Sneakeater

Also, I think it might be illuminating, in some sense, to explain why I've never eaten at ADNY and Per Se -- two obvious comparisons -- so I can't compare them. ADNY is the kind of hyperfancy restaurant that my late wife WOULD NOT TOLERATE. So we never went. It's too ostentatiously luxe for business entertaining (at least the kind I do). And it's also too ostentatiously luxe for dates -- there is such a panoply of wrong ideas that could be conveyed that it doesn't matter which one would be picked up. Per Se, OTOH, would have been fine for my late wife, and, even despite its high price, is to my mind sufficiently low-key in the ostentation department for a date. But you can't get in. I can't plan meals a month in advance, and even if I could, I won't spend all morning on the phone trying to get through (much less have my secretary do it), and can't eat a big multi-course meal at the odd hours that are usually avaibable anyway. Also, neither of those restaurants seems fit for solo dining, my other frequent option. ADNY because, even if you occassionally COULD snag a table at the last minute, it just seems too fancy/ritualistic, and Per Se because you can't walk in. (I NEVER plan solo dining in advance.) So I never go to those places. Atelier Robuchon, at least during its soft opening during these waning, inhabitant-free months of summer, is perfect for a solo semi-walk-in. Once the modified reservation policy kicks in, I'll never be able to do it on a date (since we'll be unable to get a reservation for one of the tables, and will be unable to ever expect counter seats without an intolerably long wait), and I'm sure the wait at the counter will be such that I won't be able to walk in anymore. So it goes out of my repetoire after Labor Day. But for now, in a way, for my needs, it's perfect. A place with great food, but no ritual. I wish it could stay that way.

(For all you star fans, I think two stars is a real possibility, too. But that says more about Frank Bruni and his preferences than anything else. If you tied up my nieces and nephews and pointed a gun at them and ordered me to give Atelier Robuchon a NYT star rating, I'd probably say three. But it just doesn't matter.)

I thought last night (a Sunday in August) would be a good time to get into Atelier Robuchon in its soft-opening phase, when they take no reservations and operate strictly first-come first-served. They're supposed to open for dinner at 5 or 6 (I forget which). I got there at 6:20. There were a couple of people sitting at the counter and nobody at the dining room tables. I figured (gleefully) that I'd be able to stroll right in. But the hostess took my name and told me they'd be able to seat me in an hour. I looked around and saw there were a lot of people waiting outside. Apparently, they didn't open right on time and then they trickle in the first seating while they're firing up. At least now during the soft opening. I had left myself some chores to run in the neighborhood in anticipation of this possiblity. When I can back about 55 minutes later, the hostess, with a very broad smile, led me to the counter, where I had my choice of two (noncontiguous) open seats. The cocktail menu was shocking. It's all classics -- no chef-generated special cocktails here -- at $20 apiece. I was very thirsty, and so ordered one (a Singapore Sling, after I searched the room carefully to ascertain there was no one I knew there who would see me drink it). It was ordinary. I was getting a bad feeling. One glance at the $160 seven-course tasting menu was enough to convince me to order it. It had two dishes that I very much wanted to try -- the uni dish and the so-called langoustine fritter -- which the preview in Frank Bruni's blog noted were both extremely expensive (something like $39 for the uni, a very small plate, and somewhere in either the $50s or the $70s for the langoustine). $160 for seven courses, when those were two of them, seemed like the clear way to go. I looked briefly at the a la carte menu. All I can say is that it's very confusing, what with the different categories of dishes, and that prices were all over the place: every which way but low. I asked if there were wine pairings, but that turned out to be nothing more than my server and me conferring on which by-the-glass glasses I should get to go with which sequences of dishes. The server's enthusiasm (more about this later) made that a fairly fun process, though. By-the-glass prices are high, however ($12 for a California viognier and $18 or $20 for a Rully). Painful as it will be, I guess I'm bound to do a dish-by-dish runthrough. 1. Amuse: a lemon-vanilla gel, with a layer of fennel foam topped with a bit of olive paste. This is when I began to get turned around in favor of this place. An extraordinary blend of flavors, with a beautiful blend of textures, the silkiness of the gel standing out. And the sweet/tart/salty flavor combination was piquant. 2. The Famous Uni Dish: uni in a lobster jelly, topped with a layer of cauliflower cream dotted with parsley reduction. A great uni dish. Maybe the jelly was rendundant after the amuse. Maybe it was all so good I didn't care. 3. Capellini in a very light tomato sauce topped with caviar. A simple dish including a big mound of caviar. But it really worked. Not as a luxury ingredient gratuitously ladeled on, but rather as a completely unexpected flavor element that turned out to work beautifully. 4. Crispy Langoustine Fritter: what this really turned out to be was the meat of a langoustine served inside a (greaseless) fried wonton, with some pesto inside as well. If Joe Ng served something like this, we'd all be bowing before him, singing the praises of his subtlety and technique. So, too, here. 5. Softboiled Egg on Stew of Eggplant. This was, in its way, my favorite dish. Favorite because unexpected. The eggplant stew was very spicy (I wish I knew enough to say with what). The egg on top was like a poached egg on top of a serving of corned beef hash (I am one classy food analyst, aren't I? nothing but the most refined comparisons here), having the same effect of moderating the full flavor of the matter underneath. 6. Cod fillet, with something like a steamed dumpling skin covering it, in a chicken broth. We've all been served a lot of cod lately. (Oddly, as I had thought they were nearly fished out.) Here's a fish where, if you overcook it even a little, the rubber comes in. This was as perfectly cooked a piece of fish as ever I've had. The cliche is to say it was like silk -- but it was. The highly flavorful chicken broth in which it was served wafted up fragrance as I ate the delicate fish (cod isn't a fish you necessarily think of as delicate, but I swear this was). 7. Quail stuffed with foie gras served with truffled mashed potatos. My least favorite course. Dare I say that the quail (described on the menu as "carmelized") was a bit greasy? Also, just from a menu-planning point of view, I thought it was a little late in the multi-course meal to start in with the foie gras and a bowl of potatos that were something like half butter. Also, the foie gras didn't add as much flavor as I'd have expected. This wasn't bad, but it wasn't of the highest excellence. 8. Green yuzu granite with Vervain jelly. More jelly. The have a calling here. This was an excellent palate-cleanser. But, like a six-month-old looking at a mobile from his crib, what I found most interesting about this item was how they contrived the dish so that red light was reflected up from the red glass plate under the clear serving dish so as to sort of illuminate the bottom of the granite, making it look like it was glowing red from within. It was a beautiful and fascinating effect. Having stared at my food, I did not go on to play with it. 9. Souflee with cherries and almond ice cream. They know how to make souflees here. They also know how to make ice cream. What is there to say about all this? The food was all amazingly well prepared. In terms just of technique, I've never had anything in New York to exceed it, and little to even match it. In terms of the conceptions of the dishes, they seemed to me to be extremely well-thought-out and unstinting but not overcomplicated, avoiding, say, what can occassionally seem (to me) to be the overeleborateness of some dishes at Jean Georges. It's food obviously conceived of by one of the great chefs in the world, but simplified a bit to avoid a lot of the rigamorole. Which brings us, inevitably, to the price issue. You might very reasonably say, why pay top dollar for pared-down cuisine? Especially since what is pared down is not only the complexity of the food, but also the surrounding ritual. To me, the answer is this. The value question comes down to, is this experience, in its entirety, worth the money to me? As for the food, I can't get this food elsewhere. It's different enough from other similar food on offer in New York to make it something with no competing replacement product. It's not like Chinatown Brasserie, where they're charging at least twice as much as places that serve fairly similar food that isn't materially worse. This is more like, I could go to EMP, which I like almost if not equally as much and it costs less -- but it's different. I could go to Jean Georges, which maybe I like a bit more -- but it's different. If I want THIS food, I have to go here. And at least the tasting menu price doesn't seem out-of-line to me for the quality and quantity of what you get. As for the non-food parts, let me put it this way. It isn't like Cafe Gray, where the ambiance and service are so actively unpleasant as to diminish your experience of the excellent (but expensive) food. To me, sitting at the counter was sort of fun, if not the absolute height of comfort. (For solo dining, it's optimal, in fact -- better than eating at the bar in most places.) (Not that the [Michelin] three-star version of a Robuchon-type place would even have a bar.) But even looking at the tables, it wasn't the kind of thing where the setting would diminish your enjoyment of the food. At worst, it wouldn't augment it. And as for the service, it had this one impressive aspect. Everyone appeared to be retrained holdovers from Atelier's predecessor in the space, Fifty Seven Fifty Seven. And their excitement at being involved with this new level of product was palpable. The woman who took my order and doled out the wine was visibly excited. So was the busboy who brought the food. His smiles when he presented each dish weren't feined. He was psyched. That was fun, too. So is it a four-star restaurant? My answer is, I don't give a fuck whether it's a four-star restaurant. What I care about is, did I like -- I mean, REALLY like -- my dinner? The answer is, yes. Did I feel ripped off by the price? The answer is, no. (The FOOD price, anyway: I'm NOT happy about the beverage prices.) Is it the best restaurant in New York? I'm sure it's not -- but I don't see how that conceivably matters. What matters is that at least the tasting menu is well worth trying.

I think this also shows the importance of ambiance. I think a lot of people's response to Al Di La is colored by how charming the dining room in the main restaurant is. As for the wine bar/overflow dining room, well, all you can say is, it's not. I know that when I eat in the bar, it's like a completely different (and worse) experience from eating in the restaurant. Who knows, maybe the point is that you can only accurately evaluate their food if you eat in the bar, free from the distraction of the charms of the restaurant.

Exactly.

FWIW -- and you're obviously not bound to agree -- to me, it's all gain in this case. (Although I continue to postulate that having a "real" kitchen to cook in is what really makes the difference for me.)

He doesn't think it's a three-star either.

I've been thinking about star ratings lately. One thing I've been thinking about is that I really don't care about them. (I think that'll come up in discussion of Atelier Robuchon.) But I've also been thinking -- this is hardly an original thought -- about how Frank Bruni's generosity toward lower-end restaurants has fucked up the two-star category. What brought this on is a comparison of Little Owl (two stars) with the new Tasting Room (not yet reviewed). Like everyone who's been there, I adore Little Owl. But really, Little Owl is nothing more than an overperforming neighborhood place. Worth a trip? Sure, if you've got nothing better to do, and want to take advantage of relatively gentle prices for food that is, for its class, superlative. But still, nothing more than a very good version of what it is. The same can be said, in a way, for the new Tasting Room. But just as Little Owl succeeds by completely nailing its modest ambitions, the Tasting Room succeeds by completely nailing its slightly-less-modest ambitions. This occurred to me when I had a so-called "ribeye of pork" at the Tasting Room a few nights ago. It may not be as elementally satisfying as Little Owl's justly famous pork chop, but in terms of both quality of raw materials and sophistication of conception, it was better than the pork chop in every way. (Neither the Tasting Room nor any other mid-level New York restaurant I know can beat Little Owl on cooking technique or quality of preparation.) What I'm driving at is that Little Owl has a two-star rating. The new Tasting Room seems to me to be a category better. But the new Tasting Room isn't a three-star restaurant. To me, it's a good two-star restaurant. The problem is, good as Little Owl is, it isn't a two-star. It's a very strong one-star. And the problem with being over-generous with places like Little Owl is that it forces places like the Tasting Room to either be overrated (by giving it three stars cuz it's better than Little Owl and so has to get a star more) or underrated (by sharing the same rating as Little Owl, even though it seems a category better). In other words, giving too many one-star restaurants a "Bruni boost" to two stars screws up the entire system, at least below the four-star level. (And combined with Bruni's propensity to dock three-star candidates to two, it really makes a hash of things.) I know this is not a new thought, but I thought this recent comparison gives it a pretty vivid illustration.

That's the problem with giving general recommendations of places in your neighborhood: you never can be sure how important it is that they're in your neighborhood, you know the owners, etc. I agree that I'd have a hard time advising people to get on a subway for an hour to go to Al Di La. Good thing you were visiting people from the area.

Can you break that down for us? ← Uptown types tend to have very conservative tastes. (So do uptown travelers.) Prokofiev is one of the friendliest-sounding post-WW I composers you can think of. But even his conservatively modern stuff was too way-out for that crowd. Every New York restaurant Paul Liebrandt has done has been located in the oldline district. Daniel Boulud can succeed there. David Burke can succeed there. Paul Liebrandt can't. I dunno. Does London not have an uptown/downtown split the way New York does?

I eat in front of my computer a lot more.

I should have said "had recently" in New York. This is NOT a level above JG. Anyway, full review at some future point.

A Parable For Paul Liebrandt I subscribed to the New York Philharmonic for a long time. But finally, six or seven years ago, I just got fed up and let my subscription lapse. What fed me up was all the heavily perfumed blue-haired ladies who would loudly complain about "modern music" every time the orchestra would play goddamn Prokofiev.

Just got back from a meal at Atelier. A full review will have to await my having time to collect my thoughts. Now, just let me say this. The knives will be out for this place, and it's easy to see why: $20 cocktails?????? Wines by the glass that range from $12 to $20 to God knows what?????? (Let me repeat: $20 cocktails????????? Does it mean I'm a hopeless alchie that I ordered one anyway?) But OTOH, they have a $160 seven-course tasting menu that, given their a la carte prices, is a pretty good deal. And then there's this: This food is in some ways at a level above anything else I've had in New York. Even better -- more creative, more audacious, and technically brilliant to boot -- than EMP. But still, for all that, not so fancy or complicated that it's inappropriate to the surroundings. I have to think more to work this all out for myself. But I'm VERY excited about this meal. Go before September comes and you won't be able to get in any more.

And if that's my only real complaint about this place . . . .

Having read rich's "service" thread, I realize that what I commented on, with respect to EMP, was more the style of service than the quality of service. This is a Danny Meyer restaurant, for God's sake. There's no question of being ignored or left waiting or not having your needs graciously attended to. His places are known for top-notch service, and this place is at least as good as the rest of them. What bothered me (and I don't want to make a big deal about it; it hardly ruined my meal, and I'm certainly going back) was how informal the service was. Everything that needed to be done was done, but it was all very casual (in the Danny Meyer style). I said I was surprised to be complaining about that, because usually it's my preference. But this food was so formal -- it's nothing like what's ever been served in any Danny Meyer restaurant, at least in my experience -- that I thought it warranted a more formal level of service. I think Country gets that kind of service exactly right. It isn't overdone, it doesn't seem fake, but the waitstaff is very deferential to the patrons (in a way that the friendly, chatty servers at EMP just aren't), and seem almost in hushed awe of the kitchen (and "hushed awe" is exactly what the kitchen at EMP -- unlike Country -- deserves). I think what's driving this for me is that I think that eating food this extraordinarily good (or that's extraordinarily good in this particular way) should seem like more of an event. The service at EMP is just too casual for the food they serve.

Open Note To Paul Liebrandt Stop trying to open restaurants in uptown hotels. There's a place for you in New York, but it's not where you've been trying.

Why not stay at the Oriental and save the cab ride? (I know: always a kibbitzer.)

It's funny you should say that, cuz I was just thinking about it. On the one hand, we're always cautioned against rushing to try places when they're new, because even the best places take a while to find their bearings and "a good restaurant will be better after a year than right after opening." On the other hand, in today's tumultuous market, you often find chefs leaving, menu concepts being adjusted, or owners just losing interest, and you can miss out. It's hard to know the right thing to do.

Even *I'm* not pathetic enough as to be around on Labor Day.

That's pretty much what we've all heard.

Saturday at around 7 just may have been that "secret time" iwas talking about when I figured no one would be there.

What did you have to do to get in?

SNOB ALERT Off-topic, but a couple of weeks ago a friend came in from the suburbs to meet me for a movie and then dinner on a Saturday night. I figured we'd go to Fatty Crab, since on summer weekends you can actually get in there. We did -- no wait -- and of course it was great. He, on the other, had passed by Mesa Grill on the way to the movie, and stopped in and was told there were no reservations available till 10 or 10:30 or something. On a Saturday night in late July! On a night when you could, uncharacteristerically, just stroll into the Fatty Crab at 9! I was surprised until I thought about it. Then, of course, I realized that Fatty Crab is a restaurant that people who live here go to, so of course it was empty (well, it was far from empty, we got the last table -- make that, not packed to the gills with a crowd waiting outside) on a summer weekend. But the only people who still go to Mesa are out-of-town TV fans, so of course that's just when it would have been packed.

I blame everything on Food Network.