyable" of Boulud's restaurants, which is probably not what the owner of Daniel wants to hear.

I had forgotten Uncle Jack's. I had a great experience there too, but I ordered the rack of lamb, so I can't vouch for the steak.

I don't know if Peter Luger "invented" the sliced porterhouse steak, but it's certainly associated with them. That steak is so thick that you'd really be making a big mistake if you ordered it any other way. There are several clone restaurants opened by Luger alumni that have a nicer atmosphere, a more varied menu, and where you don't have to reserve so long in advance—Wolfgang's, for example. If you specifically want porterhouse, you should go to a steakhouse that specializes in it, which would be Luger or one of its progeny. I love Strip House and Keens (for different reasons), but wouldn't choose either if I was in a porterhouse mood. Sparks is primarily known for its New York Strip, but I found the whole experience rather mediocre the one time I went there. I would never go again, unless someone else was picking up the check. Capital Grille is a chain, and while they do a respectable job, it feels like a hundred other steakhouses that you could visit anywhere in the country. The critics pounded Crafsteak. Bruni says it has improved, and granted it the unusual privilege of a quick upgrade to two stars. But I had two disappointing visits there, and while I'll probably give it another try at some point, I haven't rushed back. Even if they've finally gotten the steaks right, there's no reason to go there (and pay the price premium) unless you're interested in their superior appetizers and sides dishes. I have a higher opinion of the BLT franchise than DutchMuse. Yeah, it's true that the guy they're named for hardly ever cooks any more, but I've never had a disappointing steak at any of the BLT restaurants. Unlike Craftsteak, BLT had the steak nailed from the beginning. But it is more expensive than most steakhouses, so if all you want is porterhouse and mashed potatoes, you'd be wasting your time at BLT. I echo DutchMuse's recommendation for Quality Meats. It's in the BLT/Craftsteak family, in the sense that it's got the total package, and isn't just about the steak. However, QM is not specifically a porterhouse specialist. Your last criterion — "ability to have a conversation" — is a tough one. Almost all the big-name steakhouses get very loud when they are full. The standard steakhouse features a lot of hard surfaces, tables closely spaced, and a clientele of businessmen on expense accounts who run up large liquor tabs. Put those elements together, and you're going to have a lot of noise. Three downtown steakhouses that nobody's mentioned — MarkJoseph, Flames, and Harry's Steak — do a very good job and aren't as noisy, simply because they often aren't full. Craftsteak and Porter House in the TWC are, by design, a little more "upscale," and hence not quite as boistrous.

The restaurant reviewing season tends to run from September to August, kicked off by the fall preview issues in all of the major food sections. Frank Bruni's three-star review of Café Boulud today brought to mind a remarkable stat about the 2006–07 season. Since last September, Frank Bruni has not awarded four stars to any restaurant, while he has awarded three to the following: Felidia L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon Picholine Eleven Madison Park Bar Room at the Modern Esca Gramercy Tavern Café Boulud Of those eight restaurants, only L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon was new—although, in a sense, it wasn't new, since there are at least four other L'Ateliers around the world, of which this was a clone. The other seven were all re-reviews. Danny Meyer can consider himself the big winner, since he owns three of the seven. So, an entire year has gone by with only one new three-star restaurant, and no new four-star restaurants. That must be a new record for futility. Perhaps Leonard Kim can search his database. Has there ever been a year with so few new restaurants at the top two levels? Is this Bruni's fault, or has something changed in the industry? I think it's the latter. I can think of only three other new restaurants that could have rationally considered themselves three-star candidates: Gordon Ramsay, Anthos, and perhaps Insieme. Given the mixed reactions of other critics, I cannot say Bruni was wrong when he awarded two stars to each of them. (I gave three to Anthos on my blog, but it was a close call.) What's going on here? It seems that, while there are still plenty of new restaurant openings, investors are reluctant nowadays to make the larger commitment required to launch a three or four-star restaurant. Bruni's view, which he re-iterated in today's Café Boulud review, is that we're living in a more informal era, and there are fewer diners interested traditional fine dining. But ironically, while Bruni disdains traditional formality, he remains a tough grader at the three-star level. Aside from the anomaly of the Bar Room—which I'm sure even Danny Meyer never conceived of as a three-star restaurant—it is awfully tough to get a trifecta out of Frank Bruni. I wonder whether restauranteurs are consciously avoiding the challenge, with the view that the risk/reward ratio just isn't worthwhile.

I interpreted Eater's reaction as "Wait and see," while your reaction is "I've already seen enough." I'm more in Eater's camp.Now, I don't want you to take this too personally, but as a neutral reader, my take is that her food/restaurant knowledge is about comparable to yours. That's partly because she knows more than you give her credit for, and partly because you know a little less than you imagine. On the other hand, you don't have, nor have you sought, a paid professional critic's job. In that capacity, she needs to be a lot better than the typical eGullet Society contributor—that is, a lot better than you or me. So she still has a lot to prove.

The steak at BLT Steak/Prime is basically comparable to what the better steakhouses in town are getting, they age it properly, and they know how to use a broiler. It's not rocket science. On top of that, they have a more interesting variety of appetizers and side dishes. However, you do pay a slight premium over NYC's already-expensive steakhouse prices. I hope that clarifies it.

I think you over-state the shill quota in her writing. Yes, she was sometimes comped—so are a lot of people. But she was not incapable of dropping the hammer, though she seldom did so. RG has never had (and still won't have) Bruni's six-figure dining budget. I agree with FG that RG on Day One will probably come into the job with more knowledge than Bruni did.

Let me first re-emphasize that I wouldn't cheat in this manner myself, or condone it in others. I was just making an observation.At most restaurants, the bulk of the tables are two-tops or four-tops. If you make a booking for 3, they have to give you a four-top, and "lose" a seat. If you make a booking for 3, and only two show up, then they're "losing" two seats. Had they known it was a 2-person reservation to begin with, they wouldn't have reserved the same table. At Per Se, I observed that many bookings for 2 were seated at four-tops anyway. I think they might have a couple of real two-tops in the whole dining room. So in most cases, whether you book 2 or 3 people, they were probably going to use the same table.

While I wouldn't employ this strategy myself, there's one thing I feel obligated to point out: Most (all?) parties of 2 at Per Se are, in fact, seated at a four-top with two chairs removed. I myself sat at such a table last year, and on an earlier visit noticed several others like it. So when they book a party of two, they "sacrifice" two covers by design. This is in contrast to other restaurants, which book parties of two at tables that can only seat two.Per Se probably has a daily limit on the number of seats they're willing to "lose" this way. When they say that a table for 3 is available, but none are available for 2, they must have hit that limit.

Eater reported yesterday that Danyelle Freeman, a/k/a/ the Restaurant Girl will become restaurant critic for the New York Daily News. She replaces Pascale Le Draoulec, who had "retired" quite a while ago. Freeman's reviews will employ the traditional zero-to-four star rating scale, and will appear on Tuesdays, starting a week from today. As far as I know, Freeman is the first person to make the jump from hobbyist food blogger to a paid critic's job at a newspaper, so congratulations to her. Obviously there are many questions about how she'll handle this transition. Her blog was well known for seldom saying negative things about restaurants. She clearly was cozy with a number of chefs, and some of her meals were obviously comped. How will she adjust? Or, will her Daily News column be just like her blog entries, only with stars attached?

Well, I agree with that part. It's a pity to see a chef with his talent spending more time in the boardroom than in the kitchen. But I have to think that the way Cello was just yanked away from him must have had something to do with that. And many very successful chefs (Vongerichten, Colicchio) have created large empires while still maintaining a very high quality. Well, I was responding to the suggestion that his restaurants are awful. When you consider that even Per Se and Le Bernardin don't hit a home run 100% of the time, the BLT franchise is doing pretty good at 75%. It's high enough that the BLT's are on my return-to list...and not many restaurants manage that. The original poster stipulated that he wanted porterhouse, mashed potatoes, dessert, and quiet conversation; and didn't care much about wine. With those stipulations, I wouldn't recommend a BLT restaurant either.

I've been to the BLT's (Steak/Prime/Fish) about 8 times between them. My experiences have been positive for about 75% of those visits. Obviously it's a chain, and Tourondel himself probably hasn't cooked a meal in about two years. But L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon is a chain too, and some pretty damned good things come out of his kitchens.

I've been to QM a couple of times. Among the newer breed of steakhouses, it's among the best, but I agree the service can be a little inconsistent.

I've been crazily busy the last couple of months, and haven't had time for posting/blogging. But I must say that I had dinner at Felidia a couple of weeks ago, and it was absolutely superb. Just superb. Mind you, it was a Tuesday evening in the middle of summer, and the place was not even close to full.

Well, he's not going to say anything truly provocative about the reviewing policy.Among the questions answered so far, the one surprise was that Peter Meehan and Florence Fabricant are freelancers. I mean, both of them have what appears to be a near full-time job, and FloFab has been there forever.

I have to assume that they are planning to change the menu, even if it hasn't happened yet.

That's largely true, though there are some well known counter-examples. If El Bulli were the hypothetical profit-maximizing capitalist enterprise that you learn about in Economics class, it wouldn't be closed 6 months a year.

It might be a bit easier to get a reservation there than it was 3 years ago. But only a bit. I mean, just call the restaurant and try booking a table for a random night less than two months away. You might get lucky, but you probably won't.Per Se isn't the only New York restaurant like this, though it's the best known example. Recently, the g/f and I visited Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Like Per Se, they accept reservations starting at 10:00 a.m., two months to the day in advance. I called at around 11:00, and the only times they could offer me were 5:30 and 9:45. I took 5:30. For big "occasion" meals like that, I generally eat very little for breakfast and lunch, so I'm just fine with eating at 5:30. Granted, if the book were wide open, I'd choose a later time, but 5:30 doesn't really bother me.

I haven't been to Resto either; the similarities I noted were gleaned from press accounts and other Internet sources.Some people may have forgotten the Landmarc story, but every year the foodies have a go-to place. This year, it's clearly Momofuku Ssam Bar, but 3½ years ago it was Landmarc. Marc Murphy is a classically-trained chef, and had cooked in big-name kitchens. He then opened a casual, inexpensive, no-reservations restaurant with haute cuisine grace notes in a rustic setting and an innovative wine program. Rather than directly answering your question about what is "haute" or technically accomplished at Landmarc, I'll direct you to the original Landmarc thread, to get an idea of the excitement this place generated, among precisely the same kinds of people who are now so excited about Ssam Bar, and who (in 6-12 months' time) will be so excited about the next such place none of us can predict. Hearth and Blue Hill are also similar in many ways, and generated comparable excitement. They have conventional sit-down service, but are basically come-as-you-are restaurants. "Dining at the pass" at Hearth (the ultimate foodie thrill when Hearth was new) is very similar to a Momofuku meal. Canora's cuisine is not Chang's cuisine, but if you have to duplicate everything Chang does, then the definition of NP is awfully restricted indeed.

Yes, I've often thought the same. When the Diner's Journal was converted from a weekly newpaper column to a blog, Bruni promised that it would give him more space to write about restaurants that don't get reviewed. But the Diner's Journal has largely failed at that. He hardly ever posts "meal reviews" on the blog any more. We know he's eating at tons of places that never get reviewed, but he never tells us about them. Batali's rant aside, I think you can get a pretty good feel for a restaurant if you sample all of the Internet sources. Yes indeed, most food blogs are written as hobbies, and many of them aren't that well informed. But collectively, the bloggers are at least as reliable as Bruni, and possibly more so, assuming the restaurant has been widely written about.

It strikes me as equally likely that we believers haven't been done a good job of describing what it is we're seeing in places as diverse as Upstairs and Room 4 Dessert that sets them apart from their more obvious associations (respectively, perhaps, Bouley and El Bulli). I can't figure out which angle we've missed, but we'll get there, eventually.Part of the problem is that the definition keeps shifting. It's actually the believers' inflexibility that has made me a skeptic.For instance, Resto serves the same artisanal poultry as Momofuku; has the same no-reservations, come-as-you-are ethos as Momofuku; is highly prized by a young demographic; and is actually cheaper than Momofuku. The original Landmarc is much the same. So why aren't Resto and Landmarc NP? In my view, there are probably 40 or 50 NYC restaurants that satisfy all or most of the paradigm rules, and the believers are too inflexible to admit their existence. You're really left with a paradigm that has only one clear exemplar, which just isn't enough to establish that any kind of "shattering" (FG's term) re-invention of the restaurant experience has taken place.

This is especially remarkable, given the comments in last week's Gramercy Tavern review. He'd had a bad meal there in January, but decided it was his journalistic duty to wait it out, to see if Meyer and Anthony would get their act in gear (which they did).But the journalistic clemency granted to GT was a rarity. Most new(*) restaurants are reviewed roughly 2 months after opening, and there doesn't seem to be much the management can do about that. I can't recall another case where Bruni appeared to have waited, because the quality was on an upward (or downward) arc and hadn't yet stabilized. I'm sure Leonard or Nathan will produce a counter-example, but it's clearly a rarity. The closest comparable case is Sfoglia, but it's slightly different. In that case, after an early mediocre meal (which got the Diner's Journal treatment), the restaurant apparently got scratched off the review list indefinitely, and it was only after a comparatively long interval—after he heard reports of an improvement—that it got a second look. (*) I realize Provence isn't strictly new, but with almost everything changed except the name, it might as well be.

So . . . . the people who don't believe in it should be in charge of that? ← I just think it's rather curious that not one example offered by anyone else has been deemed acceptable.

Let's not forget that hand contact with food is merely one of many violations that pushed DiFara over the edge.