oakapple

Fr.Og. too. I haven't bothered to check the addresses of all the others. I have, and it's no such thing. A formerly very gritty area, with some up-and-coming storefronts alternating with a number of still-dilapidated ones. Within, say, a 2-block radius of Public, just count the number of storefronts, the condition they're in, whether they're open in the evening, etc., etc. Hip, of course, depends on who's doing the counting. Some people think West Chelsea is hippest. Others think it's Williamsburg. The Lower East Side can probably make a case. It's hard to think of a more overworked and less meaningful word.But in any event, whatever the merit of those streets and their current tenants, the one indisputable point is that it's not especially Italian any more. The article's 1 and only point, is that someone is trying to make the area not just relevant, but also Italian again. Whether they succeed or not is, of course, speculative. About 90% of such ideas are never implemented. But it is at least notable that a few people who are Italian, and have deep roots in the area, and still live there, are trying to do something about it.

No neighborhood is ever going to be what it was in the distant past. The most one can envision is that the neighborhood becomes relevant again, though not in the way it formerly was.

Whatever the point may be, it was the article's, not mine.But you are over-romanticizing those streets and misconstruing the patch of real estate that the article is referring to. Balthazar, for instance, is at the corner of Spring & Crosby, which is considered SoHo by any definition I've ever encountered.

A fuller discussion should probably be its own thread (assuming it's worth discussing). But there is nobody who has suggested that GR at The London is one of the top 3. I gave it a more positive review than most critics, and I'm not even sure it's in the top 10. As I suggested upthread, when Ramsay replaces the chef de cuisine, it's a good sign he's not satisfied.Part of the problem with your question is that there are very few of us who've actually dined often enough at the candidate restaurants. It's very obvious that you wouldn't put Per Se in the top 3 based on the experience you had, but Per Se is a much-reviewed restaurant, and I don't recall anyone else having as incompetent server as you seem to have had. If you paid another 3-4 visits to Per Se, and another 3-4 visits to all the other NYC restaurants with a plausible claim to being in the top three, I'd be very surprised if Per Se's service consistently rated lower than the other restaurants in its class.

Today's Metro New York has an article called Milan on Mulberry, subtitled "Can Armani save Little Italy." It talks about a proposal to lure Armani, Bulgari, Fendi, "and other luxury Italian brands" into NoLIta, reclaiming space that was once considered part of Little Italy itself. The article also mentions that 185-189 Grand Street is going to become a new Italian American Museum. One could envision a scenario (still a long way off) that the luxury stores lure more sophisticated visitors into the neighborhood, and the fine restaurants follow. But for now, it's just a glimmer in someone's eye.

Today, in the first major change to the reviewing format in many years, the Times introduces Dining Briefs. Here's the explanation: The effect is that $25 & Under gets less space (as I believe it should), and there's room for more reviews of other places. This is a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. Perhaps the new editor, Pete Wells, is proceeding incrementally. Or perhaps this was the best he could do.The three places covered in Dining Briefs this week are categorized as "Revisits" (Gilt—Frank Bruni), "New Places" (Natsumi—Pete Wells), and "Bars" (Barcade—Peter Meehan). Although Bruni is much happier with the new Gilt than the old Gilt, no star rating is given. If you look for Gilt on the search engine, it's still the old review that comes up. (Perhaps they'll update the search engine; we'll have to wait and see.)

The Times said today, per Florence Fabricant, that Ducasse's new restaurant will open in the late summer, and will be called Adour. That's the name of a river in southwest France, but conveniently, it also has the initials AD in it.

It was about the weakest one star that I can recall.

There has never been a time when a majority of NYC's dining public was eating out regularly at places like Gordon Ramsay. That's why there are so few places of its kind, in comparison to diners, trattorias, pizzarias, bistros, Chinese, sushi bars, chain restaurants, hamburger stands, and so forth.If you're going to have a restaurant critic, he needs to be able to review restaurants on their own terms. A majority of people prefer rock music to opera, but that fact doesn't intrude when operas are reviewed.

Critics like Bruni and Platt have a bias against restaurants that do classic things well. They are bored by old-fashioned cuisine, practically no matter how well it is executed. They also don't enjoy the rituals of formal service. Remember, Bruni's favorite word for that type of service is "fussy," which he never means as a compliment. So Gordon Ramsay has two strikes against it, right off the bat.That said, Neil Ferguson's dismissal suggests that, on some level, Ramsay believed that the restaurant wasn't up to his standards. Ferguson's replacement (I forget the name) has been in place for a while, so those who dine there now are quite possibly getting a better experience than Bruni and Platt did. GR got blasted by enough people that I have to think there was a core of truth to the complaints — although I did enjoy my meal there in late December. Unfortunately, restaurants usually don't get a second chance to make a first impression. The critics move on to the latest batch of new openings, and you don't easily lure them back. I don't know what it would take to stir up critical interest in GR again, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. I suppose if it gets two or three Michelin stars, it might give them a reason to take another look. By the way, I rated Country higher than GR, but you're talking about subtle degrees of excellence. They are both very fine restaurants.

I wonder: when was the last time Little Italy had a one-star restaurant per the Times? How about two stars? Or three? I'm not saying that stars always correspond to quality, but it's the only concrete measuring system we have, and it has been around since the 1960s — a period long enough to cover the decline that we're talking about.

Any ethnic neighborhood is bound to be a magnet for restaurants featuring the indigenous cuisine. If that cuisine is globally popular — as Italian food clearly is — the neighborhood will draw tourists. The trouble with Little Italy is that, because almost all the native Italians left (for reasons having nothing to do with food or tourism), there was no centripital force to keep the restuarants interesting, or even authentic. If it was good enough for the tourists, it was good enough. Now some tourists, obviously, really do know the difference between excellent Italian food and the merely adequate. But Italian restaurants can go anywhere. So, if you're a serious chef looking to make a mark in Italian cuisine, why put your restaurant in a place where you're but one of many dozens? I'm sure Mario Batali could have gotten a storefront in Little Italy if he wanted one. There was no reason for him to go there. So with serious Italian chefs having the whole city available to them, and no indigenous population to keep the Little Italy restaurants honest, those restaurants went into decline. The best practitioners of Italian cuisine set up shop in other parts of town. I think Frank Bruni once made a similar point about One if By Land, Two if By Sea. If you're packing them in while serving mediocre food, what incentive is there to be good? It may be that Little Italy is no longer packing them in, but it was for a long time, and in the meantime the great Italian cuisine migrated elsewhere. There is no good term to describe visitors with unambitious dining interests. Yeah, there are people who cross bridges and tunnels to dine at Per Se and Jean-Georges. But I think they are outnumbered by the ones who line up in Times Square at Olive Garden, Bubba Gump, and ESPN SportsZone. You can call them tourists, B&T, or just unambitious diners.

I used the B&T phrase in my post, though I deplore it nonetheless. There are unsophisticated diners living in Manhattan, and there are sophisticated ones living elsewhere.I do tend to think that the people for whom Little Italy is a treat live outside Manhattan, and indeed, outside the five boroughs. Whether sophisticated or not, most New Yorkers tend to avoid tourist-heavy venues. In the 1980s, I had a friend (who just happened to live in NJ), for whom an annual outing to Angelo's of Mulberry Street was a special occasion. This was someone who, although his fine dining horizons might not have been ambitious, was in other respects educated and sophisticated. Angelo's might have been better in the '80s than it is today, but I doubt it was that much better.

What's your source? Several NYT articles said that The Modern (dining room) would open in January. On January 1st, Fat Guy wrote, "the fine dining part, to be clear, will not be open for awhile longer."The opening (of the dining room) was evidently delayed, as on February 2, 2005, R. W. Apple wrote in the Times that the main restaurant would be opening the following Monday. It would be most surprising if he said that, and in fact it had already been serving lunch for 2½ months. The bar room began serving in January. I found no source with an earlier date. But there is no doubt that the two stars Bruni ultimately awarded were primarily a reflection of his experiences in the main dining room, which wasn't open till February, three months before the review. (His subsequent three stars for the Bar Room was surely the first case in NYT history when the casual café attached to a fine dining restaurant was separately reviewed and rated.) Further confirming this, if you re-read the actual review, you'll find that his first visit was not till February, and that he was seated in the main dining room on that occasion (though he clearly tried the Bar Room later on). From Bruni's other writings, it is very clear that when a restaurant starts serving in November, he does not wait till February to begin his visits. Once the main dining room (the principal subject of his review) was open, he began visiting almost immediately.

Nope. The Modern opened on February 7, 2005. Bruni reviewed it on May 4, 2005: three months later.

I get the sense that Andrea Strong does pay for a good percentage of the meals she writes about. Not all, but most.If you look back on the old archives of the StrongBuzz, you'll find that, from the beginning, her reviews tended to be overwhelmingly positive. Outright pans were a great rarity, and negative criticism in general was administered with a very gentle hand. I cannot believe she was getting regularly comped in those days. This was also true of the early RestaurantGirl reviews. She surely wasn't getting comped then, because her site was brand new. She actually said at one point that she prefers to write about restaurants she likes. If she has a bad experience, she writes nothing.

I took it as given that neither Andrea Strong nor RG sees themself in such a job. ← eh...they wouldn't turn it down. ← Oh, of course not. There's probably lots of things they wouldn't turn down. But they're not acting like someone who expects, or even wants, to be in that kind of job. I believe Andrea Strong once said so explicitly—she doesn't see herself as a critic.

Brilliant. Can you explain in what sense it's "fair" for one to be reviewed on its opening night, and not the other?

I took it as given that neither Andrea Strong nor RG sees themself in such a job. Among other things, you'll notice that there's hardly ever a negative review from either of them. Even within a broadly positive review, negative comments are held to a minimum. They just don't think like critics, or write like critics.Frank Bruni doesn't have the background for what he's doing, but at least he has a critic's mentality.

None of these are amateurs. The Strong Buzz, Restaurant Girl and Snack are all written as part of a strategy for developing the respective bloggers' professional writing careers. ← yup. though ultimately their cozy relationship with the industry and acceptance of free meals will ultimately prevent them from getting the jobs they really want.... ← Actually, FG has said in the past that the comped professional writer that's cozy with the industry is fairly commonplace. As far as I know, Andrea Strong is already earning a living as a food writer. She isn't getting rich at it, but it's what she does. Leuzzi is much the same. RG, who's newer at it, probably still has a day job. She is also the most blatant self-promoter of the bunch.

The g/f and I dined there last night. No complaints about the food, but the server was somewhat rude. He showed obvious impatience that we didn't instantly know what we wanted. After we'd sent him away twice, he came back and said, "Well, what'll it be?" At the end of the meal, after we declined to order dessert, it took all of about 30 seconds for him to plunk down a check, although we clearly had quite a bit of wine yet to finish.

I can't comment on anyone's psychological well-being, axes-to-grind, or depth of knowledge. But even leaving those things out, said blogger doesn't exist.I can also tell you that the roughly 2-3 blog reviews I write per week (all based on one visit) take a lot of time, and I couldn't imagine doing more. And there's plenty I fail to do, that a serious critic should. I don't take good notes, and my memory sometimes fails me. I don't taste other people's food. I don't focus solely, or even primarily, on places that just opened. I order what I want, usually ignoring large parts of the menu. Etc, etc, etc.

It's not malevolent. Every art form the Times reviews, is reviewed at around the time it first appears. Whether it's dance, music, opera, or Broadway, the review comes out immediately. Restaurants, with their 2-3 month lag, could consider themselves lucky to have extra time that is granted in no other medium.

There are other differences, too. Bruni orders a ton of food — much more than a party of comparable size would normally eat. He then makes a point of tasting every dish. By the time the review comes out, he's eaten his way through the whole menu. Most ordinary civilians, even if they dine out as often as Bruni, don't consider themselves professionally obligated to do that.

I concur in FG's points. "Traditional print" was just a label, by the way. I realize that Frank Bruni has more online readers than print readers at this point. But if you google-search a restaurant's name, his review will turn up months or years later. Someone looking for views on the restaurant is probably a lot more likely to click-through to the Times than to other online sources. It's hard to tell what influence the print reviews have. It was certainly widely noticed that both chefs left Varietal within a week of Bruni's review. But Varietal was already in trouble long before that. I visited twice on Saturday evenings, and it wasn't more than half full on either occasion. The Bruni review more-or-less confirmed what the market had already decided without his help.At the other extreme, I doubt that Freeman's fired anyone after Bruni goose-egged them, because the restaurant was doing well. Sure, a rave from the Times would have been a feather in their cap, but it didn't really matter.