taion

Different mushroom on ours but DAMN is this an awesome dish. Think of it as the best chicken mcnugget ever created. ← Thirded; it's a pretty damn awesome dish. I believe it's porcini mushrooms now.

There are a number of posters in this thread who disagree with you regarding the quality of the food at Tailor. For what it's worth (not all that much), I actually prefer the food at Tailor to that at wd~50. It seems a bit inappropriate to dismiss a restaurant as "bad" offhand when your view is against the consensus, though.

The five course tasting at 50 comes in pretty middle of the road for me – 4 app-sized savory courses plus a dessert, so roughly on par quantity-wise with a typical 3-course meal, I think. The 10-course is 75 and I've found it to be quite a bit of food – not unmanageable, but I wouldn't have minded it if some of the courses were smaller.

Went there earlier for dinner. Among other things, the octopus and avocado salad is really nice – the octopus expressed its flavor very cleanly, the richness of the avocado provided a great counterpoint, and the other elements (that I mostly forget) brought everything into focus.

Damn. There goes my plan to take advantage of their proximity to my apartment.

Oh, I don't either. But the vast majority of high-end places are offering them in some form, and it strikes me as notable that Cru is not.One change they did make, is to return to the former à la carte format; they opened that way, but were prix fixe for a while. It's not a cheap ALC, though, with most entrées $30 or higher. A tasting menu is still listed, at $135. ← Well, sort of. It's literally not on the menu any more. And it's $125 instead of $135 now. It really seems more that they forgot to update the website, and I wouldn't have known about it had I not clicked on the oddly titled "seasonal" section on the site. One of the servers mentioned that they generally only told diners who "looked like they might appreciate it" about the tasting menu, and cited the expense of keeping the appropriate seasonal ingredients in stock as a reason (in addition to wanting to keep the apparent price point lower) for not actually including the tasting on the menu.

Interestingly enough, one of the servers mentioned that the reason they no longer listed the $125 tasting was to give the impression of a lower price level at the restaurant. I don't know if that's really either here or there, though, and it's hard to fault a restaurant for moderately cutting their price point and level of ambition right around now.

Ouch, is it? Given that they weren't very busy even on a Saturday night, I guess it's all too plausible.

No posts since 2007? Wow. They're substantially less busy now (no surprise, I guess) – I managed to walk in and get a table in the dining room just now (on a Saturday) with no real trouble. The tasting menu isn't actually on the menu any more, which is a real pity – I wasn't quite sure what to expect (it was described only in the broadest terms), but it was quite a treat, especially the sweetbread ravioli. I probably should have realized before ordering the wine pairing that it would have ended up being entirely too much wine for me to drink comfortably, but, still, easily the best meal I've had in a month or two.

The blurb about methodology doesn't mention anything about a cell phone sample; if no such sample was taken, then the results are likely to be unreliable.

Alternatively, maybe Bruni's going to try his damndest to redefine what three stars means instead.

Why isn't L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon viewed as a candidate for a potential upgrade? I've never been there, but by reputation, the food seems to be at the four-star level, and while it is imported, by my understanding it remains substantially more informal than the typical four-star restaurant.

Had a few cocktails with dinner there last night – the drinks program is impressive (pretty much as you'd expect). The rocks ice is a thing of astonishing beauty; the NYMag photo doesn't do it justice. The stuff about not being able to go off-menu in the NYMag piece is also wrong; "dealer's choice" with your choice of spirit is explicitly presented as an option. There is in fact only one gin – currently an Old Tom – but the selection of brown spirits is impressive. I'm probably not as much of a Ssäm Bar devotee as many other eGulleters, but this will definitely make me go there substantially more often.

Too busy smacking me down in the vodka thread? Does the ice there make a difference? I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to head all the way to LIC for Dutch Kills when M&H is more accessible. Sounds like it's the same style of drinks, more or less?

Just went by M&H – they're still using "pan ice" there, so I'd guess that Little Branch and White Star are as well, which I think leaves Dutch Kills as the bar using the best ice for actually making the drinks, if they do use clear commercial block ice.

D'oh, just checked my receipts, too – you're right, PDT doesn't charge tax either. I must have been confused (or drunk) or something. I guess part of the reason that M&H never struck me as being particularly expensive is that in large part for me, I often go there on nights where I might otherwise have gone clubbing, so my point of price comparison is more bottle service and drinks at the bar at clubs, rather than those at other serious cocktail bars. I didn't realize the premium was quite so extreme – ah well, it's a sunk cost now!

D'oh. You are, of course, right – I'm just being dense. Although I wonder, then, if the proximity of White Star is of any benefit here.

Let me try to state my thesis coherently. My assertion is that the tradeoff between the selection of drinks available at M&H relative to its being quiet and easier to get a spot at is in some sense just poor luck: Another M&H-style bar that is quiet but still does serious cocktails is probably not viable in New York right now. The limited selection at M&H is partially due to the size of the bar area; there just isn't room for them to put more bottles on the back bar or accessible to the bartender. The size of the bar area at M&H is an accident of design – it would have been possible to accommodate a larger bar area in place of an existing table, with the seats at the bar replacing the lost seats at the table. Were the bar set up that way, it would have been possible for it to have had a wider selection of booze. Really what I'm thinking is that it's not necessarily the case that a bar like M&H has to have a smaller selection of spirits, it's just that M&H was set up in a way that it could not have a larger such collection, and another bar in that style would not be viable.

Also the Asian girl with the tattoos.

My understanding of the M&H service model is that there's usually one bartender working at the bar, one bartender taking orders and serving drinks, one host/hostess handling the reservations and checks and maybe doing some of the serving, and on busy nights a separate dedicated barback. For a good chunk of the week, it's Sam and Mickey switching between mixing the drinks and serving them, at least as far as I can see... and certainly I'd be happy with either of them making my drinks. Given how ordering there works, you'd essentially need a good bartender taking the orders...

What makes you think Milk & Honey is so profitable? Depth of inventory and breadth of inventory are two different things. Even if you don't go through all that much rye, you can still have 4 different brands. You just don't keep a case of each brand. M&H has a relatively narrow selection of brands because they just don't have all that much space to accommodate that many brands. So they pick the two gins that they like, and that's it -- they decide they can have dry white vermouth, but not Lillet. These are the compromises you have to make when working in a tiny space (which are compounded by not doing all that much volume). This is why only the larger places such as Pegu Club are able to have 14 different kinds of gin. ← "Profitably" was a poor choice of words there, my bad. I should have said "can't stay in business" rather than "can't be done profitably". It really doesn't seem to me that the size of M&H's bar area is purely due to the size of the space; M&H has 4 seats at the bar vs 24 seats at tables (more if some are used as 5-tops). I'm pretty sure this is the lowest ratio of any of the serious cocktail bars out there, and to me is actually a strike against them. And in part this contributes to their low volumes, since only one bartender can work at a time; this is especially a waste, since the person serving the drinks has always been, as far as I could tell, another bartender.

Calling it now: * Cranky eGulleters want vodka-drinking kids to stay away from their favorite serious cocktail bars. [eG]

But there are plenty of places with no scene that can serve up a perfectly fine Manhattan; it's just that the newest drinks, the most obsessive ice-heads, and that sort of stuff is associated with the new, "sceney" cocktail movement, no? These things are part and parcel of the move toward a real cocktail "scene" – it's not that you can't get what you used to be able to get, but getting the new things are more difficult... but isn't that always how it is with the "new"?But at this point we are way off-topic from the question of whether vodka will come back. Space really is a constraint at M&H – hence the sad little dinky half-bottles of Cointreau, Chartreuse, &c. Maybe doubling the bar area wouldn't double the available amount of stuff, just due to volumes, but I'd think that were M&H designed differently, it might be serving up substantially more house infused things.

It was 12 – the spring menu posted on Grub Street lists 13, though, so I assume they bumped prices. I will double-check my last PDT receipt when I get home, unless someone knows offhand and will correct me. I'm young, live like 2 blocks from PDT, and still tend to only go to PDT for drinks before dinner, just because getting in is so hard at any other time, unless I want to hammer redial for half an hour to maybe get a reservation if I'm lucky. It's so frustrating, I swear, it's driving me to drink. Getting back on topic, is it just coincidence that there's nowhere with a broader selection of drinks combined with M&H's door policy? Part of M&H's limited drink selection is surely a consequence of interior design as much as anything else! It's not clear to me, for example, that the M&H space could not have accommodated, for example, one less booth and instead had, say, 4 extra seats at the bar, along with the corresponding space on the back bar for extra shinies. Is it just the case that the "serious cocktail drinker" demographic is so limited that a second bar of that type can't be done profitably?

The non-member price at M&H, the last I heard, was still the same fifteen bucks per drink they were charging in the old model. To my mind, twelve bucks a cocktail at Pegu versus fifteen bucks (25% more) at M&H equals "much higher prices." But let's take a look at the membership model: Members pay six bucks less than the non-member price for cocktails. If a yearly membership is 325 bucks, that means that you have to buy approximately 54 drinks at M&H on a yearly basis to reach the break-even point versus the non-member prices at M&H. If we compare the membership fee and membership prices to Pegu Club's $ 12 cocktails, it would take 108 drinks to reach the break-even point. Now... I suppose if you go to Milk & Honey a lot (let's say, twice a month to the tune of 5 drinks per visit) you would eventually have a savings over their non-member prices, or if you go to Milk & Honey a whole lot (twice a month to the tune of 10 drinks per visit, or 4 times a month to the tune of 5 drinks per visit) you would eventually have a savings versus Pegu Club. But, of course, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time and money for going anywhere else. So... this is what I mean when I say that the drinks at Milk & Honey are significantly more expensive than the drinks at other cocktail bars. ← These aren't entirely comparable, though; at least as far as I recall, the prices at Pegu were exclusive of tax, so the actual price is somewhat higher. Moreover, the member discount at M&H applies to all guests as well... I guess it's not possible to completely internalize all the savings here, but I don't think the difference is as stark as you are making it sound, and you are paying something for M&H being substantially less crowded and quieter (although I guess then there's some discount for their having cheaper rent, presumably). And, certainly, compared to PDT, 15 vs 13+tax is a much smaller difference, and 9 vs 13+tax a much smaller one.I should stop being off-topic, though, especially because I don't have any substantive disagreement with you, although I re(pre)sent your remark about EV dwellers, being a resident of the EV myself. But, to my view, the difference to me between going to PDT and going to M&H is a matter of possibly paying a small premium and going a little bit out of my way. But I don't think this premium (if it does work out to be positive in the end) is that big a factor, and I think the availability of this trade-off makes the vodka-guzzling masses at PDT less of a concern than they would otherwise be, though I guess I am more biased toward Sasha's style of drinks... but this is circular, because I end up going to M&H more, since it's cheaper and easier to get in to (for me, from here, because I've already plunked down my 325).