Sneakeater

I don't want to sound like some kind of groupie -- maybe it'll help if I use too many negatives -- but, you know, I've never been to Room4Dessert and not had a great time. It's just that kind of place.

FWIW, I've had one of Will's brioches (he sent it as a free gift to a sick friend of mine), and it was awesome.

Or Degustation (as I did before that play).

I think I see why FFB is so pissed off here. I hope she doesn't think that "B&T crowd" literally includes everybody who had to go over a bridge or through a tunnel. (I also hope she understands that the whole concept only applies to places that market themselves as "cool" to begin with.)

Or even brave the crowds at the Fatty Crab?

Or 5 Ninth?

May I strongly recommend that you try to get a reservation at Perry Street (I'm pretty sure it's open on Sundays) instead?

To me, the amazing thing about Pastis is that the food isn't at all bad.

It must be very hard to maintain your self-control when some restaurant has held your luggage hostage toward a bribe to the maitre d' for a table.

I understand what you're saying, too, Chefboy. But I don't think anybody here is calling for anything analogous to sitting around for two hours at Jean-Georges and not talking about anything but the food. To people like me, though, what you're saying is more like, sure the food at Jean-Georges is good, but the place is so BORING: why can't it be more like Tao (there's a blast from the past for ya) or Buddakan? I think your club DJ metaphor, in a way, shows what a different place you're coming from than someone like me. Cuz I'd analogize Pegu Club more to going to a jazz club, where the appropriate thing to do is to concentrate on the music. My point being, you keep raising comparisons to party spots, which I don't think is what Pegu Club tries to be. (Obligatory note that I don't mean to be antagonistic in the least.) Didn't you once say you worked as a sommelier? (Sorry if I'm confusing you with someone else.) If someone said, "how many white wines do you need? I need one good one, maybe two, and there's nothing wrong with that," wouldn't your response be pretty contemptuous?

Yeah, sexy enough, certainly.

I think it might be interesting to note, as a sort of side comment here, that the only thing I don't like about the Flatiron Lounge is that, at least during the after-work period, it has this very crowded young-professionals pick-up-type scene going on (or at least, it has every time I've been there during that time period). Now I've got nothing against Young People Meeting Each Other -- the world must be peopled -- but, to me, it detracts from the seriousness of the cocktails. It's just too hard to concentrate on them. It almost seems to me that, if that's the kind of place you're going to be, you don't need to put so much care into your mixology. I'm not sure where I think I'm going with this. Other than perhaps to note how lucky it is that a place like the Pegu Club seems to have found its best audience for the most part. And to wonder how many places like that even a big market can sustain (the Milk & Honey group have all pretty much succeeded in this regard as well). (And also, I guess, to make sure that Julie will never speak to me again.)

(Although, ironically, the decor in Yasuda is very nice -- even sexy -- and, I think, definitely part of the appeal. In that sense, in a way, Pegu might be more like Karuma Zushi, where, when you walk through the door and look at the room, you definitely think, "what's so special about this?")

Now THOSE are fighting words.

Yeah, I think you really nailed it with that.

I think that if you go to Pegu Club looking at it as a bar or club to hang out in, you'll wonder what all the excitement is. ("Can't there be a better view and a sexier room?") Pegu Club is fine for social interactions, of course, but to me it's more like a restaurant whose specialty dishes are cocktails. Meaning you concentrate on the cocktails the way you concentrate at the sushi at Yasuda. To me, asking for a better view or a sexier room at Yasuda would miss the point, just as it does at Pegu Club.* __________________________________________________ * Having said that, of course you can get to a point where decor or atmosphere detracts from the experience, as it does at Cafe Gray and (reportedly) Urena. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

Ya know, they really are addictive. Every time I think of them, I think, I WANT SOME NOW. I mean, I'm sitting here, heavily medicated, with a hole in my belly, and generally feeling miserable -- and reading your post, I STILL think I want some of those NOW.

You know, I feel assinine talking seriously about something so frivolous. But in for a penny, in for a pound. Obviously it's stupid and immature to rate crowds on their "coolness." But "scene" places are fundmentally stupid and immature. So I tend to judge them by their own stupid and immature standards. Having said all that, I think it's idle to deny that, for hangouts (bars and clubs) as opposed to restaurants, the crowd matters. There are kinds of crowds you just enjoy being in the middle of for long stretches of social time, and there are kinds you just don't. What the retarded "scene" places don't get, though, is that you can't really control this in any meaningful way by door policy. The way to attract a certain kind of crowd to your place is to operate your place in a manner that makes it attractive to that kind of crowd. For example, Pravda in Nolita has attracted exactly the kind of unostentatiously hip, mature crowd I like from the day it opened -- without an exclusionary door policy. I could see from my one short visit to Clandestino on the Lower LES that it is doing the same thing (on a smaller scale).

That's funny. That's EXACTLY the way I feel. I remember going to the Canal Room soon after it opened -- I really don't go to places like that, but I was with someone much younger -- and looking around the room and thinking, "This is pathetic. I'm older than everybody else in here by some exponent, and I'm still the coolest person in the room."

This is too, too funny. You've got to tell me what "B&T types" do to muck up your good time at your restaurants! Wear odd clothing, smell funny, stick you with the bill, chew with their mouths open, scratch their nether regions, what? And do you include Brooklyn, Queens and SI in this group? ← It's tough to know what to do now that Brooklyn is Officially Cooler than Manhattan. These days I tend to think of people from Manhattan (mainly the UES) (sorry Megan) as constituting the B&T crowd. As for what they do to muck up my restaurants, I don't really go to the kind of places where I said they might make a difference, so the answer is, nothing. To be sort of serious -- and I suppose this is snobby -- there are types of crowds I don't like at bars and clubs. Go to Wolfgang's one night and you'll see them. What do they do? They bray in my ear. As the night draws on, they bray very bad renditions of old Motown songs in my ear. Don't tell them, but they don't have to stick me with the bill: I'd gladly pay them to shut up.

To be both boring and off-topic, I think you do care about B&T types in these "scene" restaurants because, unlike real restaurants, what you do in these places isn't really dine. To me, they're more like clubs with very extensive menus than like normal restaurants. So you care about the crowd in a way you wouldn't in a normal restaurant.

Third Kittichai.

It looked to me to be fundamentally the same dishes people have been talking about since it opened.

OK, this has got to win the award for Least Enticing Opening Of Restaurant Report: I ate at Upstairs at Bouley last week, during what proved to be an attack of acute appendicitis. Given the aftermath (and my current intense discomfort), I'm obviously uninclined to discuss the food I ate in detail. I'd been wanting -- and, indeed, trying -- to eat at this place for so long, though, that I didn't want to lose the chance to say it's a great value, and a great experience. This is recognizably David Bouley food. You'd know it was his if you were led into the place blindfolded and had the dishes put before you, with no further information. It's not quite as good as the restaurant Bouley at its best -- but it's cheaper and the whole experience is, obviously, much less preposessing. To be be able to get this kind of food, at a casual walk-in place, at reasonable (which is NOT to say cheap or even moderate) prices is what makes New York so great. Of course, that presupposes that you can get a table. In the past, I've been faced with at least a 45-minute wait no matter when I went. This time, hoping to avoid a crowd, we went the day after Memorial Day, at about 7. The place was nearly empty. It was just beginning to fill up when we left about two hours later. I hope I don't have to wait until next Memorial Day to be able to get into Upstairs at Bouley again, preferably at a time when I'm not suffering excruciating abdominal pain.

Somebody's gonna have to mention Keen's, which (aside from being near the hotel), manages to score the trifecta of being "touristy", authentic, and very good.