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The clearest thing to me is that he'd really be happier as the $25 & Under critic.

Actually, I've quite obviously not been clear about it. I do enjoy eating that way. I just think the new-ness of it has been grossly over-stated; that the number of restaurants offering this format has been grossly under-stated; that several of the restaurants cited don't in fact even offer this format; that the format isn't really all that "haute" or "cheap"; and that the audience for the format has been completely mis-understood.Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I loved the play.

I paid another visit to Momofuku Ssam Bar last night, to try to get my arms around this alleged paradigm. As I was by myself, I had no trouble getting a seat at around 7:00 p.m. (Couples who had arrived before me were still waiting, since there weren't two adjacent bar stools available.) I actually had a pretty good seat, facing part of the open kitchen. I decided to order two dishes at the opposite end of the Ssam Bar spectrum: something funky, something totally conventional. I started with the Veal Head Terrine ($13), mainly because I was alone, and my usual dining companions would have been totally grossed out. If you ignore where it came from, there's nothing gross about the Veal Head Terrine. Its bark is worse than its bite. The terrine is served warm, in a roughly 6"×8" portion sliced as thin as tissue paper. Frankly, I think that if it were sliced thicker, but with a smaller surface area, it would pack a heftier flavor punch. At first, I spread it on the toasted bread provided, but the terrine was overwhelmed. I ate the last half of it without the bread. It had a slightly spicy taste, but was not anything special. Then I ordered the Milk-Fed Four Story Hill Farm Poulard ($26). For the curious, Frank Bruni had a blog post about this the other day. The source is, of course, impeccable, and Chang's kitchen knew what to do with it. It was nearly as juicy and tender as you could want chicken to be, but nothing special was done with it. It was just chicken on a plate on a bed of warm leaf greens. Actually, it struck me that if you ordered the chicken at Blue Hill, this is almost certainly what you'd get. I never had the chicken there, but I've dined at Blue Hill often enough to know the style. It would be the same quality of ingredients, and the same style of preparation. They do indeed offer a similar dish on their menu, and according to the website, it's $30. This anecdote helps to debunk the idea that Momofuku Ssam Bar is "haute cheap." For what is almost certainly the nearly-identical entrée, Blue Hill is only $4 more. When you consider that dinner at Blue Hill has all of the traditional restaurant amenities, while Ssam Bar has almost none of them, you could even argue that Ssam Bar is over-priced. (I am prepared for the David Chang Army to advise that Chicken isn't what Ssam Bar is about. Too bad. They serve it; I ordered it. It was an experiment to see what Chang does with something conventional. It was pretty good chicken, but something I'm sure dozens of other restaurants are offering. Perhaps this section of the menu is meant to be "Ssam Bar for Wimps," but it wasn't labeled that way.) I can't make any direct comparison of the Veal Head Terrine, because Blue Hill doesn't serve anything like that. However, Blue Hill's appetizers are in the $10-16 range, and the terrine was $13. Before tax and tip, the total cost of my meal was $55, including two glasses of the house sake at $8 each. Obviously if you think Ssam Bar is serving four-star food (which it isn't), you could call it "cheap" in a sense. But objectively $55 isn't a cheap meal, and of course Ssam Bar isn't serving four-star food anyway. It's pretty close to what you'd pay for dinner at Blue Hill, but a whole lot less pleasant. Given that "haute cheap" isn't really that cheap, I'm not sure why Blue Hill isn't considered a New Paradigm restaurant. But apparently one of the rules of the New Paradigm is that only those who buy into the original concept are allowed to decide which restaurants qualify, and every other counter-example is brusquely swatted away. As I am sure Blue Hill will be. Since my last visit, there seemed to be a better wine list and more serving staff behind the counter. Both of my selections were delivered without silverware. Neither one could reasonably have been eaten with chopsticks (though those weren't offered either). However, my requests for a knife and fork were quickly granted. The sound system played music at a noise level I found annoying. There's been some debate on another thread about whether the New York Times review affected business. The server I asked said it had. He said people come in "all the time" and mention the NYT review. As far as I could monitor, most of the orders coming out of the kitchen seemed to be pretty conventional stuff. I did see one additional order of the Veal Head Terrine. In that case, I happened to overhear the server steering a couple towards that choice. It appeared that only the guy could stomach it.

Gourmet's blog has this post about a recent event about the food criticism profession, with Ruth Reichl and Adam Platt as guests. They suggested that being a restaurant critic's close friend is a better deal than being a restaurant critic, because the friend gets invited to many of the meals, with no oblgation to write about them afterwards. But both Reichl and Platt believe that the friends should resist the temptation to become "quote feeding" machines—the critic is there to form his or her own opinion. Reichl has said that before, but it's a little surprising coming from Platt, because he does indeed quote his dining companions occasionally. Bruni, of course, does it all the time.

Okay, I see your point. I don't know whether that's true or not, but my only claim was that Zagat is fairly close to accurate at the 23+ level. I am not trying to figure out how it got that way. "Grocery" explains why Zagat is "fairly close to accurate," instead of "totally accurate." The suck/best dichotomy on the Internet is so last-decade. You need to get over it.But here are your answers...you were partially right: Joya: 25; Sea: 21; Pam: 24. I am too lazy to check other sources that rate Thai restaurants, to see if there is a rational basis for these results. If others rate Joya more-or-less comparably to Pam, then Zagat is rational—and that's all you can expect a guide to be.

the even more self-selected group of Zagat voters that dine at four-star restaurants which is a small portion of the self-selected group of Zagat voters in aggregate know who the top restaurants are. ← What I meant was that Zagat readers—not voters—rely on Zagat to inform them what the top restaurants are. By "top," I didn't merely mean four-star restaurants. From around 23-24 and up, the Zagat ratings are reasonably reliable, and that range that encompasses more than just the four-stars.

I almost agree. But the Grocery ranking (which was likely simply ballot stuffing by people in its neighborhood) and USC's top rating year after year are greater anomalies than anything at the top end by Bruni or Michelin...they'd have to give the highest ranking to A di la or something to reach that point. Remember, USC is still carrying three stars from the New York Times, meaning there are only five restaurants rated higher on their scale (i.e., the five 4* restaurants). Dicta in Frank Bruni's Bar Room/11MP review suggest that USC is no longer worthy of its three stars, but for now it still has them. exactly. and that only accounts for most of the restaurants in the guide! edit: and this is why Zagat is really useless...everyone knows what the top restaurants are! ← You greatly exaggerate the number of people who track the NYC restaurant industry as closely as you and I do. "Everyone" doesn't know what the top restaurants are, unless Zagat tells them so.

The truth about Zagat is somewhere between what John and Nathan say. The list of restaurants with Zagat ratings around 23-25 or higher is reasonably well correlated with various other lists of NYC's best restaurants. Whatever faults Zagat may have, at the top end their ratings are more-or-less correct. Yes, there are some anomalies, but there are anomalies in the Michelin guide too, and don't get me started with Frank Bruni's anomalies. But once you get into the low twenties, the Zagat ratings are just an undifferentiated scrum — bearing in mind that 20-21 is average, and anything within two points of that is within the standard deviation. This is not because Zagat voters are idiots. It's because Zagat themselves have created a flawed system, and even with geniuses voting, you would get these results.

To some extent, Platt was just demonstrating that he needs a new job. But I think there's very little doubt that, comparatively speaking, the pace of new openings has slowed down in the last year. That doesn't mean there's zero, only that there's less than there used to be. It's the reason you find Frank Bruni struggling to find places to review. The other benefit of the label "haute cheap" is that it doesn't try to claim that the paradigm is new. Besides that, my other objection to this thread is you've got about 3 people claiming the paradigm applies to only 5 restaurants, and swatting away every other example as invalid. Wasn't that the meal when you walked in, ignored the menu, and said, "Can you cook for us?" If so, that can't be represented as the typical experience at Bouley Upstairs.

On top of that, most diners spent the bulk of their dining dollars at restaurants they like. Unlike Frank Bruni, most diners feel no obligation to spend time at bad restaurants as a journalistic responsibility. So, Zagat voters are likely to feel pretty positive about the restaurants they're voting on. It's therefore no surprise that a Zagat food rating below 15 is extremely rare.

I visited P*Ong a few weeks ago (report here), and I was very much a fan. Unlike R4D, it has table seating and serves savory courses. I think very few restaurants are going to go quite as far as Momofuku in stripping away so many of the standard amenities. And indeed, among the other purported NP restaurants, none of the others do. This is unsurprising. The standard amenities exist, by and large, because people want them. I'm afraid I just don't get Bouley Upstairs—and it's the only alleged NP restaurant that I've visited twice. (That's not because I dislike the others, but because there are so many other places I want to try.) Bouley Upstairs seems to me totally conventional, and not in any sense pathbreaking. All of the other alleged NP restaurants are older than Ssam Bar, so it clearly cannot have influenced them. Which restaurants that are in the works appear to you to be Ssam Bar-influenced, other than Chang's own next restaurant, Momofuku Ko?Tailor is the only restaurant-in-the-works that NP advocates think will fit the pattern. But Tailor has been the works a long time. You could argue (and I will argue) that R4D and WD-50 are the godparents of Tailor, not Momofuku Ssam Bar.

But had Frank Bruni awarded the 2, 3, or 4 stars you believe Katz's deserved, it would have solved none of the problems you complain of. If anything, it would have exacerbated the inequity, since there are hundreds of extant NYT ratings awarded according to the "old rules." Ironically, you are making your complaint at the very point that Katz's received the highest compliment it could have received under the existing system. What's more, a restaurant like Katz's isn't very sensitive to the rating anyway.

Hey, you're changing the rules mid-game!!!My contention is that the "new paradigm" is old, and there are many, many restaurants—not just the five you claimed, and not all of them new—where these trends can be observed. You then provided a long list that included none of your five restaurants. If you're saying that all of them (or many) are NP, then that's great: we're finally on the same page. I just wonder why it took us so long to get there. But you'd have to concede now that New Paradigm isn't New. I don't think you can blame Platt for failing to consider Tailor and P*Ong, neither of which was open at the time he wrote his screed.

That's because you're stuck in the old paradigm! ← Yeah, but of the restaurants you included on your long list, not one is a "new paradigm" restaurant. The only conceivable exception is Tailor, but as it isn't open yet, one can only speculate.To disprove Platt's assertion, one would need to have a comparable list from about three years ago, to see if there's a difference. I do agree that "exciting" is subjective, and difficult to measure. But whether you happen to like Platt, judging "excitement" is part of what a critic is there to do.

I don't quite understand the notion of complaining that rating systems are inane, and then complaining about the rating that was actually assigned. If it's inane, then any rating—be it one star, two, three, or four—would have been a meaningless shortcut for the lazy. So why the fuss?

Let's assume that that's true, for argument's sake.Your complaint, nevertheless, is not with Frank Bruni. For all of Frank's flaws, he is still following the system he inherited—at least to that extent. None of his predecessors ever awarded four stars to Katz's, or any "Katz-like" restaurant. Indeed, it appears that none of them issued a rated review to Katz's at all, even though the restaurant was there the whole time, and I'm sure they knew of its existence. It's therefore rather ironic that, after three years of Frank Bruni reviews, you choose this occasion to get so animated about one of his ratings, when he has just paid Katz's the highest compliment any NYT critic has ever given it. I'm not sure what your system would look like. As far as I know, among media outlets that award stars, none has given—or would give—its highest rating to a place like Katz's. Maybe they're all pompous and flawed, but at this point we're talking about a much larger and more pervasive problem, for which no one has put a solution into practice. Let's talk about Katz's Zagat rating of 23 for food. Zagat claims that anything from 20-25 is "very good to excellent." That is a statistical obfuscation. A couple of years ago, I very tediously tabulated the Zagat ratings by number. It turns out the average Zagat food rating is around 20-21. Viewed in that perspective, Katz's 23 is somewhere above average, but not dramatically so.

They are running a news business, after all, and writing about what's new is an awfully big part of that—probably the main part.

I think it's fair to say that the pace of exciting new NYC restaurant openings—which is what primarily drives a critic's life—has slackened considerably since 2-3 years ago. That's what Platt was writing about.I mean, unlike the rest of us, Platt can't keep writing about Momofuku Ssam Bar week after week—even assuming he shared our enthusiasm for the place. Bruni bought into the Momofuku program as much as anybody, but look at his last half-dozen reviews. He's clearly having trouble finding new places to write about.

In what reviews did Bruni prioritize "refinement of cuisines, service, atmosphere, or wine cellar?" He has given less priority to those attributes than any of his predecessors. That does not, of course, mean zero priority.You need to distinguish flaws in the system that Bruni created or exacerbated, from those he inherited. As far back as I've spot-checked, star ratings have been comparable only when looking at similar establishments. Sometimes, the NYT explicitly said so; other times, they did not. But that is clearly how it worked. The Modern's two stars, therefore, can only be weighed against other places in its class (high-end luxury restaurants). Given that such restaurants—when the Times likes them—are three or four stars, two for The Modern is a significant slapdown. For a casual Belgian restaurant like Resto, two stars is like winning the lottery. Katz's one star is basically irrelevant, since there are no other starred delis. Even when Mimi Sheraton was the critic, she would assign one or two-star "smackdown" ratings to luxury places, and "bonus" ratings to high-performing casual places. Whether you like that system or not, you can't blame it on Frank Bruni. But there are several trends for which Bruni is clearly responsible. He has demonstrated very little appreciation for the kind of serious upscale cuisine that a place like The Modern offers. Its luxury trappings actually seem to offend him. So his two-star rating there just doesn't have much authority. (Luckily, it doesn't seem to have harmed the restaurant economically, which would have been tragic.) Conversely, he often tosses out the second star like candy to casual places with one or two obscenely tasty dishes he loves. Coupled with his smackdowns of luxury places, his two-star rating becomes entirely meaningless. There are also the other biases we've talked about, e.g., his affinity for Italian food above almost all other cusines. Bruni's ascent has corresponded with the virtual death of the $25 & Under category as a useful reviewing vehicle. Whether this was accidental or planned I don't know, but I think Bruni has reviewed more restaurants in that category than Grimes did. Coupled with his obvious hostility to the high-end, Bruni has basically become the $40 & Under (plus Italian & Steakhouses) critic.

Both questions have the same answer: only a critic who has a professional obligation to try (and report on) the whole menu. This is the age-old objection when the same star system that has to accommodate Katz's and Jean Georges, and everything in between. You could argue that if Katz's is the city's best deli, it should carry the highest rating. It just doesn't. However, if you look at the ranks of one-star restaurants, there are probably no other delis. So, among delis, Katz's carries the highest rating the Times has assigned.Remember, 90% of the time, "cheap eats" restaurants are reviewed in the $25 & Under column (if they are reviewed at all), and aren't eligible for stars. Being noticed by the main critic at all is, in a sense, a significant honor—at least in most cases.

Tough to tell. Business has probably picked up since the Bruni review, and the kitchen may not have been prepared for the volume. Also, I'm guessing you visited only once, and you may have caught them on a bad day. Bruni is obligated to pay multiple visits before rendering a verdict. We ordinary citizens normally don't give restaurants a second chance.But I thought Bruni's reasons for liking the place, and for awarding a rather generous two stars, were rather flimsy. There's certainly no evidence that he's any kind of expert on Belgian cuisine. I also thought that Bruni missed an opportunity to do a double-review of Markt and Resto: same cuisine; adjacent neighborhoods; both either new, or new to their current locations; and neither one important enough that it really demanded a review to itself.

I agree. Part of me says that if the main critic is going to go below his usual price range, Katz's was the right place for it. And I agree he got the review right—both the rating and the content.If I have any complaint about the Katz's review, it's only to the extent it confirms the long-standing trend that casual carnivorous dining is what Bruni really loves. The fancy luxe dinners are a duty, not a pleasure. His descriptions of them often seem forced and contrived. They're not where he wants to be.

this is the point! but you have to call it something. ← Momofuku Ssam Bar does seem to break the usual mold. My reservations about the NP meme is not with Momofuku Ssam Bar, but with all of the other purported NP places. All of the others make a plausible—in some cases, a more plausible—case for being included in some other trend, or indeed several trends.Now, if we see two or three more places clearly indebted to Momofuku Ssam Bar, then we can say there's a paradigm, and that MSB was its progenitor. What we have right now is an isolate.

The review is now up: one star, which if you are going to review Katz's at all, is the only intelligent outcome. The Times has never purported them to be overlapping, either. The Times hasn't purported anything at all. In the Grimes/Asimov administration, they overlapped a lot less often than they do now, mainly because Meehan has taken his beat sooooooo far down-market.There are good reasons to be dismayed at the current trend. By my count, three of the last five weeks Bruni has reviewed $25-and-under restaurants. He doesn't even choose wisely. Max Brenner got a rated review, but Room 4 Dessert got $25 and Under. Bruni doesn't like Goldfarb's desserts, but at Max Brenner at least Gavin & Bella got free ice creams on the Times's dime. Meanwhile, Peter Meehan reviews taco trucks—and not even superb taco trucks, which they certainly ought to be, if they're worth the space. Obviously, one can find past anomalies (Lupa/Otto), but they're becoming far more prevalent now.

In this week's New York, Adam Platt awards two stars to Insieme. In his opening paragraph, he observes that "in this chaotically themed era, the template for fine dining has shattered into all sorts of different sets and subsets." It's the second time today someone has used the term "shattered" in this context. He goes on: I don't necessarily prefer Platt's taxonomy to Fat Guy's. I'm more inclined to say, as Platt does, that there are "all sorts of different sets and subsets." But it's another one of the many valid ways of explaining the phenomenon. I do like Platt's qualifier, "if I had to choose...." It reflects some humility about the nomination of Colicchio and Craft, perhaps an acknowledgment that it puts too much credit in one place. At least Craft has been around a while, and we can clearly see its influence.