oakapple

Nougatine and Bar Room are both relatively casual places attached to formal luxury restaurants -- Jean Georges and The Modern respectively. As you've got an invitation to go to The Modern itself, don't stint yourself by going to the less impressive Bar Room.

I'm sure DN has much money to spend but at that kind of buckage it seems that anybody would swallow hard? ← Although he can afford it, Drew didn't get rich investing in fools' errands. Opening a restaurant isn't a philanthropic exercise, like underwriting a wing at the Metropolitan Museum. He opens restaurants to make money.I agree that opening a top-tier restaurant at the old Montrachet's price level with Liebrandt as chef has to be a significant risk, since Liebrandt has already failed more than once. But if the news reports are true, this is exactly what Nieporent is doing. In just about any neighborhood, there are very few people who dine out several nights a week at places like Bouley or Chanterelle, unless they are doing so to entertain clients. I don't think it has anything to do with being in TriBeCa, or being part of the cognoscenti.

I can't find the reference, but I believe I read somewhere that the wines were auctioned off.

If he's re-opening with Liebrandt, it's safe to guess that Nieporent realizes all this. Good or bad, Liebrandt won't be boring. The question is how much of the old Montrachet (the decor, the wine program) will survive the makeover.By the way, there are many extremely fine restaurants that receive very few eGullet posts. We are a somewhat insular bunch. (See the recent thread about under-appreciated restaurants.) Well, in terms of luxury, TriBeCa still has Chanterelle, Danube and Bouley, and all three continue to do very strong business, so I'm not sure the premise is accurate. I do agree that of the four (Bouley, Chanterelle, Danube, Montrachet), Montrachet was the least exciting, but the continuing success of the others shows that the market for that type of restaurant hasn't dried up. If Paul Liebrandt can generate the kind of excitement in that space that David Bouley originally did, Montrachet will be fine.I also think the "TriBeCa cognoscenti" are a non-existent entity. That neighborhood couldn't sustain 1/4th of the restaurants it has, if there were a local cognoscenti keeping them going.

Anthos, an haute Greek establishment from Michael Psilakis (Onera, Dona, Kefi) and Donatella Arpaia, opens on Monday at 36 W. 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The concept is similar to the now-closed Onera, but it will be an a more appealing space, more upscale, and in a neighborhood where it should get more traffic. Here's Psilakis per Grub Street: My girlfriend and I shed a tear when Psilakis turned Onera into Kefi, a Greek restaurant so casual it doesn't even take credit cards. But the food there is still fantastic, with rave reviews this week from both New York and the Times. I look forward to seeing Psilakis on a bigger stage once again.

The rub is in those words, "to an extent." As far as I can tell, you're not saying, "Bouley Upstairs is better than Bouley." You're saying, "It's nice to know that, when the mood strikes you, and you don't want to get dressed up, make a reservation, spend a lot of money, or have an hours-long meal, a restaurant like Bouley Upstairs is there for me."What's interesting about Bouley Upstairs, is that it wouldn't exist without Bouley itself. The casual trappings Upstairs spring directly from the need to establish a clear difference from the flagship restaurant across the street. If David Bouley could operate only one restaurant, my guess is it wouldn't be Bouley Upstairs. The Bar Room also has this attribute. If Danny Meyer and Gabriel Kreuther could have only one restaurant in that space, it wouldn't be the Bar Room. But given that there are two, the Bar Room has to be casual, to distinguish itself from the formal dining room. Otherwise, they'd have two of the same thing, which makes no sense. Same deal with Nougatine vs. Jean Georges, the London Bar vs. Gordon Ramsay, the Tavern Room vs. GT, the Bread Bar vs. Tabla, Del Posto vs. Enoteca, and the similar bifurcated menus at Daniel, Gilt, Aquavit, Le Cirque, BLT Fish, and probably other places I'm not thinking of. Some of these are more "haute" than others, but clearly the Bar Room and Upstairs aren't all that unusual. That leaves Momofuku Ssam Bar as an isolated phenomenon, the only restaurant in The Paradigm that serves a full meal, and whose existence doesn't depend on an affiliated formal establishment. I would be more inclined to think we have a "breakthrough" if two or three more like Momofuku Ssam Bar appear on the scene.

Okay, we'll make it harder. Suppose that Bouley is free, has no dress code, you can walk in at any time, the waiters are in blue jeans, you can order as much or as little as you want. On a food qua food basis, Upstairs is still more exciting?

Does the Times really have that many readers who are unaware of what goes on in a strip club??? Bruni writes about it in a very entertaining way — which is what makes the article — but you can't really think that most NYT readers actually need to be educated about what's going on there.

Today, Snack is reporting (via Vogue) that Paul Liebrandt will indeed be the chef when Montrachet re-opens. I was at Mai House the other night, and the bartender said that Montrachet is definitely re-opening, though he didn't say it was with Liebrandt.

Most of the people claiming the existence of a New Paradigm do go to conventional high-end restaurants on a fairly regular basis. I mean, just read the reviews of where Sneakeater, Nathan, and Fat Guy are dining — it's a very wide spectrum. I mean, if you limited yourself to the purported New Paradigm restaurants, you'd probably get bored quickly, because there just aren't that many of them.eGullet posters, of course, are a highly atypical bunch. We spend much more of our time at fine restaurants than 99% of the population. The same, I suspect, is true of Frank Bruni's friends. He has managed to self-select companions who have similar interests to himself. We all do that. So the trend that Bruni claims to have identified is probably limited to a group that couldn't even fill a movie theater, which in relation to the population of New York, is insignificant. I suspect this is an exaggeration. For instance, if Bouley and Bouley Upstairs were both free, would Bouley Upstairs really be more exciting? I don't think so. What I interpret people to be saying, is that Upstairs gets you a long way towards what the flagship restaurant is doing — but not all the way — at a fraction of the price. That's part of the reason I don't think the purported Paradigm is at all new. It's just a baby-step away from the bar dining or casual front-room dining that many of the three and four-star places have offered for years.

Clearly not, because she interviewed the chef, and Bruni never meets the people he is reviewing. He does sometimes interview them by telephone, though. But in the course of the article, she does, in a sense "review" the food, though only briefly.I cite it mainly to show another perfectly reasonable way that someone who has dined at Roberts could describe the "non-food" experience without dwelling on it to the degree that Bruni did. I put the Robert's Steakhouse review in the same family as The Waverly Inn, Sascha, Bette and LCB Brasserie Rachou — in all of which, to one degree or another, the "scene" was as important, or more important to him, than the food. It is certainly one reasonable evolution of the food critic's job to describe scenes, not restaurants. But it isn't the only one.

It's pretty clear that she did visit Robert's:

I think the Michelin 3-star ranks, especially for restaurants gaining that honor for the first time, puts a premium on innovation, which perhaps can be overcome in exceptional cases.Comparisons to the NYT are difficult, because the Times is limited to New York City, and hence there are only a handful of restaurants where there is the potential for overlap. All three Michelin 3-star restaurants also carry four stars from the Times. The Times also gives four stars to 2 restaurants that Michelin has at the next lower tier: Daniel and Masa.

I think this is different, because the sexual part of the review isn't "for" or "against" anybody. It's just describing the restaurant in a way that is personally relevant to him. The fact is, when dining at Robert's Steakhouse, the models are coming over to you the whole evening long making provocative comments, and trying to sell you "extras." That is part of the experience.The Bouley/Meyer/Chodorow comments were different, because they were comments about somebody, and it is therefore important that they be accurate, balanced, and relevant. I don't either. Obviously the feminists would object to this type of reporting, no matter who was writing it.

In criticism, which is plainly a subjective personal opinion, the review inevitably will reflect the writer's agenda. I mean, Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller, and Ruth Reichl all had agendas — for good or ill — which were reflected in the very different bodies of work they produced.I'm amazed that there are reasonable people who think Bruni got it "just right." Although I didn't have a problem with the review, it doesn't take much imagination to find other "good" ways it could have been done. The Alex Wichtel piece, although not a review, shows another totally legitimate approach.

Although I don't have a big problem with how the review turned out, it was not his only option, or even his best option. He could have written a review about the food, and mentioned the strip club only in passing. The 90% of his readers who didn't know he was gay would have remained ignorant of that fact. His personal life doesn't have to come into his reviews (and usually doesn't).If there wasn't enough to say about the food to fill a full article, he could have done a double-review. I mean, the review goes pretty far towards implying that Peter Luger is no longer the best steakhouse in town, but it is still carrying three stars from the Reichl era. (No other steakhouse has more than two.) Maybe a Luger/Robert's double review would have been a better use of space than the review he gave us. He wrote a well respected book about the 2000 presidential election. My understanding is that Bruni wanted Grimes's job, and campaigned for it.

The first writer is more knowledgeable about the subject matter than Frank Bruni. This is no surprise, because everyone in the food department is more knowledgeable than him. The first writer actually cares about Lang's background, because these things interest him. They do not interest Frank Bruni. This just shows that Frank Bruni is in the wrong job, which we knew already.The fact that the Times covered the restaurant twice isn't unusual. There have been many times that the Times sends one writer to do a "preview piece" on a restaurant, and a critic later reviews it.

Many restaurants have bars where you can eat. But as I recall, the majority of the seats at Bar Room are at conventional tables.

I'm probably the wrong person to answer, given that I think The Paradigm doesn't exist, but that never stopped me before.Of the restaurants named on this thread, Bouley Upstairs, Bar Room, and Degustation received their only Times reviews from the main critic. Room 4 Dessert received its only review in $25&U. Momofuku got both, but when it was reviewed in $25&U, it was fundamentally a different restaurant. Bar Room, Degustation, and R4D take reservations; Bouley Upstairs and Ssam Bar do not. Ssam Bar, Degustation, and R4D are physically configured like bars; Bouley Upstairs and Bar Room are not. So what we have here is a random collection of traits, and no matter how you slice it, about half of the so-called Paradigm restaurants are exceptions.

I think you're entirely correct. Well, David Burke did more-or-less the same thing at Hawaiian Tropic Zone, and there hasn't been a peep out of Bruni. We're well past the opening period, so I would guess it isn't getting reviewed. (New restaurants are usually reviewed in the first few months, or not at all.) The Robert's Steakhouse review looks like a one-off to me. Keens Steakhouse, V Steakhouse, and Wolfgang's Steakhouse all got full reviews. It is not really clear how Bruni decides when to do double-reviews, but from this one example you can't infer very much. This isn't the first time Bruni has reviewed a restaurant that had been open for a long while.

Rich, that's just wrong. Bruni has 33 months of reviews behind him, for a total of around 143 reviews. Exactly one had an overt sex angle.Moreover, Bruni made it clear that it's the superlative steaks that drew him there, without which there's no review.

You can't be serious!!! ← I'm totally serious. ← Of course it was about sex. When you're writing a review about a restaurant in a strip club, how do you avoid that? Similarly, the review of Waverley Inn was about "scene." How could it not be?

Rich, I absolutely do give a damn that the current critic: A) Has very little understanding many important culinary genres; B) Is bored by, and is even hostile to, a large segment of the industry that he is supposed to cover; C) Lacks the insight, experience, or aptitude to really describe what is going on with the food; D) Is, at times, more interested in "reporting on the scene" than "writing about the food."But steak is one of the genres he really does understand. If the Times adopted FG's suggestion of dividing up the dining spectrum among multiple critics, I would have no problem at all if the steakhouses were on Bruni's beat. He gets steakhouses. And according to him (as well as a lot of other folks), one of the best steakhouses happens to be in a strip club, so he reviewed it. I think that restaurant dining is a form of entertainment. He's not reporting on the nuclear disarmament talks. It's a restaurant review, for crying out loud. I don't mind if the review is entertaining, as long as he manages, along the way, to actually cover the material (about, you know, the food) that he is supposed to cover. In this review, he basically did. Although it's a titillating story, no question about it, what I expect from the Times is accuracy. It is possible to be accurate and responsibile, but also entertaining. That's how the Times is different than the National Enquirer, which is entertaining, and that's about all.

I totally agree that Chang has done something unusual, one-of-a-kind here. But its uniqueness suggests to me that there is no new paradigm. David Chang just had a funky idea, and all of us are richer for it. I made the comment solely to illustrate that Ssam Bar doesn't have much to do with Room 4 Dessert. For Chang's own purposes, Ssam Bar's wine program is fine, and actually we enjoyed our wine very much when we dined there. Heck, he could have just one wine, but if it's the one you want, that's all that counts. But no one would call it a serious wine program; that's just not what Chang is doing.

Leonard does his research from the online archives, and the way they are structured, it would not be possible to answer all of your questions.But frankly, even if every one of these things was unprecedented, the Times isn't fixed in amber. The newspaper industry evolves. The Dining Section has a new editor, and he wasn't hired to run it on auto-pilot. I frankly don't give a damn what page it was on, how many photos were included, or the phrasing of the headlines. Frank Bruni has written many reviews that weren't primarily about the food. This one at least made the useful point (if you accept it as accurate) that in this unlikely place can be found some of the best steaks in NYC.