oakapple

Does the menu at Robuchon change, e.g., with the seasons, or according to the chefs whims? Or is it basically the same line-up of greatest hits all year long?

As I understand it, reservations at Masa are not particularly difficult to come by. Of the ones you listed, I think Babbo is the toughest to book (although you can eat at the bar any day).I agree with Nathan about the trade-offs between Babbo and Del Posto.

Just like many bloggers, Bruni's posting pace slowed down after it was no longer a novelty, and the posts were dominated by non-food topics. I think some fresh blood will be beneficial.

The three best high-end meals I've had in the last year were at Alain Ducasse, Country, and The Modern. In all the dimensions you asked about, they had it all. Ducasse, of course, is no longer open.I think Asiate has one of the best rooms in Manhattan, with excellent service and a very good wine list. The food obviously cannot compare to the above places, but you will eat well there. It is clearly well above a one-star restaurant, whatever Amanda Hesser may say. I fear re-opening the tasting menu vs. a la carte debate. I tend to prefer tasting menus at these restaurants, as it gives you a chance to sample a much wider range of what the chef has to offer.

If you've never been to Telepan, that should be your choice. If Picholine is excluded, my favorite in that neighborhood is Compass.Your 10-block radius includes the Time-Warner Center, so Café Gray and Porter House are also possibilities. My old standbys include Josephina, Shun Lee West, Sapphire and Rosa Mexicano.

There are eleven restaurants in New York's top two categories (4 & 5 stars), as opposed to five restaurants in the Times's top category (4 stars).But after the system made its big-bang debut, no new 4 or 5-star restaurants have been crowned. Platt's lower three ratings have been fairly close to Frank Bruni's.

The actual items we had were exceedingly disappointing. We very much wanted to like it. We were there previously (for a dessert tasting), and thought it was spectacular. I don't know if we just made poor choices or caught them on a bad night.

My friend and I had dinner at Varietal on Friday night (illustrated report here). There are a number of problems with the concept. The savory courses just weren't that good, particularly in relation to the price (most entrees >$30). The desserts are stunning, but the place wasn't designed to just serve desserts. When we sat down, we were handed a little printed card listing champagnes by the glass. The cheapest of them was $17. As a point of comparison, we had a fine glass of champagne at The Modern a week ago for $15. Overall, everything but the desserts is just too expensive. The dining room was only about half full, surely not a good sign on a Friday night. The bar was full, but it's not a large or especially comfortable space, and the owner won't cover his monthly nut on bar tabs. Most people in the dining room seemed to be twenty-somethings, and it's hard to imagine many of them ordering the $800 bottles of wine. My friend said, "I can't believe this is the demographic he was looking for." While we were there, a photographer from the New York Observer was in the room. The owner told us that reviews from the Observer, the Sun and New York are coming out this week. Frank Bruni has been in three times, so his review can't be far off. Unless the reviewers have a vastly more favorable take on it, I am not optimistic for the restaurant's future. Jordan Kahn's desserts might not be enough to save the place. Service was friendly and polished. You really want this restaurant to succeed. So far, I don't think it's working.

Given Sneakeater's original criteria, I would add Etats-Unis on the Upper East Side. It has a Michelin star, but is seldom mentioned here.

From Eater via Restaurant Girl comes the news that Gary Robins has been fired as chef at the Russian Tea Room, after the owners dismissed one of his sous chefs and ordered him to start using cheaper ingredients. Business has dropped from $40,000 a day during the holiday season to just $10,000 a day.

In a post today, Eater asks, "What of Montrachet?" It has been "closed for renovations" since last May, with the re-opening date deferred several times. Elsewhere, it was reported that the celebrated wine cellar was liquidated—surely a sign that it is not re-opening anytime soon, at least not in its original form. Will Montrachet ever open again? "Probably not," suggests Eater. The owner, Drew Nieporent, has been in talks with Paul Liebrandt, but the deal would require a significant investment from outside money, and the restaurant "will take perhaps as much as two years to be cash positive again." The environment for such restaurants isn't favorable. Over and over again, places like the original Montrachet get two-star smackdowns from Frank Bruni. It has already happened to Paul Liebrandt once (at Gilt). Without a radical change of concept, three stars are highly unlikely at Montrachet. Nieporent would probably be better off opening a casual restaurant that serves a great pork chop and meatball sliders — with two stars guaranteed.

Quality Meats is a personal favorite of mine, as well. There are quite a few twists and tweaks from the conventional steakhouse menu, making it more than "just another steakhouse." I also think it's excellent. Frank Bruni either blogged or wrote a Diner's Journal column about QM shortly after it opened. It wasn't an outright pan, but he was not wowed. When that happens, quite often it means that there will be no full review. If he hasn't reviewed it by now, it probably means he won't ever.

I didn't think you did. But I think some eGullet members, who think that expensive starts at $200/person, would. ← I still remember the thread in which someone suggested that Asiate ($75 prix fixe) was "upper-mid" priced.By the way, I agree Asiate is underappreciated.

The Kobe Club review posted on the Times website lacks the usual zero-star adjective. I'm assuming it's Satisfactory, as Bruni has filed only one non-Satisfactory zero-star review (Ninja: Poor). Of course, Satisfactory is a misnomer. Bruni's Satisfactory reviews seldom convey much satisfaction, and this one is no exception. But for that matter, his one-star reviews often don't sound "Good," even though that's the purported meaning of one star.

We ordered the tasting menu and requested a wine pairing. At restaurants of this calibre, I expect a sommelier to come over and ask us for preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. Instead, wines just started to appear, most of them poured by runners or junior servers. Several times, the wines weren't properly timed to the courses they purportedly went with. One server would drop off a glass; then another would try to pour wine in a glass we'd already used. I also found the actual choices rather uninspired, and there wasn't any kind of "progression" to them. Mind you, most of this would have been perfectly acceptable at Vong. I expected better at Jean Georges. The hotel lounge at The Waterside Inn was certainly more comfortable than the Time-Warner mall, but I could not order a drink while I waited. It was like sitting in a hotel lobby (albeit a very cosy one).As far as I'm concerned, the restaurant is not obligated to entertain me if I arrive before their scheduled opening time. If they are open, but not yet ready to seat me, that's a totally different story. In that case, Per Se has a quite comfortable lounge where they serve pre-dinner cocktails.

I would distinguish between places like Barca 18, which needed two stars to stay in business, and Waverly Inn, which did not.

I've been to just one three-star restuarant in Europe, the Waterside Inn in Bray, so I certainly don't count as an expert. The Waterside Inn is one of the most lovely restaurant settings imaginable. However, I did not find the food there at all superior to Jean Georges or Per Se. Indeed, as food goes I would rate it a little lower.I'm even less of an expert on European wine service, but I found the wine program at Jean Georges sub-par even by my amateurish standards. At Per Se, there were no flaws that I was able to perceive. Time for another analogy. I got to The Waterside Inn about 20 minutes early, and had to wait in a hotel lounge before it opened. Should the star rating be different because one is physically located in a hotel, and the other in a mall?

In the universe of restaurants that Frank Bruni reviews — which is also the universe of restaurants that attract the majority of posts on eGullet — a $25-30 entree price is average. In the more general universe of the 20,000-odd NYC restaurants, $25-30 entrees are expensive.Nathan says: There is no correlation between spending $25-30 on entrees, and being a foodie. If those facts were correlated, then One if By Land and Cafe des Artistes would be out of business.

From the photos, Per Se seems to be serving the same type of 9-course tasting menu that they and The French Laundry always did. At restaurants in this class, it seems the sweets at the end are always more than any normal human can eat.

I give up. Can you just explain what you mean?

I'm not aware of that general supposition, and I'm not even sure what you mean. ← Check the Michelin thread. ← I checked it. I couldn't find anything like that.

My friend and I had dinner at The Modern last night. We ordered the chef's tasting menu, the less expensive of two tasting menus offered. Both are nominally seven courses, although with various extras it's really more like ten. I'll put up an illustrated post on my blog in a day or two, but the short story is that this was one of the top handful of meals that I've had in New York. I would rate it (by a slight margin) superior to the tasting menu we had at Jean Georges. If every meal at The Modern is this good, then The Modern is a four-star restaurant. I do realize that opinions about The Modern are more mixed than for Jean Georges, which may suggest that it is uneven. But it is quite difficult for me to see how The Modern is not at least a three-star restaurant.

I dined there for the first time about six months ago (review here), so I can't make comparisons to Chef Carmellini's tenure. Both my friend and I felt that, considering the price point and the restaurant's reputation, it was a little underwhelming. I wasn't so off-put that I wouldn't try it again. But I'll have to find another friend to try it with.

This comment shows how you can get very different suggestions, depending on your definition of "underappreciated." Chowhounders love Keens. When someone asks for a steakhouse recommendation on CH, you can bet your life Keens will come up. So what exactly is the criterion for "underappreciated," then? 5 Ninth is packed to the gills every time I've been by; they've even kept me waiting for at least 20 minutes twice in a row for a reserved table. ← Here again, I think 5 Ninth remains a hot restaurant, as it has been since it opened. Its underappreciated status is solely in the sense that the discussion on this board lately has not mentioned it very much.

For a comparison, take a look at Marlene's account of her recent meal at Per Se. Obviously you cannot judge the success of the dishes from photos alone. But the platings and combinations of ingredients are simply more interesting than anything I had on the tasting menu at Gordon Ramsay.