Sneakeater

I think the menu changes just about daily.

What restaurants do you think are very worthwhile but for some reason don't seem to get much play, either here or in the world? I don't mean places that aren't sufficiently popular -- I mean places that you don't think are sufficiently celebrated. For example, that don't automatically get included in the "recommended" lists of various kinds that periodically get posted here, while other places that are no better do. My prime candidate used to be Picholine, but since its recent spiffing-up it's reassumed a position on everybody's radar. Now, I think my prime candidate would be Bouley Upstairs. Given the quality for the price, it's hard for me to see why there isn't more constant excitement about this place (as there is for, say, The Bar Room at the Modern). Well, part of it is that you can't get in. But still. I think in some ways the price/quality ratio at Bouley Upstairs is so good that it makes it hard for other places to compete.

I don't want to get into a stupid "yes it is" "no it isn't" type exchange, but I'm curious what you mean by this. I think Bouley Upstairs's importance is hard to overstate. To me, it's probably the most underappreciated place in New York (well, one of them, anyway). I think the reason it doesn't have a bigger place in general culinary discourse here is that its no-reservations policy makes it hard to reliably get into. (By which I mean the policy combined with the place's popularity: it's much harder to get into Bouley Upstairs than the nearby Landmarc, for example.)

Chef Ophaso's rather swift departure says it all.

I'd have to add Little Owl.

Don't assume anyplace will "never ever close their doors": http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...DA80994DE404482 (Requires registration and in some cases payment.)

I see, by clicking a link in Grub Street, that it's scheduled to open on February 21. So my just-hatched plan to stop in there after BAM on Saturday is seeming kinda quixotic.

Somebody's going to have been there very soon, I can tell you that.

Whatever you think about Cafe Boulud, it's a restaurant on the Upper East Side that's gotten three stars from the New York Times within the last five or six years.

Yep. But there are a lot of restaurants here with the word "brasserie" in their name that don't have much to do with actual brasseries, let alone Alsace.

But it's virtually a universal truth that the biggest mark-ups are always on the least expensive bottles on the list. So a 600% mark-up on that bottle (if in fact it's true) doesn't mean there are 600% mark-ups across the board. Now maybe you have a problem with at $60 bottle being one of the cheapest bottles on the list, but that's a different question. PS -- Another way of looking at it is, if you were to buy that $60 bottle, then, assuming the other poster was right, all you'd have been "ripped off" was $50 (actually, less, since we'd all agree that some mark-up would be appropriate). In the context of a dinner at Atelier Robuchon, how big a deal is that? It sounds like you're really concerned about your pride, not your pocketbook.

But note that none of that is based on my own idiosyncratic views of the relative importance of one thing or the other. It's not like I'm saying, "I personally don't care about decor, so I'm ignoring that in my calculus."

Absolutely. But it's one thing to say, "I don't understand Thai desserts, but the mains are so good I think it's worth two stars." And another to say, "Here's a restaurant where the desserts just don't live up to the rest of the menu." I think that latter is something you'd have to account for. (If you were inclined to do star-type ratings, that is.) Or, if you're not talking about desserts, but simply about Sripraphai's general lack of amenities, I'd say that my analysis of it is the same as yours: the food is above two-star level, and the lack of amenities brings it down to two.

Whether you care or not about dessert has nothing to do with how you'd objectively rate a restaurant for others.

We all try to do our part.

Which is what it is. Except for its Times rating.

[OT][Oops. This was supposed to be the edit of the last post.]

(I'll note that, even of the Danny Meyer restaurants, EMP features a bar menu. But the bar does not have a separate name, and they also allow you to order the main menu there. So nobody thinks of the bar at EMP as a separate dining destination, as they do the Tavern at Gramercy,* the Bread Bar at Tabla, or The Bar Room at The Modern.) ___________________________________________ * Actually, it's never occurred to me to try to order off the main menu at the Tavern, so I'm not positive that you can't do it there. I don't think I've ever seen it done. I know you can't at the Bread Bar or The Bar Room at The Modern.

I'll even give Varietal some free advice: If you want the wine bar to succeed as a wine bar (as opposed to part of the restaurant), you've got to do what every other restaurant that's carved out a separate identity for its bar area has done: treat it as a whole separate entity. (I'm thinking mainly of the Danny Meyer places, of course.) That means that, inhospitable as it may seem, you've got to stop allowing patrons to order from your main menu at the bar. You've got to FORCE patrons to stick to the bar menu, and thus to concentrate on the wine rather than the food. If you don't do that, people will continue to treat it as a normal restaurant bar (i.e., a place for solo diners and walk-ins to eat the main menu), rather than a wine bar. (I'd even give it a separate name. Have the bar menu say something like "The Wine Bar at Varietal" instead of just "Varietal".) This may lose you some revenue short-term. But it's the only way to build a separate long-term identity for the bar.

Yeah. Maybe if we were all toilet trained at age 6 months like you guys are we'd understand it. [sMILEY]

I read it as being directed to "the New York Times critic" or "any critic who does not regularly re-review".

What algy said was (emphasis added): (Note that I don't think algy lives in New York, or even North America.)

You're right. I was going to go back and edit to say something like this, but now I don't have to.

Ummmm, Cafe Boulud? Ummmm, DavidBurke & Donatella is better than Daniel?

I don't know what you're talking about. There are many valid critiques to be made of Bruni, but that's not one. He's only been a critic for a couple years. He misses enough restaurants as it is; he can hardly be doing constant re-reviews. ← No, it's a critique of the environment in which he operates. A case can be made that reviews without regular re-reviews are meaningless. Also, as FG pointed out, the way the Times operates forces restaurants to go for "wows" out of the box rather than developing, as the Michelin system presupposes. And you could hypothesize that this attitude hurts restaurants in New York. Look at the discussion above of DavidBurke & Donatella. Like robyn, I went there shortly after it opened. Like robyn, I liked it a lot. And like robyn, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it has slipped over time as its proprietors' attention drifted elsewhere. We've come to expect that in New York, that restaurants will get worse as they age. Contrast that with the European/Michelin model, where restaurants are expected to get better.