Pan

Acknowledged. As for my attitude toward paying for decor, I've previously gone on record as saying that my ranking in rough order of importance is something like this: (1) Food (2) Service (3) Price (4) Decor/ambiance Of course, extremes in any of these change the equation, such as an ambiance that's so loud I can't hear my dining partner or great food and service at a price that I simply can't afford. But you get the idea. If the food isn't great, I resent paying just for the decor. In that respect, I more closely hew to what at least used to be the stated credo of Chowhound than to a middle-of-the-road position on decor vs. food. Decor, to me, is a frill. To take an extreme example, the decor at Grand Vefour was absolutely gorgeous and added a great deal to my experience of eating there, but if the food had been mediocre, I would have felt sad and ripped off (even though it was my parents or brother paying, rather than me).

Then I have a further question for you: What kind of prices are we talking at 66, and is the quality you referred to sufficient for the markup over the Chinese places I normally go to in Flushing and Chinatown, which cost me between $5 and $25 or so at the outside for lunch/dinner?

Please clarify: By ignoring what? And what did the chef have against you (which is what you seem to be implying)? It's fascinating how you can damn a restaurant with a good review. This is really the kiss of death: What I get from your review is that you liked the food but had a viscerally negative reaction to the marketing and felt the place was too expensive to be a good value - or simply that at that price point, you will never be satisfied with the merely good and demand the special. Frankly, without prejudice to this restaurant (which I've never eaten at), I don't blame you one bit.

My take on it is that, pace Fat Guy, if the Times really thought it had made an error requiring correction, since the error was a captioned photo, the correction should have also been a captioned photo.

Interesting post, Bond Girl. Just as a way of having some idea how much your tastes coincide with mine, please remind me whether you've been to Vong before and whether you liked the food there. (For the record: JoJo used to be my favorite restaurant in the old, pre-renovation days, but on two visits [a rather long time ago], Vong struck me as overpriced watered-down Thai with lovely decor. I know others think it's really Thai-influenced French, but their opinion doesn't change how the food struck me.)

Lauren: It's Greek to Me (the one on E. 7 St.) closed months ago and has been replaced by an Italian place, something-or-other di Vino or something like that. I passed it by tonight and noted that its menu didn't seem very expensive. Their wine list wasn't posted outside. The space looks nice.

Thanks for the warning, Simon. What two storefront places did you like? (P.S. What does 4/10 mean?)

How's the rest of the food at that restaurant? I'm also wondering how far that would be from Polytechnic U. (Jay St. about a block from Tillary).

Any particular bakeries in New York you'd recommend for cheesecake? How about recommendations for cream cheese cakes and ricotta (Napolitano and Sicilian style) cakes? Has anyone tried cheesecake at Something Sweet, my beloved local Austrian pastry place on 1st Av. and 11 St.? I've had other stuff there, and it's great, but I don't remember trying cheesecake. Everything's so rich there, but of course! It's Viennese, after all! Lovely proprietress, too. If you come close to closing time, she's apt to give you two of whatever for the price of one, or/and throw in something she wants you to try.

I agree with you there. I consider it a sharp business practice, as I said before.

I don't have any trouble with honest salesmanship. A server who recommends a special - or a dish which is otherwise one of the more expensive on the menu - because s/he's tried it and loves it or because it's been popular with customers is being honest. I often ask servers whether they've tried dishes or desserts because then I can get a personal opinion from them and take it into account if I so choose. I also have absolutely no problem with the perfectly normal question of whether I want wine with the meal or dessert, coffee, or tea after the meal, nor do I really fault servers for asking whether I want bottled water when I ask for a glass of water (though that request never means I want bottled water when I ask for it in the U.S.) What bugs me is a hard sell. I suspect I'm much like others, in that respect. It would also bug me if I asked for a wine recommendation for under $10 a glass and the waiter or sommelier recommended a wine for $20 a glass. That meant s/he didn't listen to me.

Why don't you simply tell the waiter/waitress to take the wine bottle away and order another glass only if you decide to do so later?

I totally agree with you, Lizzie. If I decide to make a second reservation, I cancel the first right after reserving the second. To me, reserving tables in places where you do not intend to eat is on the same order as promising to come to a limited-invitation party with the wine, not showing up, and not calling. You do that, and if I was the one who invited you, you're no longer my friend, unless you have a really good excuse. (I actually broke off a friendship in the upshot to a situation like that.) Of course, there are always exceptional circumstances, such as when I made a reservation to eat somewhere in France, we got lost on the road and showed up in that area an hour and a half late, exhausted, and ate in the hotel restaurant, and we hadn't passed by a telephone, so I couldn't call in time. It seemed pointless to call and apologize, though perhaps we were wrong in thinking so. Anyway, though, the one time I remember that happening, I felt really bad. And we had intended to eat there that night.

Cabby, you're much more tolerant than I. It may be a good business strategy for restaurants in tourist areas to sucker and cheat their mostly one-time visitors, but when I've been a victim, it's made me angry. I'm a customer, after all, and I don't like feeling cheated, disrespected, or otherwise treated with contempt. And I think there's a fine line between a restaurant deliberately cooking to the lowest common denominator and some really bad experiences I've had, like a good Romanian restaurant trying very hard to charge me for a bottle of wine I never drank (they lost a likely repeat customer) and a restaurant in Budapest charging me an exhorbitant sum for mineral water (they had put it in their menu, but I never thought to see whether they were charging more for mineral water than they charged for dishes!). OK, the attempted cheating in the Romanian place was literally an attempted theft, but what of the place in Budapest? And what of that satay place in Kuala Lumpur that served great satay but lost the possibility of dozens of repeat visits from us because they tried to claim that we had eaten more skewers of satay than we had (showing us skewers that must have been taken from other tables)? I'll give you another example, which involves dishonesty but no attempt at literal theft: I went to a Vietnamese restaurant when I was in Hong Kong. When I made my order, the waiter encouraged me to order another dish. I said: "Isn't the dish I already ordered large?" "No, small." "Are you _sure_ another dish wouldn't be too much food?" The upshot was that the waiter seemed so sure and was so convincing that I ordered another dish that looked interesting, the restaurant got I think 30 more $HK for that one meal, there was enough food to feed a horse, I had nowhere to store leftovers in the Youth Hostel, I was very angry, and the restaurant lost out on a repeat visit, which the food would have warranted.

No, I've never experienced this anywhere. I consider it manipulative and sleazy, and I mean it! It borders on the genuinely dishonest, and some customers might misinterpret the gesture. A glass is a glass, period. I would be very upset if I ever thought a restaurant had a policy of instructing its wait staff to leave a bottle of wine on the table deliberately, not in order to comp it but in order to try to induce me to pay more without engaging in any spoken dialogue with me. Most likely, though, I'd simply call the waiter over and say "Didn't you forget to take the wine bottle?" Then, if his/her response were something other than "Wow! Thanks for telling me!", I'd probably decrease his/her tip - depending, of course, on what happened for the rest of the meal. Do they also pour a cup of coffee for you without asking if you want one, or refill your cup without asking if you want a refill, and then charge you for it? Or do they simply leave the coffee pot on the table?! Just where is this Mickey-Mouse operation?

What if you cooked them with kosher salt?

Thanks for those recommendations, folks. I'm a regular at Yeah. Are you talking about the soup dumplings, or/and other dumplings?

Now that's what I call outstanding service!

Interesting. I'll take a closer look at Le Tableau. I've never been there. What dishes have you enjoyed there?

This has been my universal experience with Kang Suh, despite my own efforts to give painfully detailed directions. The strange thing is that the place is huge. It's not like you can't see it from the street. You're right. What seems to have given people problems is: (1) I told them Kang Suh, and though it's listed that way in the phonebook, it's Kangsuh on the restaurant; (2) people had trouble remembering the exact name, though I spelled it for them; (3) it doesn't have a prominent awning; (4) people were overwhelmed by the number of Korean restaurants on the block, and claimed that some had similar names.

I tend more toward steamed dumplings. Which places are your favorites for steamed dumplings (and steamed buns - pao/bao/baozi, if you like)?

Thank you for your reply, Cabby, and especially to you, Bux. What a great web site, and what a delicious-looking menu! It looks to me like that $65 tasting menu might be the best value, but if I were going, I'd do as they suggest and call in advance to find out what's on the latest tasting menu. Problems arise when I go out with people who don't eat things (e.g. no pig, no fish, etc.) or are allergic to things. I can and do enjoy wine but it isn't a necessity for me. I think it'll have to be a pretty big occasion, but I look forward to going one of these days.

Your meal sounds great, Cabby. Would you please give me some idea what it cost? Perhaps Blue Hill would be a good place for me to reserve for some kind of special celebration someday - but not if it's, say, $100/person. I'd have to win the lottery or have some wealthy benefactor for that.

Tonight, I returned to New Green Bo, and I just want to reiterate that eating their Seaweed with Garlic cold dish and their Noodles with Spicy Meat Sauce is enough to put a smile on my face after a stressful day. The service may be inconsistent, whatever, but those dishes are so pleasant. To make the evening even warmer for my tummy and soul, I followed up by getting some hot Taro Milk Tea to go from Tea & Tea (formerly Saint's Alp) and then visited one of the last video arcades in town, the one which used to have the live chickens many moons ago.

Last Friday, I had dinner at Lavagna for the first time since October (I believe). I am confirmed in my opinion that it is a very good restaurant, though a bit too heavy on the salt for my taste, sometimes. I was first to arrive, so I stood at the bar and asked the bartender for a fruity wine, not too dry. Her first suggestion was Moscato d'Asti, but I replied that Muscat wines are really sweet dessert wines (I've had Moscato d'Asti and like it, but I wasn't in a mood for dessert before supper). Her next recommendation was a white Bordeaux which was so good that I asked her to write down its name. It was a Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux, 2001 ($8). It was deliciously fruity but interestingly complex. (My wine descriptions aren't technically sophisticated; I just know what I like when I drink it.) When my friend showed up, he also got a glass of the white Bordeaux and also liked it very much. His mother was late in coming because she was arriving on a plane. The maitre d' was extremely kind and gracious, ultimately letting the two of us share a table for three, even though on a Friday night, that small restaurant was really busy. We decided to go ahead and order appetizers, both of which we split. He ordered the artichoke with white bean paste, a favorite of mine; I ordered the broiled asparagus with pancetta and a creamy sauce (with porcini? I can't remember). The broiling of the asparagus was impressive, really well executed, and the pancetta was delicious. So was the sauce. I ultimately may have still liked the artichoke starter better, just because it was less salty. This situation repeated itself with the primi piatti. He got the rigatoni with spicy ground sausage, a great dish; I got spinach/cheese ravioli with a cheesy (in a good way) porcini sauce. Both dishes were excellent. The sauce for the ravioli was a bit over the top in terms of salt, but still delicious. My friend's mother was finally in transit to the restaurant when it was time to order secondi piatti, and we ordered one for her - a tuna dish which she liked very much. I and my friend split the special flambeed striped bass for two between us ($38). It was a good unfishy fish, the sauce was delicious, but the part of the fish that had been in contact with the pan was overly salty to my taste. My friend's mother ordered a fairly light red wine - I forget what it was, but it was just a decent vino da tavola to me, though the two of them liked it better. We all managed to have room for dessert (I had deliberately eaten very little earlier in the day). I and my friend's mother each got the fruit cobbler, which was pretty big. The top of it was delightfully caramelized, the fruit below was delicious, and the vanilla ice cream on top was pleasing. My friend got the chocolate mousse thingy (which I've had before and greatly enjoyed) and liked it very much. I don't know what the bill was because my friend's mother picked up the tab. Generally, the meal was very satisfying. I definitely plan on going back, and I do recommend the restaurant. But I still wish they'd be a little more subtle with the salt.