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One of Bruni's better performances today: Porchetta, one star. I considered this paragraph inappropriate: It's the kind of thing that people will be reading about Porchetta long after this ephemeral incident should be forgotten. It is totally incidental to the review.

For those who've been there—regardless of whether you liked it—is the restaurant full?

Well, that is a very possible result in the world of BruniStars. The same system permits the Bar Room at the Modern to be rated higher than the restaurant itself. It would certainly be another dent in the system's credibility, but it has suffered many such dents, and keeps on ticking.Based on Bruni's known proclivities, I suspect GR will get two, with a chance at three, and a very remote chance at four. There's no question Ramsay came to New York thinking he was putting out a four-star restaurant. To award three fewer stars than the restaurant was built for would be Bruni's biggest smackdown ever. I wouldn't be shocked if he did that, but it's not likely.

I wouldn't take it too seriously—it's just something Eater does every week for comic relief. I believe 15,000 to 1 is the highest the 4-star odds have ever been. The reality is, for a restaurant like Porchetta, the odds of 4 stars are basically infinity to 1.

And sure enough, Porchetta is tomorrow's NYT review. Eater predicts two stars, on the grounds that when Bruni visits an outer borough, that is often the outcome (Dressler, Sripraphai, Al di La, Spicy & Tasty).

I think two is pretty much on point.. ← As I've said on the Bruni & Beyond thread, modern restaurant criticism tends to be biased against restaurants that do the classic things well. If you take Platt's review on its own terms (i.e., assuming everything he says to be correct), and remove the effects of this bias, GR probably deserves three stars on Platt's 5-star scale. But because Bruni has the same bias (and indeed, probably has it worse), it is quite likely that Bruni will match Platt at 2 stars, and 1 star wouldn't surprise me.Platt, it must be noted, does not find the particular service glitches Daniel reported, which is not to suggest Daniel's experience isn't valid, but only to suggest that it doesn't happen to everybody. (It also didn't happen to me, FWIW.)

Oh, no question about it — inexcusable in a major magazine.

I think it's just an error. Had the sentence said "London," rather than "England," it would have been correct.

For those that offer the deal year-round, I agree. Not all do.

Adam Platt reviews Gordon Ramsay and The London Bar in this week's New York, awarding two stars to the former, one to the latter: Platt concludes, "Possibly Ramsay’s earlier London restaurants were imbued with passion and a certain ineffable sense of place. This one isn’t."I'm not going to directly agree or disagree with Platt's rating, but he seems to exact a pretty heavy rating penalty for the lack of an "ineffable sense of place." Nevertheless, Platt and Bruni often agree, and seldom disagree by more than 1 star. It suggests a 3-star maximum from Bruni, with 2 stars a very realistic possibility.

Well, somebody must be going, but in the so-called "foodie" community, Gilt seems to be practically invisible.Having said that, the dining population is more than just the people who post to Internet message boards.

At a luxury restaurant in an American city, I think it's reasonable to expect servers who can communicate in comprehensible English. That doesn't mean English with an American accent, but it needs to be understandable. I am trusting Daniel, based on his past reviews, that when he complains about this, it isn't merely that the server had an accent, but that the accent was thick enough to be basically incomprehensible.

The service lapses Daniel described are, of course, unacceptable at a restaurant on GR's level. The funny thing is, when I dined there we ordered a wine pairing with the Menu Prestige and didn't specify a price range. The sommelier came in at $60 per head, and our requests were honored. Servers who can't make themselves understood in English are a pretty common occurrence in New York. At a few restaurants, I've had to just give up and eat the food without knowing what it was. Del Posto was one of these.

Aside from Italian food, steaks and burgers are what Bruni knows best. He doesn't write with Reichl's sure hand, but comparatively speaking it's one of his stronger categories. Nevertheless, the Wolfgang's review was one of his worst, for its glib and gratuitous references to heart disease. The Wolfgang's review, like this week's EMP/Bar Room review, compared the restaurant he was rating to another that he was not—in that case Peter Luger. Rich lambasted Bruni for comparing the two, which shows that Rich is at least consistent, but I considered it totally appropriate. If Wolfgang's and Luger's aren't two similar and very comparable restaurants, I don't know what would be. Fat Guy doesn't think the fine dining critic should review steakhouses. I don't see any objection to it, unless you are also going to exempt other formula restaurants, like sushi bars, classic French bistros, Greek seafood restaurants, and so forth. Indeed, given the pace of steakhouse openings these days, compared to other major restaurant categories with high check sizes, it's hard to see how Bruni could avoid them. FG's idea of a periodic Ed Levine-style roundup sounds just fine, but I think you need to look at it more broadly. Steakhouses are hardly the only genre that would lend itself to that kind of treatment.

It's hardly the first time that something happened to Bruni, where it's clear he wasn't recognized. In the grand scheme, however, I think they're isolated and fairly infrequent incidents. Indeed, he probably mentions them as a rare glimpse into the kind of service the non-V.I.P. might be expected to get.Most of the time, I think he is recognized. At the RTR—a very expensive restaurant with a former three-star chef that knew a full review was forthcoming—he was surely recognized by most of the staff, on most of his visits.

Mimi Sheraton seems to have construed the stars differently, given your earlier analysis: ________ I am not a food expert either, but when I read Sheraton, the writing seems to be more professional and more serious. She certainly doesn't drift into irrelevant sidelights, as Bruni so often has done.I can't name specific provable errors Bruni has made. It's just a feeling one gets, which is clearly rather widely shared.

By all accounts, Bruni was well known at the Times as a huge restaurant fan. Whenever people visited Rome, Bruni was (allegedly) like a walking Zagat Guide, so encyclopedic was his knowledge. I suspect that, having made his chops at more serious reporting, he wanted to do something fun. Johnny Apple is evidence that it is possible to be an entertaining food writer without having been trained for it. Anyone knowledgeable about wine is not ignorant about food, since the vast majority of wines are made to be consumed with food. The reality is that all of the major restaurants (and many of the minor ones) recognize Bruni anyway. Indeed, they recognized Grimes and Reichl too, and their likenesses weren't plastered all over the Internet, as Bruni's is. Just google him; you'll see.

Do they accept reservations for the evening service? Silly question, I know, but thought I'd ask.

I'm afraid I don't share your enthusiasm for Bruni's craftsmanship. Yes, he's competent, and certainly better than I am. But so many of his reviews are plagued by irrelevant material, overwrought imagery, and misplaced emphasis. I don't think Pulitzers are awarded merely because the writer knows how to string together technically correct sentences that read well.

Currently I think Eric Asimov has both qualities as does Mehan. ← I am reasonably sure that Asimov, had he wanted it, could have had the principal critic's job after Grimes left. Meehan would probably have a shot at it after Bruni leaves, but there's no telling how long that will be. If he stays as long as Reichl and Grimes did, we're only halfway through his tenure.

I haven't been to Porchetta, but could it possibly be the victim of unrealistic expectations? Diners who know Nerone's background at two-star 71 Clinton may be expecting a more refined experience than Porchetta is designed to deliver. In today's BruniBlog, the Frankster is talking about portion sizes, and he has a nice compliment for Porchetta: That suggests he's making return visits, and a review is probably imminent (within the next 2-3 weeks).

Per Eater, Barça 18 will close tomorrow, an outcome Eater had predicted ten months ago.

A trip into the time warp might dampen our nostalgia for critics past. Earlier this week, I dined at Le Boeuf à la Mode (539 E. 81st between 1st & York Avenues), a classic French bistro that has been in the same family since it opened in 1962. Although remodeled in the 1990s, I strongly suspect the cuisine has barely changed since then. [blog review here.] The last—and as far as I can find, only—New York Times review was on April 25, 1975. In a double review, John Canaday awarded two stars apiece to Le Muscadet and Le Boeuf à la Mode. Incredibly, he acknowledges that he paid but two visits to the former, and only one visit to the latter — unthinkable by today's standards. The food writing, frankly, is rather pedestrian. Here are some examples: The "lacking oomph" line struck me as very much in the Bruni style.But there is a humorous couple of paragraphs at the end:

On the subject of re-reviewing: Obviously, if the number of restaurants has increased, the review frequency must decrease. But if Bruni simply returned to the Sheraton/Miller custom of reviewing two restaurants most of the time, the number of reviews would nearly double. It may be that restaurants are more diverse, and therefore more space is needed to describe them adequately. But there have been an awful lot of Bruni reviews in which at least half the material is filler. And no: As far as I can see, Sheraton didn't have 2 to 3 times more space than Bruni.

Comparisons are difficult, as it's clear Sheraton was operating under a very different system. In this respect, I agree with your comment in the 2006 thread that the star system has changed a lot over the years.Sheraton had the opportunity to re-visit restaurants much more frequently than Bruni can, and as you've documented in the past, she used the zero-star rating far more freely than more recent critics do. We don't know what Bruni would do if he was using her system. In one of his blog posts, Bruni conceded that some restaurants probably wouldn't get the same rating if he went back six months or a year later. He also said that there's nothing he can do about it, because he has to spend most of his time investigating new restaurants, not re-checking the old ones. It's notable that it took Bruni over 2½ years before he reviewed a restaurant he'd already written about, whereas one gets the impression that Sheraton did it all the time. To put it another way, we really don't know whether Sheraton's original reviews of Claudio's and Tre Scalini were wrong — except in the sense that her crystal ball failed to predict their decline. Bruni may be no better. We just don't know, since unlike Sheraton he's not in the habit of promptly revisiting his mistakes.