Busboy

I've heard the half-smoke thing, too, and I ain't buyin' it.

That's not what I'm saying. It has nothing to do with comparing different cultures. It's 4-star cuisine (for lack of better term, perhaps haute) compared to street food. The best hotdog at Grays Papaya cannot meaningfully be rating equivalent to a dinner at Gramercy Tavern. Nor could the best burger served anywhere, unless it's stuffed with so much foie, braised short rib and truffle that it's no longer street food. ← I can't get my mind around the idea that there's a bright line between fine dining and street food. Pretty easy to say that there's no comparing a hot dog and the Gramercy. But what about an excellent Thai restaurant and a 1-star but neighborhood-y Italian place? If we're dealing with a contnuum that runs roughly from spam warmed over sterno to nine courses at Per Se, what are the distinguishing characteristics that separate NYT lead review material from the hoi polloi? Saying this is "street food" and that is "neighborhood stuff" is not illuminating. Since everyone seems to agree that Sri serves great food, what is it that differentiates it, and others, from the reviewable spots. As Kant put it (Iggy Kant, food reviewer for the Leipzig Gazette) "Speak as if your definitions are to become through your will a universal law of food journalism."

DC has basically a southern, heavily black, Tidewater village for most of its existence. There's a strong seafood and soul food tradition here, but we haven't really perfected anything or elevated it to icon status. If you dig in old back yards around town you'll find oyster shells galore; barbecue, southern cooking and fried fish are readily available in a lot of African American neighborhoods; The Main Avenue fishmongers continue to thrive and I suppose politicians and diplomats have been eating steak as long as anyone can remember. But there's nothing that's been handed down for generations that we can claim as our own. Except maybe that soup.

Sripraprai is not serving "4-star food". Its not even serving 2 star food. The luxury of the ingredients just isn't there. ← And yet another argument against the star system. ← When you say that Sripraphai serves four-star food, are you suggesting that it's of the same level as Per Se, Le Bernardin or Jean Georges? Dude, it's street food. ← If Rich believes that Sripraphai's and Per Se's food can be meaningfully compared other than to say "they both serve excellent food" (and I'm not saying Rich has taken this position), then I'd say that there's no meaningful rating system to account for that position. ← Intersting take, inasmuch as it draws the question of, at what point can food from two different cultures be compared, except to say "they both serve excellent food?" How does one compare an excellent Chinese restaurant with an excellent steakhouse? How does one compare French and Italian, for that matter? Any system that allows only five grades is bound to be inexact. Maybe it should be chucked. On the other hand, why not trust the diner to bring a little nuance to the rating and understand that a 2-star Thai in Queens will be an excellent, but very different, experience than a 2-star New American (or whatever we call them these days) restaurant in Mid-town. I think people are bright enough to figure these things out. Finally, since I'm feeling inquisitive, why not do as Michelin does (and as old DC'ers will remember that Donald Dresden, pre-Phyllis Post critic, did) and break out a second rating for service/ambiance. Then Babbo could get four stars for its food but only two stars for its Led Zepplin soundtrack; we could zero out Sri on the ambience scale so no one in a Barney's suit accidently took a client to lunch there, and we could pick restaurants depending on whether we were in the mood to be pampered or well-fed.

My brief time working in restaurants would suggest that no one would care too much: if they're doing good work, they'll keep doing it, and if they're slinging hash, it's still gonna come out hash. When I think of these photos hanging on kitchen walls, I have this image of chefs recognizing, say, Ruth Reichl, and suddenly dropping syringes, pushing away the alley cats with their fifth of Jack Daniels, flicking ash off their Lucky Strike, and firing up the stove. Surely that's a Bourdain-inspired exaggeration, so can someone who has run or worked in a restaurant tell me exactly what happens differently if Famous Critic shows up? I'm really curious about specifics. ← When I was a waiter at a posh DC restaurant, a well-known critic for a local glossy used to come in and it was clear both from his demeanor and the owner's that we were meant to kiss his butt up and down for the duration of his visit. He was a pompous ass and the fear was always that failure to genuflect would draw his ire somewhere down the line.

When I wanted to do a write-up of Michel Richard's Citronelle for eG, I blackberried myself notes all night. Much easier to read than handwriting, even with the typos, after many glasses of wine.

There is a fully elaborated genre of fine-dining Thai cuisine. Vong, Spice Market, et al., are examples here in New York. And there are a couple of recently opened Thai places, like Klong, that might be able to mount an argument for one star. Nor is this some random imposition I'm making on Thai cuisine. If you go to Southeast Asia and speak to the people there, you'll find that they stratify restaurants exactly the same way: you've got your street food, your family restaurants, and your more formal stuff ranging all the way up to the fine dining places that tend to be on the top floor of some hotel on the waterfront. A lot of people are determined to read offensive value judgments into such systems of taxonomy, but that misses the point. I love Sripraphai; I just think it's a different species of restaurant from the restaurants that do and should be reviewed and assigned stars. This is an illuminating post, thank you. But I'd ask: does this same hierarchy apply to other cusines? Does the confit at Balthazaar -- a dish French peasants have been making for hundreds of years -- deserve greater exposure and respect than the curry Thai peasants use to flavor their duck? Aren't Vong and Spice Market (and this is a real question, not a rhetorical one) fusion efforts and profit centers operated at a distance by talented celebrity chefs as opposed to actual Thai restaurants? And, regarding your "straw man" statement below, isn't beginning a statement with "a lot of people are determined..." pretty straw-mannish in its own right? Um, I think anyone in the New York area can pick it up for 50 (?) cents and anyone in the world can read it free on-line. Sounds popularly priced to me. And c'mon -- 1 million households or offices, largely in the New York, is pretty damn good penetration. I'll bet CNN would kill for those numbers. Sure, it's upscale, but I'll wager that even the food section is read by starving but culinarily-aware bike couriers, bridge and tunnel housewives and starving intellectuals who will never get to Babbo. Over time, it certainly wouldn't be unusual or objectionable if the reviewer threw the occasional bone to people who aren't as sophisticated or well-off as the bulk of the Times' readers. That would be a tough point to dispute. But a lot of the criticism of this restaurant selection had -- at least until you threw in a little perspective -- a distinctly classist attitude about it. Lots of shots a Queens, subway rides, storefront locations and the like. It may be true that "important" food is rarely found in those circumstances, but the assumption that it can't be undercuts the criticism. In a larger sense, what I don't understand is the establishment of the star system -- that last refuge of tourists, people too lame to read the whole review and those more concerned with impressing friends than dining well -- as some kind of holy writ. It is, at best, shorthand. It cannot be established as an objective system, why pretend that it can? Anyone who reads the whole review as well as looking at the stars should come away with a pretty good idea of what dinner will look like. Anyone else? I guess it wasn't that important to them. And, finally, star system or not, where it written that the Times should review only restaurants of a certain type or gravitas. It is an important forum with great influence. So what. Neither Bruni nor anyone in that position should be trapped by the expectaions you or I or Mario or some stockbroker looking to get a private room for 20 for a closing dinner have for his role or, especially, by some arbitrary notion of what is serious and what is not. He got the job, we didn't. The Times' theater section reviews pretty much everything that has a major Broadway opening, no matter how kitchy or excreable. They're trapped by a definition imposed on them years ago by people now dead -- it's on Broadway, it gets reviewed. It doesn't have to happen with restaurants

My dad would do neither, but he reads the Times. ← Robyn -- I'd actually do both - OK Saks, there's no Barney's in DC. Kind of a revealing statement, though, don't you think.

I agree with you. Who is this review for? I'm sure most people in Queens know about the place - as do most knowledgeable diners in Manhattan and the other boroughs (although the latter are less likely to go there than people who live closer).... When I'm visiting New York - I don't want to do this - and I doubt many people who live there want to either. By the way - in terms of discussions about "elitism" - I pay more attention to the Design and Arts sections of the NYT than the Dining section (I'm more interested in design and the arts than food). And although there are articles about trends in these areas that aren't necessarily "high-end" (not a huge number though) - I really can't imagine an editor who's determined to cover trends in these areas that are frumpy or low brow. Nor would I pay money to read about those trends. I see enough frumpy low-end stuff without having to pay to read about it. I buy the NYT because it helps me to keep in touch with the cutting edge of new trends. And if that is elitist (probably is) - so be it. If the NYT isn't elitist - what will distinguish it from the New York Post? Is there really anyone here who reads the NYT to find out about neighborhood Thai restaurants? Robyn ← Most people in Queens and Manhattan know about Babbo and ADNY, too, but I suspect that wouldn't be raised as an aobjection if Bruni turned his sights on them. As for taking the subway out to Queens, I've heard that even Manhattanites and tourists get there every now and again, knowing that there's a restaurant worth going a little out of your way to find, if you happen to be in the borough anyway, or worth a special trip if you really like Thai food. Personally, I wouldn't spend an hour on the subway for most of the 1 and 2-star restaurants reviewed in the Times, though I'm sure they're fine establishments. Finally, elitism based high standards and genuine appreciation for something is fine. Elitism based on sniffing about "neighborhood restaurants" and pointless highbrow-lowbrow dichtomies is suspect.

I am a little confused. Are you saying that it's not possible for a Thai restaurant to rise above its genre into the realm of "serious" (or whatever term you prefer) cooking? That it, by definition, is the "Batman" of cooking while the French and Italians have "Hamlet" to themselves? Do you think that looking outside the accepted canon necessarily involves a decline in critical standards? Don't you think its possible that a serious examination of new or less-analyzed cooking and restaurants is a useful and legitimate role for a critic? It's easy enough to demonize Bruni's sloppy use of the term "democratization," but you've made quite a leap -- if Bruni has equated Sripraphai with Per Se, I missed it. The fact that they both have been included in the flawed and imprecise star system is only tangentially relevant; reading the two reviews (painful as that is for many) makes it clear that Bruni is not engaged in a culinary guerrilla action aimed at tearing down haute cusine and distributing confiscated foie gras to the masses. Bruni writes for a newspaper that serves millions of readers. It is by definition a popular, rather than an academic medium. As a writer in this type of publication he certainly has license -- if not an obligation -- to explore the "popular" restaurants that some percentage of his readers will find interesting or even preferable to the more traditional subjects of NYT reviews. There is even an argument to be made that the first review of an apparently excellent Thai restaurant has greater marginal value for serious discussion and understanding of food and restaurants in New York, than the 17th review of yet another fashionable one- or two-star French, Italian or New American place. It's tough not to get an alarmist, if not elitist, vibe from this post -- people have been decrying the death of standards for years yet, even in my son's leftish high school, no one equates comic books with Shakespeare; at the Symphony there's still a lot more Mozart than (Paul) Williams; and Yalies still get to run for president. One review is not an assault on the star system and, more important, not an assault on the concept of fine dining and (sometimes self-) important food.

As soon as the budget allows -- we have our EZ Pass now -- and we can get through to Per Se. OK, maybe we won't count on Per Se.

The diner or breakfast joint will toast them because they're not as fresh as the bagel place! I don't toast fresh bagels, but happily do so to those that have been sitting around a little bit. Great post, Busboy! How did I miss this when it first came out? ← I always assumed you boycotted NYC posts because of the ancient upstate-downstate rivalry.

Do what Al said, only folt the pounded breasts in half over some good Gruyere or Fontina cheese (breading only the outside). Deglaze the pan with a little wine and some more lemon juice, and whisk in some butter to make a little sauce. Serve with cous-cous.

I'm an out-of towner who has been reading the NYT reviews pretty regularly for several years, and I have to say that from this distance Bruni's decision to abandon the beaten track appears positively refreshing. The Grimes years seemed to bring an endless stream of reviews of over-decorated 1-stars full of mojito-drinking yuppies concerned far more with the scene than food. "Chef Y, late of Craft and the Bouley Bakery has teamed with designer Y to offer Manhattan's late-night crowd another minor variation on Italian cooking in a jewel box-like setting that reportedly cost more than $1.5 million to decorate." I'm sure these restaurants have distinctive personalities and kitchens, and that these distinctions are obvious to those who live in New York. But from a distance, they all kind of blurred into a dot-com era parody of a expense account dining and celebrity chefdom. The change is refreshing -- and might even be refreshing for a lot of people in the Times' home delivery area. Sure, eGulleters have made the trek to Queens for Sripraphai, but it's likely that a number of other New York Times readers have not. They may appreciate, as I do, a look at what some apparantly consider the finest Thai restaurant in the U.S. And drawing arbitrary lines as to what "deserves" a review and what does not strikes me as odd. Good Chinese food but not good Thai food? French but not Uruguayan? Park Slope but not Queens? Butcher paper on the table but not formica? What do I know, I'm just a provincial from DC? But sometimes it seems that people are demanding that Bruni be rigid and formulaic in a way that would be found tired, boring or unispired in a chef.

Boring though it may be, the lightly-smoked bacon at Whole Foods is pretty swell.

Please eat a Cubano (sandwich) for me. And report back. The always voracious Jonny Apple tells you where to begin your search for Miami's answer to New York's pizza or Philly's cheesesteaks as great street fare, in this article.

Not sure you'll do better than Miervois here, but I'd look into La Chaumiere.

← BdC's is pretty edible. And, if you can wait a day, Thursday is Cassoulet Day at La Chaumiere. Think I noticed it on the menu at the new Bistro au Pied in Georgetown, but my brief experience there was not particularly satisfactory.

How about someplace, oh, French? A big bowl of cassoulet? A bigger bottle of Cote du Rhone?

Thanks all, for the pointers and information. We are off to kick a few tires out in Virginia and will repeat the the process tomorrow in Maryland, with an eye towards the Fridgidaire and the GE. We will pass along any useful information we gather.

This may sound like a dumb question, but I've never cooked with a convenction oven and they've always impressed me as being useful, but not life-changing. If funds were unlimited, sure, I'd probably get one, but given the added expense (and possible need for rewiring) how much difference do they make in life of someone who on a good week, might roast a chicken on Tuesday night; heat the pizza stone on Friday night, make cookies on Saturday and braise a pork shoulder on Sunday?

Very interesting. Do you or tyour buddies in the biz have any experience with the brand?

Is that the Gas stovetop/electric oven option? What are the advantages?

The GE Profile in all its glory.

Topsca is further downtown, 11th and F. The Tabard is on N between 17th and 18th, about 3 blocks from the hotel.