Sneakeater

The unagi fritter really pissed of the person sitting next to me at the bar last time I was there -- no discernable unagi -- and, since she gave me a third of her serving, it pissed me off, too. Although not as much as if I had paid for it.

You have never gone to pdt with H. du Bois.

I want one of each. Well, maybe not one.

That's it. I'm feeling officially slighted as a Momofuku regular until I get to eat in David Chang's living room.

H. is probably getting the shakes right about now.

As I've said elsewhere, Merkato 55 is this strange example of a restaurant that just screams out "it's gonna suck" but somehow doesn't. (Whether it stays good is anybody's guess -- as we all know, Spice Market declined pretty precipitously pretty quickly.) But I'll tell you what. There are plenty of places I decline to try, because I don't think they look very good. But it'd be NUTS for me to criticize them without having tried them. Save your money, sure. But it's just ridiculous to put down places that you haven't been to in print in a public forum. What kind of credibility does that have?

Have YOU eaten there, Daniel?

I went back.

Actually, speaking of printing utterly false statements, Josh Ozersky has nothing to do with Eater.

The ironic thing is, you're probably gonna love it. (And if you care, I had the EXACT same experience vis-a-vis preparing vegetarian dishes at Bistro du Vent. I mean, you could transpose the dialogue: the words were just about the same.)

DB Bistro Moderne is a modern bistro, one of those "baby bistros" that are calculated to depart from bistro tradition and reflect a chef's culinary vision. Benoit isn't like that at all. It's just a traditional bistro. Whole different concept. And they're pretty clear about it.

Which leads me to a conversation I had recently late night at the bar of a restaurant whose executive chef -- I won't name names, let's call him, umm, M -- has restaurants uptown and downtown. I was in the uptown one. I was chatting with one of the kitchen staff, who had come out to the bar for a late-night breather. I noted that I thought my food was excellent, even though M wasn't in the kitchen. "Thank god," he replied. "He was here last night, and got everybody's rhythms off. It's great when he stays away and we can just cook."

Why would you even THINK of ADNY as a comparison? Could Benoit be MORE different? I think comments on this and other boards show that a lot of people are going to this place with inappropriate expectations. The poster above who tried to make a vegetarian substitution, for example. I'm sure they were unduly rude about it, but the point is, it's a bistro. I don't think they're planning on doing a lot of individualized cooking here. To expect that they'd whip up a dish available at other kinds of Ducasse restaurants seems kind of unfair. Why would you expect their kitchen to even be familiar with the food at other Ducasse restaurants? Rude as the manager was, I think there's a reason she kept repeating, "it's a bistro." (I should add that, as I understand it, the word "bistro" is thought to derive from a Russian word meaning "quick." A lot of stuff is cooked in advance.)

I don't want to sound like an apologist, but Merkato 55 has a chef de cuisine and it isn't Marcus Samuelsson (it's Andrea Berquist). Expecting Samuelsson to be in the kitchen there is sort of like expecting Daniel Boulud to be in the kitchen at Cafe Boulud.

That Berquist gal, actually.

Not likely. I used the bathroom at Benoit, and it worked great.

We ALL wonder that.

But what some are missing is that Benoit, at its current prices, is an incredible bargain irrespective of the BYO policy. Even if you had to pay for wine, it would still be cheaper than just about any restaurant of comparable quality. Astoundingly, it's almost in the Mia Dona price category, for God's sake!

The bartender reacharound at Babbo is indeed a reacharound. I used to do it, too, until I concluded it constituted cutting ahead of the people who'd registered with the maitre d'. Also, as Nathan notes, it doesn't seem to work anymore.

I think Il Materello is one of the best Italian restaurants I've ever been to outside of Italy, FWIW.

I only noticed the chicken for two. What else is there that you can't eat alone? I found it pretty easy to construct a delicious solo meal, and saw several more on the menu.

Yes, Cory is the FOH poster boy for the new paradigm. I do not, however, hold all other FOH managers up to the Cory standard. That would be like holding all carpenters up to the Jesus standard. But I do think there are other good Gen-X (and younger) FOH people out there who can represent. Like the dude at Noodle Bar now. The thing is, there's just nobody at Ssam Bar even playing that role as far as I can tell. ← I'm not arguing with you, FG. Even as an apparent VIP regular, I've noticed the downturn in service you refer to. I think the point I was trying to make is that Ssam Bar was what it was owing to a fairly improbable combination of circumstances. We all talk about the genius guys in the kitchen, but somehow they happened to get a genius guy out front as well. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the line David Chang feeds the press, but I'm willing to believe that luck played a big part in all the right things becoming alligned at the right time for this place. Unfortunately, it will now take skill to maintain it.

See, Cory is -- to use the usual hyperbole we Momo fans like to employ -- the great FOH guy of this generation. I'm serious about that. In terms of this "new" style of assertedly casual fine dining, he makes sure you get a level of attention analogous to (you can't really say "similar" to) what you'd expect in traditional fine dining establishments. It's too bad he's moved upstairs. But that's the consequence of being that good.

Benoit is definitely a level above Balthazar.

I guess this is the wrong thread to say this, but I recently went to Noodle Bar for the first time in a while and was completely knocked out. I think FG's comparisons of both the different natures of the food at Noodle Bar and Ssam Bar and, perhaps (I hate to say this but maybe it's true) their current respective quality are spot on.