Sneakeater

Weekday or weekend? Weekday: Jean Georges Weekend: Perry Street These have to be two of the best lunch deals on the planet. Perry Street might actually be better for the girls.

10 is definitely your best bet. And I prefer the new lamb belly, too. (What they need to do is bring back that lamb shoulder . . . .)

Yeah, that last point is inarguable.

Those are flights. That's different. If PDT or D&C offered half-servings of cocktails, at a price of 50% + 50 cents, would you regularly get them?

You didn't answer about the half-servings of cocktails.

Just to make the argument for the glasses: if you really like wine, you may well feel that a taste isn't enough for the wine to fully reveal itself. You might also feel that, if you like the wine, you're not going to want to wait to get the second half of your glass (as you must in a place as crowded as Terroir). I mean, would you regularly order half-servings of cocktails, if that option were presented?

Just for the record, they do serve the full menu at the bar.

At least when it opened, the one in Chinatown was a branch of the one in Flushing.

The counters at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. Not great, but not bad.

Just for steak, I'd be very surprised if Wolfgang's weren't the best. (I've never eaten in Craftsteak.) The downtown Wolfgang's steak is indistinguishable from the uptown one's.

Believe it or not, people get rapturous about their hot dogs.

Don't forget Wolfgang's.

I assume Nathan is talking about the leftover old school French places in the West 40s and low 50s. Forty, fifty, and more years ago, that area was a sort of French ghetto (reportedly, these places opened to serve French sailors arriving at the piers). The comparitively few remaining ones are survivors. They're no longer very good (if they ever were), and they're dropping like flies. They're no more competition for Benoit than they were competition for Brasserie LCB. There are also places like the one at 53rd (I think it is) and 7th. Sort of cookie cutter bistro/brasseries for the tourist trade with no culinary ambitions at all. They're not even part of the dining scene, as far as I'm concerned. I guess obligatory mention ought to be made of the bistro in the Parker Meridien. It was originally affiliated with Raoul's, but no longer is. I think the point to make about it is that people were genuinely rather excited to have a place like that in Midtown when it first opened -- although it has since deteriorated into complete nondescriptness.

Just for the record, DiFara isn't in or even particularly near Bensonhurst.

Look at the thread title. (That's the problem when people put important information in the thread title and don't repeat it in the body. People tend to skip it.)

Nathan, I don't know how to put this, but I seriously doubt, in opening a restaurant, that anybody's primary question is, "is Nathan (or Sneakeater for that matter) going to travel to this?"

The waits at Shake Shack and the Burger Joint are NOT comparable. At mealtime, the wait at the Burger Joint rarely exceeds 10 minutes. At Shake Shack, it's rarely LESS than 45 minutes.

FWIW: http://eater.com/archives/2008/04/koboom_exceptio.php

Yeah, but he introduced his rating system by doing a list of the "Top 101" restaurants in New York where he retroactively gave them stars.

No, Per Se's New York Magazine rating -- given to it by the same critic who gave Ko four stars out of five -- is four out of five.

If classic French has to be presented ironically, we're all in a lot of trouble.

I thought it was confusing what Fabricant was talking about, since it then got back to Balthazar as a prime example of the genre it was discussing.

That said, it's remarkable how off everyone's radar Adour seems to be.

Moreover, it wasn't posted, as usual, on Monday along with its appearance in print. I can't recall another instance when a Platt review was rushed onto the website before its print edition. Unless his reviews are now regularly going to appear on the New York Mag website the Wednesday before they're printed, why was this necessary?

But really Amorina can't touch Franny's. And the non-pizza items at Franny's are in like a different universe than the few such items at Amorina.