oakapple

Yeah, but what would be foolish is to rate the restaurant two stars, when it lacks the amenities expected at that level. Oh, but wait...somone already did that.Instead of a two-star restaurant that's missing stuff, I'd rather view it as a great one-star restaurant.

What it does not say is that the savory courses are too "conventional" to be paired with Jordan Kahn's outlandish desserts. Rather, it says that they are experimental—and the experiments don't work.By the way, TONY's absurd six-star scale is really incomparable to anyone else's star scale. They've given four and five stars to some pretty humble restaurants, so three is indeed a slam.

I think we need to distinguish the circumstances of the restaurant's creation, and what the chef does afterwards. At WD-50, the restaurant remains Wylie Dufresne's main endeavour. I don't have a good historical perspective, but I suspect it has only gotten better since Grimes reviewed it.At David Burke & Donatella or BLT Fish, we've got a chef who was initially very focused, but is now spread very thin. There's no surprise that both restaurants seems to have slipped. At Gordon Ramsay, we've got a chef that was arguably over-exposed even before he arrived in New York. He has more restaurants and more TV shows in the works. Is he driven to put the energy into making this place the best it can be? I suppose there's the fourth class of restaurants where the chef stays focused, but time just passes them by. A good example is David Waltuck at Chanterelle. It's still his main activity, and I cannot imagine that he's suddenly forgotten how to cook. But people just don't get as excited about it as they used to.

For restaurants he's reviewed that have a casual cafe or "bar room" attached (BLT Fish, Country, The Modern, Gordon Ramsay), I took both the review and the rating to be primarily driven by the main dining room, but rather, a new recognition that it deserved to be recognized separately. Bruni's only self re-review is Eleven Madison Park.In a very similar way, this week's review talked about The London Bar, but does anyone doubt that the two stars were primarily driven by the dining room? Update: Bruni has a new blog post about GR, titled Flushes and Flashes. He talks about the bathrooms (one of his well known pet peeves) and the unusual number of people in the dining room taking flash photos. One of the commenters (#2) takes Bruni bitterly task for treating a casual bar room and a main dining room as one restaurant, which the commenter notes Bruni has done on more than one occasion. The suggestion is that Bruni should do as Adam Platt did in his review of GR, and rate the two rooms separately.

Eater reports that at the London yesterday, the Dining section was removed from every New York Times in the hotel.

Well, it's the chef's loss too, because the chef often has some of his own money, and he certainly has his prestige, riding on the outcome.On its own, a bad Times review isn't the end of the world. The Modern, for instance, still appears to be doing quite well, despite a two-star kiss from Frank Bruni. An even more extreme example is Asiate, which is still doing brisk business despite one star from Amanda Hesser. But I think both places have survived because of a strong consensus that the critic got it wrong. Ramsay has yet to wow any of the mainstream critics (though some bloggers, including me, have liked it). I'm not sure I agree with FG that Gordon Ramsay is "a restaurant in a hotel," rather than a "hotel restaurant." The pre-opening press made a big deal of Ramsay's tie-ins to the whole hotel operation. I do understand that the main dining room won't survive solely on hotel guests. DB&D operates at a lower price point and higher volume. For them, two stars wasn't a smackdown. Yes indeed. This has been much discussed on the Bruni & Beyond thread. The current structure—with generally one rated review per week—means that the critic spends most of his time reviewing new restaurants. All of Bruni's re-reviews, except for EMP, have come after a very long passage of time since the last review. At EMP, there was a new chef, coupled with his strong view that the restaurant had improved dramatically.Bruni's tastes aren't going to change. It's distinctly possible that Ramsay is doing exactly what he intended at this restaurant. It was widely promoted that GR at the London was meant to closely imitate the Michelin three-star GR at Royal Hospital Road. I doubt that Ramsay veered far from that successful formula. What do you do when the technique that made you successful is suddenly condemned en masse by the critics of a foreign city? I think the closest analogy is The Modern. As far as I can tell, Gabriel Kreuther hasn't made major changes. The restaurant is doing well. Bruni has been back, and he just doesn't like it. Perhaps he never will.

If this is correct, then the NYT reviewing system is very poorly suited to tracking the evolution of the restaurant. Critics expect to find a fully-formed establishment as soon as it opens, and it's tough to score a re-review, even if things change rather dramatically. The Michelin system, with its annual check-ups, seems better suited to tracking these incremental changes. (Yes, yes, I know there's an allegation that the Michelin inspectors don't really re-visit as often as they'd like you to believe.) The precedents here are scanty. Bruni has re-reviewed himself only once. It took two years and a new chef for that to happen (Eleven Madison Park). This, of course, presumes that Ramsay has any intention of making the kind of broad Bruni-pleasing changes you are talking about.How much thought leadership does Ramsay have in this restaurant? He is operating many more restaurants than Ducasse, and he has a lot of extra-curricular activities that Ducasse does not.

Maybe not. Bruni noted a high percentage of British visitors—the kind of folks who neither know nor care what the Times reviewer had to say. I think it will be more important now for Ramsay to wow the Michelin inspectors.For me, the big unanswered question is how GR at the London compares to GR at Royal Hospital Road. I don't think we've had a post yet from anyone who's dined at both. The track record after NYT smackdowns is mixed. It's not always the kiss of death. Some restaurants make radical changes; others keep doing their thing, and survive. It just goes to show that the Times is merely one data point. The problem for GR is that none of the mainstream media reviews have been good. Enough of those, and at some point it has to hurt.

As I noted above, Eater is a New York-centric blog. Eater's view—whether right or wrong—was almost certainly based on their view of the New York forum. I have also sensed a falloff on the New York forum, though I don't know how to measure it. I certainly think objective measures are possible—e.g., number of posts per day. You could also check whether more of the posting density is coming from just a handful of people, which was one of the things Eater implied. I don't know how you'd verify or refute Eater's other charges (higher proportion of ego-driven posts; failure to recognize important trends).Chowhound always outnumbered eGullet in sheer number of posts, particularly (but not exclusively) when it came to the "cheap eats" category. That was partly due to the mindset of the people who started Chowhound in the first place. Also, in the old days CH didn't require registration, which made it easier for people to post there. But though it had higher volume, I always found a higher proportion of uninformative posts on CH. That's purely subjective and unmeasurable, but the fact is I had a choice about where to spend my time, and I chose to spend it here.

Not really. You have to remember that when Bruni reviews a famous chef, the review is cloaked in expectations. The subtitle of this review is, "Why GR is not three or four stars." It's a review by subtraction, and the shortcomings are therefore exaggerated. Read closely, and there is actually very little that he does not like. He is merely saying that it doesn't generate the excitement and exhiliration that he thinks a three or four-star restaurant should have.Read any of Bruni's smackdown reviews of haute restaurants—there's a sizable body of them now—and you'll find a similar pattern. The review goes in with the presumption that the restauranteur was expecting three or four stars. Out comes the machete. The Perry Street and Del Posto reviews show that it is possible for a restaurant to have some food dishes he dislikes, and still get three stars, as long as there are enough highs.

He's not saying that every Amex card holder buys $700 bottles of wine. He's saying that people who come through the platinum service are more likely to do that than the typical diner.Is it really a surprise that the $700 customer is more valuable to him?

This one, I thought, was entirely—almost boringly—predictable. Pretty much like the food at GR (or Bruni's view of it).Let's all say it again: Conventional formality bores him. Gordon Ramsay, meet Scott Conant and Gabriel Kreuther.

For those not familiar with it, Eater focuses mainly on the NY forum. Whatever one may think of it, the NY forum is only a tiny fraction of the eGullet community. I know of only two online communities somewhat similar to the eGullet Forums: Mouthfuls and Chowhound. Mouthfuls is quite similar, and actually uses the same software. As it is much newer, it doesn't have eGullet's extensive archive. In terms of current content, I don't see the case that Mouthfuls is any better. My rough impression is that Mouthfuls has fewer people posting, and even if the posts are of roughly similar quality, there just aren't as many of them. Chowhound recently got a new user interface, which means it finally emerged from the early 1990s. Although much improved, it's still an inferior UI to what eG and Mouthfuls are using. Despite the obvious improvement, many of the CH old-timers hate it anyway. The clueless moderation policy—with perfectly legitimate posts routinely disappearing for no good reason on a whim of the anonymous "Chowhound Team"—is the one thing that hasn't changed. I always found Chowhound to have a much higher posting volume than eGullet, but a much worse signal-to-noise ratio. I quite happily got myself (deliberately) banned on Chowhound. I then satisfied myself that it was trivially easy to evade the ban by rejoining under a new name. Having proved that, I stopped regularly visiting. So it eludes me why eGullet, among the three, would be Deathwatched. To be fair, Eater has ripped Chowhound plenty of times, though he has never DW'd them—not that the Chowhound Team would give a damn what Eater thought.

I don't know if the moderators want this discussed here. Eater's views—right or wrong—are mainly derived from his impressions of the New York forum, so this seems as good a place as any.I know of only two online communities somewhat similar to the eGullet Forums: Mouthfuls and Chowhound. Mouthfuls is quite similar, and actually uses the same software. As it is much newer, it doesn't have eGullet's extensive archive. In terms of current content, I don't see the case that Mouthfuls is any better. Chowhound recently got a new user interface, which means it finally emerged from the early 1990s. Although much improved, it's still an inferior UI to what eG and Mouthfuls are using. Despite the obvious improvement, many of the CH old-timers hate it anyway. The clueless moderation policy—with perfectly legitimate posts regularly disappearing on a whim of the anonymous "Chowhound Team" for no good reason—is the one thing that hasn't changed. So it eludes me why eGullet, among the three, would be Deathwatched. To be fair, Eater has ripped Chowhound plenty of times, though he has never DW'd them.

In terms of ego, three stars would be a bruise, no question about it. Ramsay definitely thinks he's as good as any of the chefs that have four stars in New York, and his restaurant was designed on that assumption.But I think the economic breakpoint is between two and three stars. Not even Ramsay would have designed a restaurant that had to get four stars to survive — it's just too risky, given that a new four-star restaurant is rarer than a solar eclipse. At three stars, GR would be right in the heartland of many comparably priced places. Even a three-star review from Bruni would have to be pretty enthusiastic, and would therefore be a boon to business. During Bruni's tenure, I can think of four new restaurants that probably thought of themselves as three-star candidates, but got two: The Modern, Gilt, Alto, and Café Gray. Only at Gilt were there significant repercussions (the chef got fired). Alto retooled the menu quite a bit, but is still ticking. The smackdown didn't seem to have any effect at The Modern or Café Gray. So regardless of the review, I think GR's long-term fate depends on overall word-of-mouth than on the number of stars Bruni gives out. Obviously a three-star review will help business in the short term, and a four-star review will spark an all-out stampede, but long-term success requires repeat business. I also think that the Michelin rating for a restaurant like GR will matter more than it does for a lot of other places, given that GR could be expected to draw a lot of international guests, who give more credence to the Michelin ratings than Bruni's.

The issue on the Bruni thread was about journalistic responsibility. Bruni's comment was basically an aside in his EMP/Bar Room review. It was a throwaway—not anything that needed to be said. He acknowledged that GT was in transition, but the comment will be out there on web searches for many years to come.Now, you could argue that any restaurant serving food to the public needs to accept whatever criticism (bad or good) that it gets. But given that Bruni can't go back and revise these reviews, a lot of us felt it was irresponsible for him to slam GT at the precise moment that he did. Obviously, once the new menu is in place, he may go back and re-review Gramercy Tavern. If he finds that it's no longer a three-star restaurant, no one would quarrel with his right—indeed, his responsibility—revise the rating downward.

Which was precisely what people said before the reviews of Café Gray, Gilt, Alto, and The Modern. Of course, people also said it about some places like Del Posto that did get the expected trifecta. One can predict three stars for just about any high-end place, and have a decent shot of being right.

Eater has two editors: Lockhart Steele and Ben Leventhal. It was an outgrowth of Curbed, which Steele founded. Leventhal previously ran a site called She Loves NY, which pretty much went dormant after Eater began. I think both of them contribute to Eater, but Leventhal appears to be the primary contributor, as Steele now runs a blogging empire of multiple sites, including Curbed in three cities (NY, LA, SF) and Eater in two (NY, LA).

The wait is nearly over. Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Gordon Ramsay at the London. The Eater oddsmakers have established two stars as the most likely outcome (3-1 odds). But Eater is taking the three-star action (6-1 odds) because he thinks Frank likes to surprise us. That's the fun thing about Eater, who sets the odds and then bets against them in the same post: I think Eater has it about right. Given Frank's history, two stars is the most likely outcome, but three is certainly possible, and at 6-1 I would take that bet too.

When we did the same, we were seated at a table, and our server made a very suitable wine pairing recommendation. This always happens when anyone tries to break with tradition. On the other hand, tradition isn't easy to overcome, and those who try to innovate take bigger risks. Just ask Paul Liebrandt, who has flamed out more than once.

Over at the BruniBlog, Frank has yet another follow-up on last week's cult-of-the-chef article in the newspaper. Money quote: Now that he's recognized the importance of examining "all sides," it would be nice to see him do so. While I think the issue is valid, his coverage of it last week was rather one-sided.The new post is no great mine of insights, although there is one interesting long anecdote about a California restaurant from thirty or forty years ago. Neither Frank's correspondent nor Frank himself can identify the place.

That's what I was thinking. Bruni's history is that, once he's said something negative about a restaurant, it's a pretty good leading indicator of what the full review will say.

They've also spruced up their website, which as of a few weeks ago was looking extremely dowdy. Now the question is: can they turn around Frank Bruni?

I had a great meal there a few months ago with my mom and my girlfriend (writeup here). It's a solid three-star restaurant (out of four).

My friend and I will be visiting Copenhagen in July. Any idea how far in advance they accept reservations, and/or how far in advance is necessary to book?