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At Morimoto, it's $120.

Blogger Augieland has already had the Morimoto omakese five times. Obviously the guy has a lot of disposable income. Amazingly, there have been no repeated dishes. See here, here, here, here, and here.

I'm not sure what "very different take" you're referring to. No one has disputed that Bruni's comments about Gilt's prices were factually accurate at the time he wrote them.In today's review, Bruni says, "When Gilt opened, many dishes came with supplemental charges, and wines by the glass were ludicrously exorbitant. Now the supplements are fewer and the wines slightly less expensive." Since those were precisely the points he complained of, I think it's practically inconceivable that his comments did not have an influence. I would fall off my chair if someone in management at Gilt said, "We would have reduced our prices in any case, and it's just our bad luck that Bruni wrote about them before we got around to it." Whatever the merits of the earlier piece, it was meant to be ephemeral. Today's review will be accessible on the Times website for free, and it's fair to guess that people will be reading it for a long time to come — that is, until another review comes along to supplant it.

(This comes after Frank Bruni's two-star review of Gilt, another restaurant that clearly had four-star aspirations.)Due to the extreme rarity of a four-star coronation, it's rather difficult to say what it takes to earn four stars. The last two restaurants to reach that level, Per Se and Masa, are both very clearly over-the-moon — enough so that their four-star reviews were practically anti-climactic. What it would take for any other restaurant to get four stars remains to be seen until somebody does it. But given that Babbo is three stars, and Del Posto is designed to be Babbo on overdrive (both in cuisine and luxury), one can clearly see what they were thinking. Unfortunately, luxury for its own sake can be perceived as a caricature, which is clearly what Adam Platt thought ("like watching a troop of lumberjacks tiptoe their way through a ballet"). Platt also found the food uneven, which is perhaps a more serious problem.

The Times has been a national newspaper for many years now. The decline in local readership is not attributable to that. Newspaper readership has been under pressure for decades, due to the rise of alternative information sources (CNN, the Internet), and various other factors. I agree. Bruni has not persuaded me that he has the background to write knowledgeably about this type of cuisine. Restaurants usually have "soft openings," which are the culinary equivalent of theatrical previews. A critique at that point would have been inappropriate. But when Bruni's earlier piece appeared, Gilt was not in a "soft opening." It was fully open to the general public. Once a restaurant has formally opened, it is fair game for critics. Indeed, Steve Cuozzo and Gael Green also had writeups on Gilt within about a week of Bruni's. You may believe (as I do) that Cuozzo and Green are better critics, but that's a whole other matter than whether it was appropriate for Bruni to write about Gilt at the time that he did.You observe that Gilt "has subsequently changed its pricing," implying that it was unfair for Bruni to make these points when the restaurant was "obviously...in progress" (i.e., evolving). But Bruni himself may have brought about the evolution to which you refer. It is probably not a coincidence that the Times complains about pricing tactics, and shortly thereafter those tactics are changed. It doesn't seem to have done them any good, but clearly they were trying to respond to the criticism. One point I do agree with is that, in a piece that purported to discuss broad trends in restaurant pricing, there was a bit too much emphasis on just one restaurant.

Although I cannot recall every specific instance, I agree that the bread service at many New York restaurants is not up to the level of the rest of the food.

Yes, I can assure you they're deeply disappointed at Gilt today. Since this was a restaurant that had reasonable aspirations for four stars, a two-star rating is a significant slap-down.Bruni has given the two-star kiss to a number of places that had far higher expectations: Café Gray, The Modern, Alto. But did anyone think that those places were going to get four stars? Not really. Gilt aims higher than any of them. Since I haven't eaten there, I can't say that Bruni is wrong. But probably not since Amanda Hesser's one-star review of Asiate has the actual rating been so much lower than what the restaurant had aimed for. I must quote this sarcastic snippet at the bottom of the review that might otherwise be overlooked:

The rating is sometimes missing right after the review is posted. It will show up later. I can guarantee you it is not zero stars.

It will be basically across the street from the #1 South Ferry subway station and the W/R Whitehall Steet station, and just a few blocks from the 4/5 Bowling Green Station, making it – at least arguably – a lot more accessible by mass transit than Chelsea Market. And Lower Manhattan is the city's fastest growing residential area.

No one's saying it's insurmountable. The question is how much infrastructure you have to build, and what that does to the economics of it.

That seems to me an awfully ungenerous reading of what has been posted here. People are simply rooting for a well regarded chef who's had some hard knocks in the past. I would think, until demonstrated otherwise, that the people who are predicting and/or hoping that Gilt will receive 3 stars, also believe (based on whatever information they have at their disposal) that those stars will be deserved. I do not believe that anyone here is rooting for Gilt to receive unwarranted acclaim.

Eater has new reports on the Del Posto lease fiasco here and here. According to the latter report, the unauthorized duct work for Del Posto's HVAC system spills over into the space that is supposed to become Tom Coliccio's Craftsteak later this year.

We tend to derive satisfaction when our opinion is backed by others, particularly in so public a medium as the New York Times. We also derive satisfaction from seeing that a chef whose work we admire has earned the critical acclaim that we believe he deserves.On a selfish level, perhaps we want a restaurant to receive favorable reviews so that it will be successful, and we'll be able to continue enjoying it for years to come. I'm not sure that critical acclaim actually has much to do with staying power, but we often hope will be the case.

According to a report in Downtown Express, the Battery Maritime Building could become a foodie paradise: The proposal is not without difficulty. The 1908 building, the Manhattan terminal of the Governor's Island Ferry, is located at the southern tip of the island. It is not particularly friendly to pedestrians, as access is blocked by the FDR Drive and the mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. It is also "a haul from any residential enclave."

It is true that TriBeCa and the LES are residential neighborhoods, and the Meatpacking District proper is not, but it is quite close to the Far West Village and Southwest Chelsea, which have plenty of residents. The analogy is still relevant, because the better known restaurants in all of these areas couldn't come close to surviving on neighborhood business alone. They survive because they are dining destinations.You refer to TriBeCa and the LES as "local friendly," but this was not always the case. In 1980, you needed a security escort to walk around TriBeCa at night. It was decidedly not the upscale area it is today. But once it was demonstrated that the area could be a dining destination (it was probably Montrachet that did it), the explosion came, and it still hasn't stopped. Do you think Bouley, Chanterelle, Nobu, Danube, Scalini Fedeli, etc., are surviving on drop-ins from the local residents? Not likely. I don't know the LES quite as well, but I believe it's a similar story there. What it is today is not what it was just a few short years ago.

I don't think it matters that Café Gray is in a mall, since the location hasn't hindered Per Se or Masa. The décor is singularly misguided, but I don't think that's the problem either. Rather, it's the unpleasantness of dining there, particularly because of the noise. At these prices, you want to be coddled, and Café Gray fails to do that.

I don't see any reason to think it will be a problem, just as it hasn't been a problem for TriBeCa or the Lower East Side—both of which, like the Meatpacking District, were once forlorn, but are now upscale. As I said upthread, "If you want to open a successful restaurant in New York, there's no better strategy than to go where there are already successful restaurants."

That report was only a week ago, and there's been no report of a resolution, so I assume those problems are still out there. I agree with Nathan that both sides are posturing, and in due course there will be a resolution, probably allowing everyone to save face.

Some of Platt's comments remind me of the early criticisms of Ducasse. For every patron who finds the imitation Michelin style "stagy," there may be five others who love it. The reviews I've seen suggest that the food bears considerable similarities to Babbo, a restaurant for which there remains considerable demand. Bearing that in mind, I think Del Posto is going to do just fine.

Apologies for stealing Megan's thunder, but Del Posto now has its first mainstream media review: three stars (out of five) from New York Magazine's Adam Platt: To arrive at a rating, Platt employs a subtractive method, deducting one for the "stagy atmosphere" and another for food that's "very good, but...not Babbo in its prime," arriving at three stars—surely not what molto Mario had in mind.

I'm already on record with a three-star prediction, and I'll stick to that.

Last night, I returned to Café Gray, my first visit since November 2004. My sense of it at the time remains my sense today: it is a wonderful restaurant, but not without its share of miscalculations. Chief among these must be the boneheaded interior design, surely the most obscene waste of a great view in dining history. Walls studded with hard surfaces ensure that the noise carries—and, oh boy, does it carry. At the table next to us, an man was delivering what sounded like a lecture in musicology to a hearing-impaired companion. The next table over had a Japanese family with two toddlers, one of them quite loud. Ninety minutes later, thanks to the din, I left Café Gray with a mild headache. I have the Café Gray website open in another window as I write this. I'm not fond of websites with a sound track, but this is one of the dumbest ones ever. People chat and laugh, glasses clink, wine is poured, music flits in and out in the deep background. About its only merit is that, if you quintuple the volume, you have precisely the aural experience of a meal at Café Gray. The food is an altogether happier story and deserves better surroundings. My friend was grateful to be steered towards the mushroom risotto ($22) and the braised shortribs ($36), both signature dishes that Gray Kunz made famous at Lespinasse. They are indeed special, but as I'd already had them the last time, I wanted to see what else the kitchen could do. I started with the Seared Foie Gras and Quail ($24). Foie is pretty much infallible, but the quail was a succulent surprise. For the entrée, I chose the sautéed pork chop with housemade sauerkraut ($35). The chop was about half again as thick as one normally sees. To get the interior to the house-recommended temperature of medium, the exterior had to be slightly over-cooked. It was still very tasty, but not perhaps as good as it could have been had the kitchen served two thinner chops. The sauerkraut was wonderful. We didn't have dessert, but I noted that the available choices were between $14-18, which is excessive for this type of restaurant. (My friend and I got into a long discussion about how high the rent must be.) Wine options under $50 were in short supply, but when we chose something at around $48, it was one of the better wines we've enjoyed at its price point. Many restaurants in town have a disappointing bread service, but Café Gray served a loaf of homemade sourdough bread that I'd love to eat every day. The amuse bouche was a small beet in a mildly spicy sauce that I've now forgotten. Overall, the kitchen at Café Gray does a first-class job, but the surroundings disappoint.

The concern that "at some point there will be more seats than people" would be relevant if the Meatpacking District were somehow geographically isolated from the rest of Manhattan. But it isn't. In this town, you can be just about anywhere within a half-hour of where you are now, so MePa is drawing diners from all over town. The district will become oversaturated only if Manhattan itself is oversaturated—and I see no sign of that happening.Two things have changed over the last several years. The first is that the Meatpacking District is stretching. Morimoto's Tenth Avenue address (between 15th & 16th Sts) would formerly have been considered Far West Chelsea, and officially it still is. The Meatpacking District's traditional northern border is 14th St. But because a Meatpacking address is considered desirable, people will talk about Morimoto as if it's a Meatpacking restaurant, but according to the traditional borders it is not. The second change is that serious restaurants are coming in. On the same block as Morimoto, you have Del Posto today, and shortly you will have Craftsteak. That's just on one block. It's no surprise, either. If you want to open a successful restaurant in New York, there's no better strategy than to go where there are already successful restaurants. I don't know whether Stephen Starr will succeed here, but at the moment I wouldn't bet against him. In choosing a neighborhood that is already a success with the dining public, he's following a well-trodden formula. It worked for TriBeCa, and it worked for the Lower East Side. It will probably work here, too.

There are many restaurants in New York that I want to try, so a restaurant has to be pretty damned good for me to rush back. If it is merely good, I move on to the next destination. After our first visit, Cookshop had made it into that rare pantheon of places my friend and I felt we had to rush back to. Alas, early promise wasn't fulfilled. On our second visit, my friend ordered a "humanely-raised" veal chop. We supposed that meant that the young animal received plenty of coddling in its short life, but in the end they still slaughtered it anyway. All of that made no difference. The chop was inexpertly cooked, lacking any char or texture on its outer surface. I ordered the suckling pig, another animal that had died young. Its final stop before my plate was a rotisserie, which is perhaps a gimmick to persuade the diner that he is getting something special, but in the end it was just bland. I had a far superior version of the same dish a few days later at the TriBeCa restaurant Dominic. So our enthusiasm for Cookshop has dimmed somewhat. We'll probably give it one mor try one of these days, but this time we won't be rushing back.

Photos of the food & setting here and here. They've even got aged soy sauce—10 and 20 years old. I have never heard of that.