Sneakeater

AND my friend with Celiac disease can drink it. This is actually rather major.

The timing error was all mine.

For an ice cream parlor like Serendipity, just being mentioned on a serious food board like eGullet is a major coup. It makes them look like they're in the same league as, say, Daniel, rather than (as Sam points out) Bennigan's. OF COURSE this is tasteless. It's just not worth paying attention to. Nobody's supposed to ever eat it.

There's no bad publicity on this. This ice cream parlor will now be thought of as a place with fancy stuff -- willing to be fancier than an ice cream parlor ever needs to be. You've given them just what they wanted.

I think SHO's prices are freakishly low. We can speculate as to their lease or other aspects of their relationship with the developer of the condo they're in that permit them to charge so little. But I don't think you can fairly compare other restaurants to SHO. Something is clearly going on there.

Speaking for myself, I consider Ko to be not entirely successful, because the food is not consistently at the empyrean level it should be for the concept to work. (On the other hand, I haven't been there in more than a year.) (On the third hand, it's telling that I don't feel compelled to keep going.)

Or maybe it isn't even "subtracting." I think that when the food at Ssam Bar started to go haute, most of us viewed it as a tremendous increase in the quality and ambition of food you could get at a casual food counter -- not as a decrease in the level of service you could expect at a high-end restaurant.

Where I have always differed from Oakapple's analysis of the service at Chang places is that Oakapple sometimes seems to be failing to acknowledge that some people PREFER the things that Chang subtracts to be subtracted. They're happy not to deal with those things while still getting superb food -- and generally agree with Chang's decisions as to what's left in. I think it also bears noting, in connection with recent discussion in this thread, that one of the things that were most disappointing about Ko out of the box was the lack of interaction with the chefs. I'm happy to hear it's better at lunch.

And so does per se, the only other "high end" NYC restaurant identified as having this practice. Seems pretty clear to me.

It's kind of funny that out-of-towners are presenting this as the kind of scam that "people in New York" will keep "dishing out" for, when it's so obvious that this is nothing more than a PR gimmick calculated to impress the tourists and suburbanites that constitute almost the entirety of this ice cream parlor's clientele. It's also obvious that NOBODY -- not even the tourists and suburbanites -- is expected to BUY this thing: it's pure PR, a pure menu gimmick (although I'm sure Serendipity wouldn't say "no" if some gullible big-talking tourist wanted to). Congratulations on giving Serendipity exactly what it wanted.

This is what eating in New York is like now. Welcome.

I can imagine someone saying the same thing about Italian food 50 or 60 years ago.

No! I'm wrong! He still maintains some affiliation with the restaurant. Why DID people stop going?

I'm pretty sure their big-deal Thai chef -- who was the raison d'etre of the place, and after whom it was named -- left years ago (to be replaced by somebody much less big-deal).

I very much appreciate MikeHartnett's recognition that being a litigator doesn't necessarily make you an evil inconsiderate self-entitled person (I guess a lot of people would disagree with that). It just means that your obligations to courts and clients are unpredictable in the extreme. And I'll repeat: I loose thousands of dollars a year on unused theater, opera, and concert tickets. I'm not making this up. I just want to note that just because you appreciate traditional accommodations given to customers by restaurants, it doesn't mean you're apt to be culinarily conservative. It just means you appreciate the accommodations. The suggestion that I'd like Alinea less than anybody else on this board is risable.

Not to be overly argumentative -- because once again I don't know what their cancellation policy will be -- but if I had to choose between waiting 15 minutes or a half hour at the bar before being seated and losing $300-$500 every time unexpected work obligations cause me to cancel dinner plans, I'd easily choose the former.

1. It should be different because restaurants can often fill unused tables with walk-ins, which is not a tradition at theaters. 2. If restaurants traditionally haven't operated the same way as theaters, why SHOULD they change? Or at least, why should we APPLAUD the change, when it's so obviously worse for us? Are you so self-abegnating that you think that everything that can be stacked against you as a customer SHOULD be? Why in the world aren't your and my interests as important, for purposes of discussion, as the restaurant's? (Of course, as you and FG point out, if they have a reasonable cancellation policy my whole complaint becomes moot.)

Aren't you guys offended by the fact that if you can't make the dinner, the risk of loss shifts to you? I lose thousands of dollars a year on tickets to theatrical and musical performances I have to miss because of unexpected work obligations. Now I have to lose money on restaurants as well?

I think it's very hard to recommend that someone visiting for a short period of time from London schlep out to a nice but not particularly interesting part of Brooklyn for a lunch. She specifically asked for recommendations of lunch spots that are near places she'd otherwise be.

i certainly have no problem with factoring decor and pricing into a reviewer's star rating. Maybe even noise. But the fact that you can't get in on a busy night without a rating? Makes little sense to me. Almost as if he's saying this restaurant shouldn't be so popular so I can give it a higher rating. I wasn't clear. I didn't say you couldn't go during normal dining hours -- I said you couldn't COMFORTABLY go. I think that if a restaurant is too noisy and crowded to enjoy during normal hours, that's something you can hold against it. Note that this is more a matter of how a place is set up than how popular it is. If you manage to get into Minetta Tavern during prime dining hours, it's a blast: the way the room is configured, the crowd and the bustle is energizing and fun. Places like Schiller's and Pulino's, OTOH, are just unpleasant. (And remember, I LIKE Schiller's and Pulino's: I'm not saying this makes the restaurants bad -- only that it could prevent them from getting more than a one-star "good" rating.) In other words, I was trying to say the same thing as oakapple, but failed.

When you consider that Sifton said (not incorrectly) that you can only comfortably go to this place for a very early dinner or very late at night -- otherwise it's too noisy and crowded -- you can understand why he'd say it's a one-star place.

Yeah, I mean, just to be painfully clear, when I said the Momofuku organization was trying something different here, I meant "different in feel." I know a lot of people who don't go to the other Momofuku restaurants ONLY because of issues with the noise and comfort level (things that others of us, like me, affirmatively enjoy). These people might like Ma Peche even if -- make that ESPECIALLY if -- the food is just a retread of Ssam Bar's. Although, knowing Tien, I doubt it will be.

Well, that's true, too. We'll have to wait to see whether the dinner menu is less of a Ssam Bar retread than at least the bar menu.

WK2 appears to have forgotten that this "storage area" has housed a restaurant -- indeed, a NYT three-star restaurant -- since the day the Hotel Chambers opened. Having said that, it's true that David Rockwell's design for Town ameliorated the dining room's placement in a basement in a way the design for Ma Peche just doesn't. Rockwell's design swept you up, so that you felt like you were in this soaring space. The Ma Peche design makes it feel like you're eating in, well, a basement. On another note, criticizing the Hotel Chambers for not being the Ace Hotel is like criticizing Cafe Boulud for not being Minetta Tavern. There's room for all kinds of places in this City. It would be a pity if the Chang organization, now trying something different from what they've done before, were to get roundly criticized for not doing the same thing as ever.

Hunan House! Hunan House! Hunan House!