Sneakeater

Just make sure it's chicken. If you catch my drift.

I was afraid of that. Sorry to hear it. Thanks.

This is more a question than a suggestion. A long time ago -- maybe 10 years even -- I had what I remember as one of my favorite dinners in this country at Norman's. Is it still good? (Was it ever? Was I just misguided?)

I still have a rubber Big Boy doll. No, it's not for sale. (Interesting thread. I guess we like chains that existed when we were children, and fulminate self-righteously against ones that exist today.)

Rising prices and diminishing quantity. THAT'S a relief!

I remember the first full-bore degustation menu I ever had. It was at (pre-3-star) Guy Savoy in Paris. When we got to the fourth or fifth dessert course, I was ready to dive under the table to hide from the waiters.

But just to be clear, what the "mainstream" ISN'T, IMO, is, say, anything in Jackson Heights or Flushing. Or even, say, my beloved Tulcinga del Valle on 10th Ave. (I hope it's clear that "mainstream" isn't being used in any kind of qualitative sense here.)

I guess I think of the "mainstream" as mainly being occupied by poor-value mid-to-upper-mid-price places.

Of course, your problem is that you're staying in neighborhoods where things tend to be kind of overpriced. The night you're at the Westin, you might consider Tintol. (If you search the name, you'll find a thread on it.) When you're staying at the Waldorf, maybe Katsuhama (which is Japanese, but focusses on fried pork) (it's great). (If you search for its name, you'll find more info on that place, too.)

Shit, I go to Chocolate & Chili in Park Slope and get all disappointed that they don't have any grasshoppers.

OTOH, Chowhound does pretty well by low-end and outerborough places, but not as well with what you might call mainstream restaurants. Maybe it's difficult for a single board to do both.

Why WOULDN'T they be happy with one star?

There may be a lot that's wrong and even offensive about this place, but our confusion about what they changed the name of the old place to can hardly be blamed on them.

Here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=97439 I have to say, though, that despite the "breaking in new bartenders" problem (which one assumes will not last forever), I still prefer Pegu to Death & Co. The drinks at Death & Co. are killer, of course, but it's just too much of a kid bar for me. I feel much more comfortable at Pegu.

Nobody writes about Death & Company here. They're too busy writing about E.U., a restaurant a few blocks away.

Let me say one other thing about 5 Ninth and why I think it counts as "underappreciated." It is obvious that 5 Ninth is a very commercially successful restaurant. But I don't think the reasons for its success have anything to do with the criteria that people who frequent sites like this impose. I'm not suggesting that any restaurant that opens in the Meatpacking District is bound to succeed: Sascha Lyon can tell you how wrong that is. But they don't succeed or fail primarily on the basis of the quality of their food. For that reason, I think the quality of the food at 5 Ninth can tend to get lost among people like us (whatever "people like us" might mean). I'm sure that most of us actively avoid that neighborhood. So I think it's useful to be reminded that this very good restaurant -- to return to my idee fixe, I personally enjoy it as much as Hearth, for my own undoubtedly idiosyncratic reasons -- exists there.

PS -- FWIW, I see what you all mean about the difference between 5 Ninth and Esca. All I'll say in my defense is that, from the discussion on this board, you'd think that all Zak Pelaccio is good for is a very tasty mid-priced white-boy riff on Malaysian food. Which, while not a big deal, is just a skewed view of what's going on in New York.

It took me a long time to work up the courage to go to Bouley Upstairs for that same reason. But what I finally found was that (not surprisingly) you can get two seats pretty reliably if you go early or late, and you're apt to be able to luck into a solo seat at the sushi bar (full menu served) just about any time. And, of course, it's not like there aren't plenty of other options in the immediate area. (Once a friend and I whiled away our time on the wait list at Blaue Gans by walking over to Upstairs and then Landmarc to check on the lengths of their wait lists. By the time we found out the wait was too long at each of those places, too, Blaue Gans was ready to seat us.)

See Post #13 above. It isn't a big deal, obviously. But to the extent that this site hopes to present a balanced account of the real-life NYC dining scene (and not just the fairly random preferences of a bunch of posters), it's useful to try to think of the "other" places. I mean, if oakapple tries Esca and likes it, that's useful in and of itself, right? In other words, it isn't to benefit the restaurants (who cares about that?). It's to benefit US.

This will no doubt strike many of you as absurdly ignorant and undiscriminating, but I think Tim Love fell victim to the same syndrome as Alain Ducasse and Gordon Ramsay.

5 Ninth

It's a personality test. It means your plate is either half empty or half full.

In re Danube, I think there's no way around the fact that the place just deteriorated after Mario Lohniger left a couple of years ago. It's too bad. It was one of my real favorites.

I really wasn't intending to foist that bottle of sake on you guys. I really intended just to split it with my date and pay for it myself. Honest.

I was impressed almost to the point of being astonished. They don't need to be that good.