Sneakeater

This is very strange. I just made a reservation there for Sunday night, and nobody told me it would be at a new address. I wonder where I'll be eating?

The Meatpacking District practically IS an upscale mall.

But even the highest motives you posit seem low to me. Remember, people aren't saying "I hope this restaurant I haven't yet eaten in turns out to be good." They're saying "I hope this restaurant I haven't yet eaten in gets lots of stars (i.e., is recognized by an influential critic as good)," presumably so lots of consumers will then be induced to pay money to go to it. In other words, they're saying, "I hope this restaurant is foisted on the paying populace as good -- whether it's actually good or not (because I have no way of knowing)." Still seems low to me.

Not having been yet, I get the feeling we're seeing a chef fall victim to hype (or, rather, a misunderstanding of hype) he probably had no role in generating.

I searched this board, but since this was a New York thread in which the place was mentioned, I limited my search to the New York board. (If you do a general board search for the word "venue", you get an awful lot of irrelevent uses of the common word "venue" -- as in fact you do on the New York board, since as I now know the restaurant is in New Jersey. There was nothing in the reference above to indicate that, though.) Thanks for the link.

Ah-HAH! It's in Hoboken!

Please. Tell me. ← Yeah Shanghai Deluxe, New Green Bo, Joe's, the newish Joe's offshoot, Goodie's (I only know the places in Manhattan; there are lots of other and probably better ones in Queens) all serve this great pork belly in brown sauce dish. To me, it's the world's greatest pork belly preparation (to the extent my limited experience can support such a ridiculously broad assertion).

You can't leave out all the usual Shanghainese suspects.

Is there a way to ask what and where Venue is without sounding COMPELETELY clueless?

Tan319 hasn't reviewed Gilt, so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) he hasn't eaten there. I understand wanting your own opinion confirmed, but I thought that didn't come into play in this case.

Why would you "hope" for 3 stars for a restaurant unless you own it? Why would you care?

You should read Proust. It's really great.

Because of course the problem is that not only are we not clairvoyant, but neither are the people who run the various cocktail lounges in this world. How are they to know whether a parent seeking admission for his underage child is contientious Christopher or one of the Slopers who seem to feel it's a badge of enlightened parenting to let their children run wild in public?

If that didn't go without saying, then I want to say it, too.

This isn't really "less than great comfort." It's more like "active discomfort" -- or at least, "active unpleasantness." What IS it about the atmosphere at this place that's such a turn-off? Size? Room design? Noise level? The fact that it's in a mall? Or, is it not so much that it's a turn-off as that the very high prices make you expect much more in the way of comfort and pleasantness? (You see, my answer is that the food just isn't good enough to overcome everything else. But I'm not gonna contradict Fat Guy on a question like that.)

"Son" is actually a style of Cuban music, FWIW.

I see this as more a thin-edge-of-the-wedge problem. The problem I joked about above with eating out in Park Slope is that it's a very children-centric neighborhood. And, for reasons it's fun to speculate about (but we'll leave that for another day), today's parents -- in sharp contrast to my parents' generation -- feel that it's somehow necessary to take their children along when they go out to eat, even on weekends. This leads to an atmosphere where you're sitting in, say, Blue Ribbon, and children are running all around the room, yelling, bumping into chairs and tables, etc. And who can blame them? As I recall from the times I was taken out to eat at their age (NEVER, I should point out, after 5 or 6 p.m., and NEVER to anyplace with any pretentions toward being good), it's boring to be a kid in a restaurant. And, for reasons it's fun to speculate about (be we'll leave that for another day), today's parents -- in sharp contrast to my parents' generation -- seem to feel there's no reason to try to reign their children in. So, you start by saying it's OK to take babies to cocktail lounges, the next thing you know it'll be toddlers, and then children. And then there'll be practically NOWHERE in this world reserved just for adults.

This is why eating out in Park Slope is often such a trial.

I think part of the problem I have with Cafe Grey is that it presents itself as a sort of "popular" place: it's huge, it's casual, it's not in any way "nice". The kind of place you'd stop into after a concert, as I did Saturday night. And then the bill comes, and it's the same as you'd pay for a big-deal center-of-attention meal out. There just seems to be a disjunction here.

Thinking it over, I think Cafe Gray is sort of an inflated version of the type of mid-level restaurant that people often complain isn't worth the money it costs. I say it's inflated because the food is much better than at the usual restaurant this charge is directed at (this is hardly just a "mid-level" restaurant) -- but the prices are correspondingly much higher.

So when you have Chinese food in the US, are you able to completely block out your awareness that the Chinese food you had in China was (presumably) generally a lot better? ← No. But instead of trying to compare all the Chinese food I eat in the U.S. to what I ate in China, I appreciate the Chinese food here for what it is. ← And you don't think your opinion of American Chinese food is better-informed, and worthy of more respect, than the opinion of someone like me who's never eaten Chinese food in China?

I'll also note that you appear to be someone inside the food industry. I think industry people's interests may be different from consumers'. Maybe what I think I need is different from what's in your interest for me to get. (I'm not accusing you of being underhanded or anything; I just mean it's natural for people in a position to be judged to have different feelings about the judging process than those who make use of the judgments.) Moreover, I'm not really sure what you mean by "a Robert Parker". Certainly, one can support one's opinions analytically without assuming the power of a tyrant. I just don't see what use a sort of cozy "I like it cuz it makes me feel good" is supposed to be to anyone.

Strong statement - and at the end of the day, your statements about a restaurant are - your statements. However esoterically or simplistically designed, people still form their own opinions. They may agree with you more or less, but unless your discourse is targeted at people who have identical tastes to you, they end up being as useful as any other method. The last thing the food industry needs is people like Robert Parker - ← But people can't tell if they have identical tastes to yours if all you say is, "I like this; I didn't like that." They need a basis for evaluating your opinion. That basis has to be your analysis, which they can accept or reject. Also, at least to me, it's simply not interesting to read someone else's unsupported and unanalytic opinions about things. As Pan said, if all someone has to say about an artwork is "I like it" or "I don't like it", I don't want to spend my time reading it.

By an almost eerie coincidence, I also returned to Cafe Gray last night for the first time since my first visit there in November 2004. In that first visit, I really got annoyed by this place. I thought it emblemized everything I've come to dislike about the Borough of Manhattan. The food was way too expensive for what it was -- you could get the same kind of food, almost if not quite as good, in Brooklyn, for something like two thirds the price. The restaurant was crowded and noisy beyond coping: even though we had a 10:00 p.m. reservation, we still had to wait 45 minutes to be seated. Well, at least things have calmed down in that last respect. I was alone last night, and entered at about 10 p.m. without a reservation and found ample space at the bar. While I'm somewhat more mellow about Cafe Gray than I was in 2004, I still question the value, though. The food is good, but I still don't think my meal was worth the more than $110 it cost. (OK, they didn't force me to have two glasses of wine on top of a cocktail. But I had a three-course meal, so how much wine am I to be expected to have? And while the wine-by-the-glass prices didn't reach the reputed heights of Gilt, the substantial amount they added to my dinner tab is still something to consider.) The food is vaguely mittel-European-inflected "continental"-American cuisine. In other words, the current version of what I call "Restaurant Food" -- the type of food you find in a lot of restaurants but rarely see on anyone's home table, a vaguely inflected American-based cuisine whose inflection (French -- 20 years ago; Italian -- 10 years ago; Asian or Austrian -- today) changes with the fashions of the times. It's good to very good. But I still insist it isn't that much better than what's served at a lot of other places for less. This isn't -- and doesn't aim to be -- one of the exalted number of the top restaurants in New York. Yet, it charges almost as much. (Look at the entree prices in Oakapple's review.) To be specific about my meal, I started with a spinach-and-ox tail lasagne. Anything with a lot of ox tail in it is bound to be good, and this was. I then had a spice-encrused venison in a juniper-huckleberry emulsion with red cabbage. This sounded like it could be some kind of ur-venison dish. But it slightly disappointed. It was only very good. Partly, the spice crust overbore the juniper-huckleberry flavors more than was desirable. Maybe the problem is that it's only been a week since I had Devi's fantastic tandoori venison chop -- a venison preparation for the ages. This dish did not merit the $36 (if I recall correctly) it cost. Dessert was the unequivocal triumph of the night. Baked Alaska with mandarin oranges in chocolate sauce. The orange-chocolate combination never fails to please greatly, and the audacity of serving a baked Alaska is very winning. There was nothing wrong with this meal. And I guess if you live around the Time Warner Center you probably can better afford it than I can. But I just find the whole place inflated. (Oh, I have to second Oakapple about the bread. It was excellent!)

If you're not more analytic than that, then I think you have no reason to be writing about it for others -- or even recommending to others. "Would I go back?" is of no interest whatsoever to anyone other than myself, unless they know why I think that (and can tell that they share my tastes). And I wouldn't automatically recommend every restaurant I'd go back to to every friend I have, but only the ones I think each friend would like.- Not being analytic is fine as long as you're only making decisions for yourself. But once you enter into discourse on a subject, you're either somewhat analytic or completely useless.