
Sneakeater
participating member-
Posts
4,452 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Everything posted by Sneakeater
-
The pleasure is all mine.
-
Just to be obnoxious, I have to say that Bar Room is configured as a bar pretty much to the same extent Ssam Bar is.
-
See, that's the problem here, rich: you can't get your mind out of the gutter. [sMILEY]
-
I have just realized that these two Jessicas aren't the same person.
-
Re: Degustation I think that the reasons that FG found Desgustation "older" and "stuffier" than the other restaurants nominated for The Paradigm are that Degustation (a) is So Fucking Small and (b) received a lot of traditional-style promotion and press attention. Sixteen seats. That's much smaller than Tia Pol. Much smaller than either Momofuku. Much smaller than most places I can think of. Sure, they could have decided not to take reservations -- but then it would have been a zoo. (Think of how zoo-ey Tia Pol is, and then multiply it by two.) So Degustation is, as I said in my very first post in this thread, not a walk-in place (apparently unless you're Mayur and in with management). As for "older" and "stuffier", I think that's a function of the crowd its publicity and reviews have attracted. (Note that Degustation got a lead Times review as soon as it opened, whereas Ssam Bar started in "$25 and Under" and migrated to a lead review pretty much on the basis of street buzz.) So possibly because Degustation has been presented to them through the channels they are used to, the crowd at Degustation (to the extent you can call 16 people sitting at a counter a crowd) tends to be more Uptown, on the whole, than the crowd at Ssam Bar, Room 4 Dessert, or even Bouley Upstairs. (I would guess that Bouley Upstairs's decision not to take reservations -- remember, it's a much bigger place than Degustation -- is what keeps the older Uptowners away, as robyn's posts have suggested.) Interestingly, the first time I went to Degustation, before the reviews started coming, the crowd was very young and local. (Certainly, you can't call Chef Genovart "old." He looks like he's about 12.) All of which raises the question of how much these factors -- most of which relate strictly to reception and not intentions -- can take a place out of The Paradigm. I'm not saying they can't. I'm just raising the question.
-
Yeah, I mean, this is all worthless speculation, but Robert's wasn't really a "normal" restaurant opening. It wasn't the kind of place that cried out for a review. It took a while for word to get around, and one could imagine it took awhile for Bruni to get around to acting on it. For whatever reason, Robert's is red hot now. Just a couple of weeks ago, the sister of a Famous New York Chef raved to some friends of mine about a tour Lang had given her of his meat lockers.
-
I'm gonna get in there on my own or I'm not gonna get in there at all. (Hey. Maybe Luckylies could reintroduce me to her pastry-chef friend.)
-
Hooters. Right. It was New Media: http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/200...ngs-and-things/
-
Didn't Bruni already do a piece on Hooters? How did they handle that? (I honestly don't remember.)
-
Actually I believe a decade or so ago Mark Strausman was the chef at Stringfellow's. Also, not exactly a strip club but related, David Burke is involved with Hawaiian Tropic Zone. ← You're right about Straussman. I'd completely forgotten about that episode (notable in many ways I'm not going to discuss now). I was wondering when someone was going to bring up Hawaiian Tropic Zone (an enterprise that -- WARNING: irrelevant statement of personal preferences coming -- I personally find more offensive [in theory -- not that I've been to either of them] than Robert's).
-
First of all, theme restaurants are hardly a new and unknown idea. And it's not news that some of them have had better food than others of them. Second, in this case, I think it's pretty clear that it's the food that's the "gimmick", not the sex. There have been any number of strip clubs in New York. But there's never been one with a credentialed chef serving what appears to be excellent food. To put it another way, Robert's was hardly conceived of a stand-alone restaurant. It's another profit center at this club.
-
The other thing to say about the "wine program" at the Ssam Bar is to repeat a story I told in the Ssam Bar thread. I was there a couple of weeks ago, right after they started serving wines. I made the rather obvious choice of a riesling to go with the apple/bacon/pork salad. My main dish was to be a new, heavily cinnamon-flavored, braised beef and ox tongue hot pot that had just been added to the menu. When the bar guy saw me drinking the riesling with the salad, he came up to me excitedly. "You're not going to believe how good that wine is going to be with the stew!" he exclaimed. "That stew is a new dish Tien just came up with. We had a staff tasting, along with all the wines, a couple of nights ago, and we were surprised to see that the riesling was GREAT with it! None of us could believe it! Who'd have expected it?" That kind of improvisatory, engaged excitement just doesn't happen at "normal" restaurants. Also, it turned out that he was absolutely right.
-
If you're going to do a story about the rather notable and interesting fact that there's a good restaurant with a credentialed chef inside a strip club, it would be ludicrous to downplay the fact that, well, it's inside a strip club. I think that if the Times ran the piece the way rich seems to want, it would have seemed laughably prissy and out of touch. They had the choice to be intentionally funny or unintentionally funny. They chose the former.
-
I say this as a big D&C supporter: Somebody should advise them that if they permit this to be framed as whether they are a "bar" or a "restaurant", they are in big danger of losing. (Again, I don't know what the legal definitions are in this context. But the arguments that Nathan and donbert have made strike me as almost cynically disingenous.)
-
To be clearer, what I should have said was: They didn't even HAVE a wine program until a couple of weeks ago. They had a few sparklers as aperitifs (including that very interesting sparkling shiraz), and then a decent selection of sakes and a very good selection of beers to go with the food. Wine isn't really part of the concept here.
-
1. The Ssam Bar night-food program was announced almost from the start. It wasn't an "accident"; it was part of the concept. The only "accident" was that they felt compelled to turn it into a dinner program in addition to a late-night program. Frankly, I thought it was more "New Paradigm" when it was limited to late-night. 2. Your complaint that the "wine program sucks" at Ssam Bar seems to me more to prove that Ssam Bar's a new thing than to prove anything else. There have long been arguments here about whether a good wine program is or isn't necessary for multi-star dining. These restaurants are finally breaking that mold once and for all.
-
As for the rest of your questions, one might ask, when was the last time the New York Times reviewed a restaurant located in a strip club?
-
It makes no difference whatsoever. But I think it's unnatural not to be interested in other people's sex lives.
-
I was eating at Franny's last night, and as I was having a very good cauliflower dish, I was thinking that if you kind of scrunched up your eyes, squinted hard, and looked through them that way, you might convince yourself that Franny's fits in here. But really no. It's rustic. It's a pizza place, for God's sake. I don't think there's a place in Brooklyn, at least that I know, that fits the Paradigm.
-
Now I'm REALLY sick I missed you guys.
-
We're all seriously waiting to hear what you think of Pegu and Degustation.
-
A Voce is too expensive. FG says that The Bar Room at The Modern has been reported to have had problems since its review. Don't know. Momofuku Ssam is the current knee-jerk response if you don't mind waiting. (Actually, if you're going to be eight people you can order the Bo Sssam [huge roast pork butt] for $180 total. Then you could get a reservation. You'll want some more dishes, but you can still bring it in for $50 a person [not including drinks], I think.)
-
That's true. He just hadn't had the opportunity to comment on his affinity for the ouvre of Diana Ross before. (I have to say that, as much as I don't respect him as a critic, I'm gonna love the guy forever just for that one moment in this review.)
-
There was some list in (I think) New York Magazine years ago -- before Bruni was the restaurant critic -- of powerful out gays and lesbians in New York. There was a sublist of people at the Times, and then political reporter Bruni was on it. This was years ago. (I want to emphasize that this wasn't a list outting people. It was a list of people who were already out. I think it was tied to Gay Pride Week or something.)
-
Wasn't she MARRIED to a bassist?