Dave H

Look, the fact is that neither Mozza nor Patsy's East Harlem is serving Neopolitan-style pizzas, nor are their pizzas or their restaurants anything similar to each other, and some guy posting a comment to the Diner's Journal blog doesn't make it so. The proper New York points of reference for Mozza are Franny's and, due to their shared DNA, you can make a case for Otto for non-pizza items. The proper national point of reference is Pizzeria Bianco. So Frank got two out of three right. This is a separate question from whether Bruni ought to be familiar with the major New York-style pizzas (Patsy's EH, Totonno's Coney Island, Grimaldi's, Lombardi's, Di Fara), which he obviously should be. (The top New Haven places, too. And the new-style New York pizzerias, particularly Franny's and Una Pizza Napoletana.)

Jesikka and I dropped into Perilla on Tuesday night, its second night of official operation. Restaurant was about 85% full when we arrived for our 9:45 table, with the exception of the bar, which was kept clear. (Presumably they will have full service there when they get up to speed.) A slip of paper clipped to the top of the menus informed us that they're giving a 10% discount until they get their legs; no idea when that deal will end, but given things ran pretty smooth for us I wouldn't expect it to last long. The schtick at Perilla is fusion, driven by a diverse cast of very specific East Asian greens and herbs as accents, and it is carried off with creativity and finesse. The menu Tuesday was quite similar to the one posted on Eater, save the addition of IIRC an oysters appetizer (forget exactly what it was), an off-menu special (monkfish cheeks in shellfish sauce), and some minor adjustments of wording and prices. Also everyone should take a look at some guy's writeup which has pictures of some of the dishes we had. "Thinly Sliced Raw Hamachi" is not actually very thin at all (and I forget if it retained that name on our menu): three generous slices of gorgeous fish in a yuzu-infused tomato-water broth, along with precise deployment of fresh herbs and spices, and slices of fresh cucumber. This is a stellar dish. Sashimi-quality hamachi--good sashimi quality hamachi--and a finely modulated and complex set of flavors. And while it's been done before and maybe I'll be sick of it eventually, let me just spend a few words in praise of yuzu as a flavoring for delicate creative-Japanese type dishes: it's great stuff (see also: Ssam Bar uni). If I had to criticize anything I might say the cucumber chunks were cut a bit too large given the subtlety of the rest of the dish, but Harold may have his reasons (e.g. to keep them easy to handle with a fork), and anyway, this is really nitpicking. Smallish duck meatballs in a meaty broth with yam gnocchi, a raw quail egg, and a topping of water spinach, was both the most fully Japanese in style of all the dishes we tried, and also my first experience with the faintly ballyhooed Italo-Japanese fusion that is apparently the basis for a couple new restaurants in the East Village. Not sure about its potential as a culinary movement, but this happens to work extremely well, which you could ascribe to the two cuisines shared affection for umami (well represented here in the broth and the spinach), or you could just point out that if you call yam gnocchi "yam dumplings," there is nothing not Japanese about this. The gnocchi don't pack much taste, but the quail egg yolk and the meatballs are killer together. Temperature was a problem, as while this is izakaya-type food, hearty enough to be served hot, it came out not much above room temperature--particularly a problem with respect to the gnocchi, although at least their texture was still good. Also as a matter of mechanics it's somewhat difficult to get the full use of the quail egg; presented whole it certainly looks pretty, but the somewhat shallow bowl with all the meatballs and gnocchi in it doesn't encourage the diner to whisk it in vigorously. Those issues aside, another really strong dish. The mains didn't quite keep up that level of accomplishment, but they both had strong qualities. My roast duckling was served in a style I'd previously only seen in France: as a large slab of duck breast (or in this case, two long but thick rectangles), the fat scored to expose more of it to the pan. Compared to the commonplace fan of thin little slices, serving duck this way brings out more, truer flavor, and the quality of this duck perhaps wasn't quite up to snuff, with some mildly off gamy flavors in the fat. But it's a somewhat gutsy presentation, and it was roasted to a beautiful (and gutsy) rare, so good for them. The menu calls for corn pudding and foie gras bordelaise, but to me the bordelaise tasted straight and it was the corn pudding that tasted foie gras-y. Both were rich and salty, the foie (wherever it came from) didn't work any particular magic, and the tiny little bits of marrow seemingly brought nothing to the table beyond perhaps fulfilling the definition of "bordelaise". The saving grace was the significant quantity of sauteed mustard greens, which provided a sharp but nuanced counterpoint to the one-note richness of the duck and sauces (despite all that's nominally going on, the dish could maybe use the addition of one more flavor component), and turned this into a fairly decent success. That counterpoint was largely missing from a nonetheless interesting dish of roast chicken. Yes, there were some nice bitter greens identified as tatsoi (which came across as baby spinach, although in hindsight they might have had a bit of extra kick), but not enough of them to balance out a rather beige and thirst-inducing dish. The bulk of it was a commendably juicy roast breast of chicken with the first wing bone attached, topped by its nicely crisped but oversalted skin. A smaller rectangle of dark meat was not as successful, and rather dried out. A smattering of hen of the woods mushrooms failed to add much, but not so the four thick slices of sauteed Chinese sausage, which had an intensely sweet-salty, almost fermented taste. The Chinese sausage is a very compelling ingredient, but it couldn't really be brought into balance with the rest of the items until we figured to cut the already smallish pieces into quarters, and take them in the same bite with both white and dark chicken meat, whereupon everything clicked. All in all, this was probably the least successful dish of the evening, but with a bit of tweaking--smaller pieces of sausage and more tatsoi might be enough--it could be very good. From what we sampled, Seth Cato's desserts integrate beautifully with the savory side of the restaurant. Again, the innovation is in the use of Asian fruits and herbs to accent more traditional dessert concepts. The "smoked" aspect of the smoked chocolate cake was fairly lacking, leaving the cake itself pretty interchangeable with every other flourless chocolate cake of the past 15 years. Luckily the diced roasted rhubarb and kaffir lime ice cream brought not only acidity, freshness and lightness to the plate, but also robust, rounded flavors (this is what distinguishes the kaffir lime from lemon, which it predominately tastes of). Very well made ice cream technically, as well. A clever twist on an old cliche. Next, what will probably turn out to be the restaurant's signature dessert (although there is also a lemon-fennel donut dessert, and people love donut desserts): coconut cake with basil-watermelon salad and perilla frozen yogurt. Our waiter described perilla as an Asian relative of mint, but it tasted like a much rounder and complex herb, a bit like basil but really a lot like shiso, maybe. Oh, that's because, turning to wikipedia I learn that perilla is shiso (or, more accurately, that shiso is the most common variety of perilla--and surely the one in use here). Whatever; the fro-yo is awesome, with an intense attack, great mouth-filling consistency, and...shiso! Which is an awesome flavor. The basil-watermelon salad (which also had what I'm fairly positive was coconut meat thrown in as well) was a great contrast, although it will be even better once the watermelon is really in season. (Don't get me wrong, this wasn't bad, it just lacked the explosiveness of truly great watermelon.) And the coconut cake was a light and airy canvas for all this. (Small complaint: whether because the it was too fresh out of the oven--it was still warm, unnecessarily--or some other reason, the cake was a bit too crumby and didn't hold together as it should.) A very impressive dessert with a bright, crisp flavor profile that is too rare. The above plus two glasses of wine (a Beaujolais and a Gruner Veltliner, both quite nice), a pot of tea, tax (but not tip), and 10% discount hit $100 exactly. Service was pretty solid if occasionally odd (our waiter slipped into calling Jesikka "m'lady" as the night wore on... ). All in all a very strong showing for Perilla. The food is clever and has a distinctive voice. The flaws so far are of balance and execution, but both of those are nonetheless pretty impressive for a restaurant on day 2. Provided they refine the cuisine and work out the kinks, Perilla is a solid two star candidate, and a very welcome addition.

Thank you. As I recall, there are several passages of (adulterous) flirtation while she's out reviewing restaurants in Garlic and Sapphires which read as if they came from the reviews themselves, but not having read the originals I wasn't sure. The foodies hadn't discovered the Internet yet. For whatever little it's worth, that's what I think. ← I disagree. I think if you go back and compare to his first year or so on the job, Bruni has markedly improved in some areas. Most notably his prose, which was routinely as embarrassing as anything in that Roberto's review, and is responsible more than anything for making him a laughingstock today. If you don't believe me check out brunidigest or the Mouthfuls Bruni thread. And this covers everything from preposterously strained and mixed metaphors, to distracting overuse of alliteration and an unholy predilection for the word "moist", to a tendency toward elaborate hooks that sometimes took up half the review, to an inclination to view his column as more an Eater-style fashion report than a review of food and service. Today there are far fewer gaffes or displays of ignorance, such as when he was mystified to find recessed seating at a Japanese restaurant, or when he researched and explained to his readers what a "plancha" was. (Yes, there was the recent todo about grower Champagne, but at least that's more obscure than a plancha.) His star ratings, which were frequently capricious or inexplicable in the beginning, are now much more settled and accurate; adjusting for the fact that he devotes more weight to subjective factors than under the Grimes/Miller model, lately I find his star ratings pretty spot-on. Where he has not improved and presumably never will is in his inability to do a proper "close reading" of a dish: to identify with specificity what's going on, what flavors are being used, what works and what doesn't and why, and to knowledgeably situate the dish within a cultural or historic or culinary context; and, not unrelatedly, in his lack of appreciation for what distinguishes haute cuisine from everything else. Of course this instantly disqualifies him from ever becoming a great food critic, but I think the disdain in which he is held is due to his continued prominence in a world in which he has suddenly dozens of competitors in his field. I think that, when you get down to it, Bruni holds his own very well against any particular other restaurant reviewer, or food blogger, or eG/MF/OA/CH poster. Of course, to those of us who pay enough attention to follow it, the cluster of reviewers and bloggers and posters is incalculably more useful and authoritative than Bruni alone.

Exactly: this year's James Beard selections only confirm how conservative they are. David Chang for Rising Chef would have been a great selection two years ago, but now it's not only oddly late, but also a somewhat inappropriate to recognize Ssam Bar which is actually a collaboration of several chefs. Noting that Grant Achatz is the best chef in the "Great Lakes" region is the sort of no-brainer that only calls attention to the failure to award Alinea Best New Restaurant in its day. Similarly passing up Ssam Bar for Best New Restaurant--which is the much more suitable award--in favor of the latest outpost in a four-year old chain restaurant. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe L'Atelier's menu has not substantially changed since 2003. Also: Chanterelle?????!?!?

One last thought: doesn't this incident pretty well confirm that Morandi is in fact not nearly as Bruni-proof as alleged? Meanwhile, just above the item collecting reactions to his bizarre rantings, Eater links to rumors that erstwhile feminist McNally has fired Jody Williams for having the unfeminine temerity to point out that, judging by Frank's review, her cooking was the only thing saving that place from a Poor.

So, unless I'm missing something, the only female-cheffed restaurant in New York that even pretends it could have a plausible shot at three NYT stars is Annisa, currently carrying two stars from Grimes. On my one visit there, I was pretty disappointed; I think it's a strong one star. But it turns out we don't need to guess what Frank thinks; he wrote a fairly in-depth Diner's Journal piece detailing two visits to the restaurant: one that seems to have been promising enough to make him consider Annisa for a possible three star re-review, and a second middling enough to convince him it couldn't do better than two. Among other things he mentions how much he likes the fact that a woman runs the kitchen, and what an embarrassment it is that this is so rare among serious NY restaurants. Anita Lo is discussed prominently throughout. It is fairly obvious where his thoughts on the subject lie.

I was curious at to the identities of the two non-Manhattan two-star female chefs whom Bruni, ruthless enforcer of the patriarchy that he is, failed to credit in his reviews. The first, of course, is Sripraphai Tipmanee, whose name I suspect no one would have ever heard if her restaurant wasn't eponymous. There is a bias here, but it has nothing to do with gender. As for the second, I'm drawing a blank. I spent some time trying to google out the head chef at Spicy and Tasty (can't be done, I'm pretty sure) before trying to run through the other Outer Borough two stars. Hmm...didn't Al di La get two? Al di La chef...Anna Klinger! Aha! So that's a potentially colorable claim. (I mean, McNally's overall argument is preposterous, but it is at least commonly considered an oversight not to mention the chef at a small Italian place--in a way that, fairly or not, it's not at a more "ethnic" ethnic restaurant.) So I click through to Frank's Al di La review to find...why, Anna Klinger, there at the top of the 7th paragraph. Puzzling. Oh wait. I see: since Frank failed to specifically mention that she was the BOH half of the husband-and-wife team, he technically "flatly refused to mention that the chef was a woman." (Oh, and I checked the Sripraphai review on a hunch, and, sure enough, he identifies Ms. Tipmanee as the owner, but does not make explicit the fact that she is in charge of the kitchen.)

Head cheese, as I understand it, is just meat and fat scraped from the inside of the head (plus geletin, etc.) No organs. I mean, are beef cheeks offal now? Guanciale? I guess head cheese is offal in the sense of being "garbage parts", but that's a pretty subjective definition. As for sweetbreads, I think the fact that I find them so easily appealing demonstrates I'm not a hardcore offalhead. Kidney, tripe, hearts, brains...I'll eat those, but even if I've gotten over being squeamish, I maintain that they almost always carry an actual edge of weirdness that leaves them in a different category from other ingredients. Not because of knowing what they are--I could care less. Because of taste and texture. Plus the fact that for many of them in order to make them appealing at all requires invasive cooking methods--you have to soak them, slow cook them for hours, whatever. Sweetbreads, conversely, are simple and delicious. If you like fat you should like sweetbreads. Personally I find even liver more "difficult" than sweetbreads, but no one considers liver offal, even though by definition it surely is. edit: Just to clarify, I prefer the offal as edible organs definition. That's why I said sweetbreads are offal like cucumbers are fruit--technically they belong to the category, but not in terms of their actual culinary properties.

I think Grant's comment about there being "only two modern restaurants" in Chicago demonstrates the exact opposite point than people are taking from it. A city in which Avenues is not considered particularly modern has very different dining norms and expectations than New York, where Gilt under Paul Liebrandt was considered modern, or R4D is considered modern. As for wd-50, the food is definitely more challenging and intellectualized than Alinea, but in terms of innovation and novelty in form, technique, and service, Alinea and Moto are considerably further in the "modern" direction. (Just to be clear, I think the "intellectualized" stuff--the fact that the way the food tastes carries ideas behind it--is a vital part of "modern" cuisine, and that wd-50 definitely deserves its place with the forefront of that movement. But not on the basis of the more superficial reasons people often cite to put it there.) Of course none of this changes the fact that Chicago's modern moment is a couple years old now. If we have to shoehorn the entire restaurant industry into one narrative of hot trends, I guess we can note that last year's attempt to plop oversized outposts of international celebrity chef empires in New York has substantially fizzled (good); that the same effort in Vegas continues apace (who cares); and that New York, while still too conservative for my tastes, still has a number of restaurants putting out exciting, even ground-breaking, food, and a decently promising staple of new restaurants opening all the time. (And Tailor on the way.) Frankly, if you have to identify Ssam Bar as an offal place in order to cram it into some shoebox and desperately try to leave your thesis intact, you are talking out of your ass. Not that it matters, but there is a grand total of one (1) Legitimate Offal dish on that menu. (I'm sorry, but sweetbreads are offal the way cucumbers are a fruit. And veal head cheese is offal in the way...I mean, it is not offal in any way whatsoever.)

My sense is that, while Bruni certainly likes NewGilt more, better (to him) execution of less ambitious food equals still a two star rating. The to-be-sure paragraph ("Not all of Mr. Lee’s efforts pay off...") makes that fairly clear. "Revisit" will presumably be the dumping ground for re-reviews that keep the same stars.

Bruni's judgment is in: a rather harshly worded one-star. He ate considerably better than we did, which is what saves it from a Satisfactory. It's not clear whether Jesikka and I just ordered badly, or the food has improved over the past month (as rumored), or it's just wildly inconsistent (as it appears to me, and as Bruni hints). What is clear is that he hate hate hates the decor, atmosphere, and concept. IMO justifiably so.

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek; there are definitely differences not only in handling but in the fact that the top-tier places buy whole smoked sides of salmon and hand-slice them to order whereas your average grocery store or bagel shop is selling the pre-sliced stuff. IIRC the earlier thread considered the theory that the top places might be getting higher quality fish or fish made to their custom specifications, but no evidence emerged that that might be the case.

Instead we have this thread pointing out that all of the smoked salmon in New York and indeed most of the country is exactly the same, because it all comes from Acme Smoked Fish in Brooklyn. Having said that, the best smoked salmon in New York is at Russ & Daughters.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. But I'm having a hard time piecing together exactly what you do think it means. Apparently a gastronome is someone who arrives at a restaurant and immediately asks for a tour of the walk-in so he can decide what to have his personal chefs in the kitchen make for him that night. It is important that all the food cooked there be sauteed or pan-roasted so that the flavors can escape into the air and make his brief jaunt through the kitchen more aromatic. (Also if the pure flavors of the ingredients make it into the food it could make him vertiginous, which is bad.) And that the kitchen be hot and noisy so as to add an extra element of discomfort and stress to the task of his personal chefs who will have to interrupt their jobs making food for the rubes ordering off the menu in order to custom-make his dinner from scratch. This makes it more sporting. Also it is important that they not have tattoos because....? I'm getting stuck here, could you help me out?

I can't find the reference, but I believe I read somewhere that the wines were auctioned off. ← Interesting and somewhat unfortunate. (Not that I was ever likely to be ordering any of the reserve bottles there.) Still, I can't find any reference to this, and it seems like it would attract some attention if it were a substantial portion of the Montrachet cellar. Maybe they are selling some at Crush?

It seems fairly safe to assume the old decor will not survive the makeover. If they're planning to keep the name Montrachet, it seems obvious the wine program will. Also, what else would they do with the wines? Sell them at auction? Hang on in the hopes of opening a more wine-focused restaurant in the future? Both seem unlikely to me.

Exactly. The clientele for these places is not people who are sick of traditional three and four stars; it's people who like three/four stars so much that they want to be able to enjoy the most significant part of the experience on a much more regular basis. Somewhat ironically, because this is a select subset of the three/four star clientele--that is, the ones who are there for the food--you end up that these "Paradigm" restaurants are serving food that is more vital and exciting than many of the three/four stars. I'd also point out that NY has for some time had a sort of predecessor to these restaurants in the wonderful tradition of most three stars saving the bar to serve their full menu to walk-ins.

The wine program as Ssam Bar is actually a pretty impressive accomplishment, and quite well thought out. One of the many ways Ssam Bar dispenses with the norms of fine dining is in a menu which is not divided up into traditional app/main/dessert or tasting menu progressions, and which combines a lot of very disparate flavor profiles from delicate minimalist Japanese flavors to spicy creative market-oriented takes on SE Asian salads to savory stews to sliced hams. Between its four beers, two sakes and four wines by the glass, you can match pretty well any course through the menu quite nicely. The lack of a dry white wine by the glass, like the fact that there is more sparkling wine than still, is a feature, not a bug. Also it is somewhat ridiculous to assert that Ssam Bar "isn't avant-garde at all." This entire thread is about the fact that many of us think it almost defines today's avant-garde.

Another reason to switch from 0 - 4 stars to A - F (or something equivalent) would be to make clear the ratings were totally incompatible. But yes, this is another reason my proposal is pretty unlikely to happen; New York Magazine was lucky not to have another rating system in place when they started their current one. Of course, the Times would only make a switch like this if they thought the current star system was in some sort of crisis and becoming unworkable. Some of us clearly think so, but then we probably worry about it a lot more than the people at the Times do. Maybe in future years if this trend we're picking up on of ambitious food becoming unyoked from formal service becomes truly widespread... Of course then they could just move to a componentized food/ambiance/service system instead.

Perhaps that's right. And yes, Plotnicki's category names are too wonky for the average consumer--I wasn't suggesting using them, just showing an example of the idea in action. Thing is, the way I was envisioning it, the categories would sort of stay out of the way--they would be there if you wanted to keep track of what group a particular restaurant was being compared against, but the main point is to focus on the how-good part of the rating without losing the information conveyed by the which-category. Done right, it might simplify the system from the point of view of the average person. It's easy to forget, but someone who isn't already familiar with the way restaurants are rated isn't going to understand that there is such a thing as a "two star restaurant" and a "three star restaurant" irrespective of how good they actually are. True, for ordinary people to surf to the NYT web site in search of a place for dinner and have to decide up front if they want "Upper Middle" or "Fish, Steak and Brasseries" is probably not going to work even if you do come up with more artful titles. But then I'm not sure their restaurant review archives work well for that sort of situation now. (Come to think of it...how do ordinary people decide what restaurant to try??)

How to Fix the NYT Star System (a somewhat wordy manifesto) ------------------------------------------- Everyone sort of understands this, but I feel it might help this discussion to make it explicit: The difficulty with the star system is that it combines a descriptive which-category factor and a subjective how-good factor into a single, coarse-grained score. The main reason Bruni has come in for criticism vis-a-vis his star ratings has been that he has increased the weight given to the how-good factor, thereby deemphasizing the which-category factor. I would argue that, all things being equal, this makes the system somewhat more useful (despite what some have implied I doubt a single consumer has actually confused Spicy & Tasty with Le Cirque as a result of Bruni's ratings). It does, however, have the unfortunate effect of making Bruni's ratings somewhat incompatible with his predecessors', although as we have discovered this regime only stretches back to Bryan Miller's tenure, with earlier critics handing out stars in a manner more like Bruni. At this point I was prepared to make a principled argument that, if you ignore his often perplexing first year or so, Bruni has actually done a fairly excellent job awarding stars; that while his ability to describe food is clearly weak, the list of restaurants he has championed by bestowing ratings higher than what should possibly be allowed for their category under the Miller-defined system--Sripraphai, Little Owl, Spicy & Tasty, Bar Room, and Ssam Bar--is a damn good group of restaurants, well worth championing, and as Sneakeater and Nathan have been patiently explaining upthread, a list that is very relevant to how knowledgeable Manhattanites New Yorkers actually eat. (One quick comment on that discussion: I disagree completely with Bruni's implication that the savvy eaters of the Ssam Bar generation dislike stuffy stodgy ol' Per Se. Rather I think they eat at haute cuisine restaurants just as often as the savvy diners of previous generations--that is, a few times a year at special occasions, or a bit more frequently if they get to add in the occasional celebratory business dinner; the difference is that they also get to eat extraordinary food, and in the case of Ssam Bar near-haute cuisine, a few times a week at these sorts of places as well. Frankly I'm not sure Frank agrees with what he wrote either, it may have just been a quick caricature to situate Ssam Bar in the restaurant scene at large.) Meanwhile if we look at the list of places Frank placed below what the Miller system would allow--Alto, the Modern Dining Room, Le Cirque, the Russian Tea Room, Gordan Ramsay, Kobe Club perhaps--it's not a very inspiring list. Many of these reviews prompted howls when they first hit, but my impression is that in the long term people's opinions of these restaurants have tended to fall into line with Bruni's. To be fair, I have not been to most of them, and it's possible that they are indeed great restaurants and that the fact that no one talks about them is only confirmation of Bruni's power to kill a worthy restaurant. But I doubt it. (What he did to Gilt, on the other hand, was a tremendous error and a tragedy, but every reviewer will make some mistakes.) Of course his latest review makes an argument for Bruni's unimpeachable credibility and evolving seriousness pretty impossible (although, please note, he got the star rating correct!), so let's move on. In the interminable discussion on this subject, several suggestions for how to fix the star system have come up. The first is to abolish star ratings. Not only is this, as Fat Guy points out, never ever ever going to happen, let me go on the record as saying it's a terrible idea. At some level one's opinion of a restaurant's quality involves the subjective matter of one's personal tastes, but, even more than most cultural fields, the vast majority of a proper restaurant evaluation is objective. I'd guess something like an 80-20 rule holds: assuming they have an equivalent experience or at least make enough visits to smooth out unrepresentative ordering choices or off nights, an informed and experienced group of eaters will probably independently agree on about 80% of how good a particular restaurant is, with the remainder up to their individual inclinations and tastes. Maybe it's closer to 90-10. (I also suspect that the more expert the group of diners the more their ratings will converge.) The point is that restaurants are something that can be objectively evaluated. At its base, restaurant reviewing is about telling people which restaurants are worth going to, and a quantitative rating system could aid that immensely even if the particular one in use at the Times may not. The second suggestion is to split the current "overall" rating into several component ratings, most commonly for food, decor, and service ala Zagat. This sounds good initially, but it actually doesn't solve the problem at all: which-category and how-good would still be conflated into one number. To make this a bit more concrete: I find the space at Blue Hill elegant and pleasing, and I think the waitstaff is among the very best in the city. I found the room at Per Se odd and out of touch with New York, and the service a bit awkward. But there's no way in hell I would claim that Blue Hill has four star decor or service, or that Per Se does not. The which-category distinctions swamp the how-good ones. The third suggestion comes from the existence of the $25 and Under column, because that's where you would traditionally see writeups of Sripraphai and Spicy & Tasty pre-Bruni. If we're recognizing that this category of restaurants (with the name suitably inflation-adjusted) can be good enough and important enough to warrant the attention and standards applied by a starred review, why not beef up the column length and slap a star rating on the end? That way it allows for the cheaper restaurants which form the bulk of many people's everyday eating a chance at a rigorous evaluation. This is exactly the approach newly adopted at New York Magazine, and I think it's a good one, as far as it goes. That's because it allows a partial separation of which-category from how-good. This lets us take care of Sri and S&T, but it hits a roadblock when confronted with a Ssam Bar review. Clearly Ssam Bar belongs in the "fine-dining" review column, because the food is chef-driven and innovative and is frankly competing head-to-head with the best restaurants in the city--plus a meal there can easily cost $70pp or more, well outside of the range of "25 USD(1990) and Under". But then you've got the paper napkins and the backless chairs and the no reservations policy. No matter where you put it, its rating is going to be significantly affected by which-category and not just how-good. This led a couple people upthread to propose a third, "middle" review category, presumably to include Ssam Bar, Little Owl, etc. But this is just kicking the can down the road. Where do we put the Bar Room? What about wd-50--is it right to grade it on the same scale as Per Se, when the food is arguably as serious but the formality clearly is not? Does Masa go up against Per Se, when so much of what makes for a traditional four star experience does not apply? If Masa does, does Sugiyama? And it's not like these problems don't show up in our Cheap Eats category: how do you grade the Arepa Lady on the same scale as Sripraphai? And where do the steakhouses go? The solution, I think, is not to invent a new review section for every restaurant category, but to unify restaurant reviewing into a single section (with multiple reviewers as necessary) and explicitly identify the restaurant's category at the top of the review, along with a how-good rating that is independent for each category. There would be maybe 10 or 12 categories to choose from, based on how many internally comparable genres of restaurant actually exist in the city. Obviously new categories could be added down the road to incorporate the emergence of new genres, although this would have to be rare. Ratings in the same category are understood as being directly comparable, and incorporate the quality of the food, service, overall experience and value in the context of the standards for that category and the competing restaurants in it. I'm stealing this idea from the way Steve Plotnicki has organized his reviews on his OAD blog. His somewhat quirky but serviceable categories for New York restaurants are: New York Casual Dining New York Creative and Bistro Cuisine New York Fish, Steak & Brasseries New York Formal Dining New York Formal Ethnic Dining New York Inexpensive Ethnic & Regional Dining New York Japanese Dining New York Upper Middle Dining Within each category he grades restaurants on an A - F scale with +/-, which I also like because it offers more room for fine distinctions than 0 - 4 stars, and it's intuitively understandable. [One of my great moments with the NYT star system was when I was leaving a predictably mediocre meal at Ruby Foo's with some "non-savvy" friends (they picked the restaurant) and I was dumbstruck at Ruth Reichl's two star review hanging outside. My friends couldn't decide if I thought two stars was too high or too low, because, being non-savvy, their reference point was movie reviews where two stars is generally worse than average.] Of course if adopted by the Times, the reviews themselves would be full reviews as currently written, not Plotnicki's capsule reviews. Obviously there are problems with this approach, primarily in choosing the categories so they are broad enough to be relevant but narrow enough to ensure comparability. Of course there would be arguments over what category certain restaurants should be assigned to. But I think such a system would be worlds better than what we currently have. The problem is conflating which-category with how-good. The solution is to separate them. What do you think?

Would it be annoying if I pointed out that I actually said, Yes?? Probably? Would it have been more annoying if eGullet had a [blink] tag?? What's that?? I should quit while I'm behind??? Sigh...

Quite an interesting article by Mimi but I disagree on two points: First, I have to take issue with, "Chodorow claims to have had some positive ratings but cites none specifically"; the ad (the PDF version at least) has links to distinctly positive takes from Gael Greene and John Mariani, and a three star review from Bob Lape. Granted he doesn't literally write "Bob Lape gave me three stars," but the reviews are all cited, and accurately. Second, I completely disagree that this stunt isn't a brilliant move by Chodorow. The same tactic may not have paid off for Assembly Steak House or Dish of Salt, but those establishments, I suspect, were not running the same game as he is. People don't go to a China Grill Mgmt restaurant because they care about good food; they go for an upscale theme park experience, or maybe just because they've heard of it. Especially in the case of Kobe Club, where the entire purpose is a flashy but commodity menu item costing $150 per person, people will go only as long as it remains a scene. At this point you can get Wagyu steaks anywhere. The danger of a zero star Bruni review was not so much that people would think Kobe Club is bad, but that they would stop thinking about it at all. In New York, at least, Chodorow had become a total has-been; after The Restaurant and the ensuing lawsuits and Brasserios blew over, you pretty much forgot he even existed. Opening up Kobe Club didn't get him back in the public eye, but kicking up a shitstorm about Bruni will, and the new blog means he can keep it up indefinitely. I think this has a huge payoff, for Kobe Club and the whole brand. One thing I do agree with is that this incident has ratified Frank Bruni in my eyes, if for somewhat different reasons. Being the lover of shitstorms that I am, I actually clicked through to read those three positive Kobe Club reviews, as well as searched out the Steve Cuozzo column from which Chodorow plucked the dubious assertion that Quality Meats is filled with Kobe Club rejects. Wow. Reading these four Kobe Club writeups, it is striking how much better, and how much more professional, Bruni's review is. Not that Bruni is a fantastic dining critic; more that these guys are hacks. Regarding Greene, Mariani and Lape, the "important" "respected" critics who gave such positive notices: I really used to agree with Fat Guy that whether the reviewer got comped was irrelevant to the quality of the review. After reading those? Not so sure.

Oh, come on--what's the point of a "most annoying" thread if we can't bitch and whine and make unsupported generalizations?? Having said that, mine happen to be correct. Note that this does not imply that the 1,537,195th most restaurant-savvy Manhattanite is more discerning than the most sophisticated Brooklyn resident, or whatever HdB took my personal attack on her restaurant-going chops to be. Actually the antecedent of my and Nathan's "they" was "partisans of The Grocery," a group that, though at one time quite vocal, probably includes only a few thousand of the 2,465,326 folks in the borough. Of course, more generally it was indeed meant to touch upon a narrow class of Brooklynites, the sort of yuppie folks whose cohort forms the backbone of the restaurant dining class over here in Manhattan (but does not actually constitute all 1,537,195 of us! And many Manhattan yuppies don't know anything about food either!!). Broadly going by neighborhood (more generalizations!), this basically tends to mean Williamsburg, whose restaurants are obviously not even worth talking about (although Bedford Cheese Shop is nice); Brooklyn Heights, which amazingly seems to have been zoned restaurant-free (how did they manage that?); and Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, home to a relatively visible number of deluded residents who not infrequently make claims that their restaurant neighborhoods are equal to the best of Manhattan. Claims I find annoying. But Smith Street and Park Slope are not, in fact, strong restaurant neighborhoods in the context of New York City or even of Brooklyn. I say this not, by the way, on the basis of having eaten at every notable restaurant in each neighborhood, but on the basis of having eaten at a handful and comparing the claims made on their behalf to the reality I saw. The Grocery is a particularly illuminating example. Here is a restaurant that is frequently cited as evidence that Brooklyn restaurants are every bit as good as Manhattan's, but in reality it is not very good at all. Not only that, but it is overpraised in a way that reveals ignorance and unsophistication on the part of those involved. Conversely, Franny's is a truly excellent restaurant, but its reputation is less than it deserves. Reading through online comments one frequently finds gems like people complaining that $13 is an outrageous and insulting amount to charge for a pizza (this one is pretty much a constant), that $4.50 is an outrageous amount to charge for a beer, that the pizzas aren't sliced, that their crust was charred, that it's no better than the pizzeria on their corner, etc. (Rarely do you find someone who has managed to order something other than pizza.) Of course, there are plenty of positive comments as well, but the overall opinion is clearly mixed, and the comments against are ignorant and stupid. There are many ignorant and stupid negative comments about great Manhattan restaurants on Citysearch too, but the Franny's comments are notably stupider, more ignorant, and more frequent. Or take Frankie's Spuntino, which opened last year a couple blocks south of my apartment. In the context of similarly targeted Italian restaurants in the lower East Village, and the general standard of restaurants on Clinton St., the food served there is an embarrassment. But it is apparently the exact same food they serve at Frankie's 457 on Court St. And Frankie's 457 is apparently beloved by local residents. Now, I have not eaten at Frankie's 457 myself. Nor have I interviewed a statistically valid sample of local residents. But I can ascertain online that the menus are, in fact, identical, and I can know that by reputation and by the fact that they opened up a second outpost in Manhattan it is in fact beloved by local residents. The fact pattern is clear enough for me to safely conclude that local residents are idiots. I can go on. Mayur, I'm glad your sample set gives Franny's the love it deserves; my (admittedly not that large) sample set of acquaintances living within half a mile of Franny's tend to have barely heard of it, and on my (inexcusably infrequent) visits I have never had a problem getting in. This is not to say it's not popular, although if by your own admission it takes mobs of Manhattanites to make a place that small and that superior to the surrounding options full, that is frankly pathetic. (For what it's worth, one comment that has not shown up online since mid-2004 is that the waits are too long.) Look. There are plenty of great reasons to live in Brooklyn but let me just suggest that actual. living. space. tends to correlate with an actual kitchen and often an actual family, both of which anti-correlate with frequent, serious restaurant going. (Normalized for degree of caring about food. In case it is not clear, I am claiming that Brooklynites may be more likely to cook, and Manhattanites more likely to go to restaurants or order delivery. Please note, however, that this does not mean that no one in Manhattan can cook, or that the 2,465,326th most frequent cook in Brooklyn cooks more than the most frequent cook in Manhattan.) Of course, just because these generalizations are not iron-clad rules does not mean they are not important. The dining patterns of a neighborhood's residents, and the discernment of their restaurant tastes, eventually determines the restaurants that open and thrive there. (Of course the arrows of causation go both ways and the interaction is contingent and complex.) Yes, there are plenty of terrible, overpopular restaurants in Manhattan, too... ...but those are just full of people from New Jersey. All of that said, I did not actually intend to turn this entertaining thread into Brooklyn Mobilize 2007!! vs. Manhattan Snobs Unite. I only intended to note that The Grocery sucks.

It's that, but it's also a consequence of self-sorting. If they were knowledgeable restaurant goers, they would pay the extra rent to live in Manhattan, or the extra time to eat out in Manhattan. Since they don't understand what makes a restaurant comparatively good or bad, they end up yapping about places like The Grocery because it fits into their preferred narrative of Manhattan is a waste of money and everything in Brooklyn is just as good but undervalued by snobby Manhattanites. (This is also, of course, why Zagat ratings are useless--because Blue Water Grill is rated by the sort of people who eat at Blue Water Grill.) A further consequence of this is that they don't understand or appreciate the truly superlative restaurants in Brooklyn. (I'm thinking primarily of Franny's, but I also get the sense that the Brooklyn chauvinists in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, etc. are the least likely people in the city to schlep out to Di Fara's or Totonno's or explore the great ethnic cuisines in the less accessible reaches of their borough.)