Why New York's Not Hot

[Megan Blocker]

An interesting post on Grub Street yesterday aims to identify the reasons why the NYC dining scene seems a bit, well, dull these days, at least from a buzz perspective.

People are still clawing their way into Waverly Inn, and if you enjoy offal products done up in an elegant, Asian-fusion style, Momofuku Ssäm Bar is the place for you. But the grandiose cycle of openings which began with the arrival of Masa and Per Se at the Time Warner Center four years ago and reached a crescendo early last year with the giant Meat District extravaganzas like Buddakan and Del Posto has more or less petered out.

Among other things, he notes "the end of haute cuisine," the fact that "the city costs too damn much," and "the Vegas effect."

Have a read over here, and chime in with your thoughts on Platt's hypotheses...

[Nathan]

I think he's on to something.

I think that Ssam Bar, Bouley Upstairs and the like are the harbingers of a new trend...but it'll be another two to five years before that will fully emerge.

that all the avant garde chefs are in Chicago has been pointed out for years. I think part of the problem is that the high end of the NY dining scene is so highly dependent upon expense account diners and tourists (who at that price point tend to be old and stuffy).

the high start-up costs are definitely a massive factor.

[BryanZ]

I think Grant Achatz said it himself when he was like, "Once the press gets hold of something and run with it, it's out of your hands. There are really only two modern restaurants in Chicago." Modern cooking remains a boutique thing except for a handful of restaurants across the country and their somewhat more numerous copycats. I think the lack of modern restaurants in NYC has more to do with tastes than the fact that Chicago has them "all."

What I found most interesting--and this is tangentially related to the somewhat off-topic discussion that's going on in the Ramsay thread regarding the best restaurants in the country--is that you'd have few people who argue that Savoy and Mansion are among the best, if not the very top, French restaurants in the country. It used to be that NYC was the bastion for this kind of thing, but, as Nathan points out and has been discussed here at length, that kind of dining just isn't flying in NYC anymore. Is it really the end of era or just a dry spell?

[Nathan]

Chicago still has twice as many as NY!

but it's really the fact that Alinea is there and full every night that creates the image. Alinea is at the same price point as Per Se (after tip) but serving challenging, hypermodern cuisine. Alinea plays it safer than WD-50 (which is definitely a bit more more avant garde than Alinea) but at a radically higher price point....and it explicitly follows the four-star model....in terms of service and decor (and its policy on customer attire for that matter)...I don't see that working in NY right now.

[raji]

So the NY DOES have plenty of avante garde restaurants, but none on the scale of Alinea?

If I want to get foams, spheres, smokes, and all sorts of mixtures of savory and dessert ingredients, I feel like I have plenty of places I can go...

[Nathan]

No. NY has one. Chicago has two. (in the strict sense that Bryanz is using.)

dessert bars don't count.

yeah, NY has plenty of restaurants that are influenced by hypermodern food....but so does Chicago and any other major restaurant city.

[Fat Guy]

I'm not sure what Chicago has to do with the hotness issue. Neither Alinea nor Moto is hot anymore. They're in cool, established middle age now. If there were other similar restaurants opening in Chicago but not here, it might have some relevance to the issue under discussion here. But that's not happening.

Anyway, I think Platt is overreaching. It's safe to say that there are fewer hot fine-dining openings this year than in the past several years. At the same time, there have been hot openings along the Momofuku, Bouley Upstairs and Degustation lines, as well as Inn at Little West 12th, Waverly Inn, a number of interesting cocktail lounges, dessert-bars, etc. So it's not a question of hot or not hot. It's a question of what's hot. Platt is saying the scene overall is not hot. That's incorrect. Fine dining, at this moment, is not hot (though not as cool as he makes it out to be by trying to bury Ramsay and Robuchon as an aside), whereas haute-cheap, gastropub, cocktails, dessert bars, etc., are hot.

[raji]

No.  NY has one.  Chicago has two.  (in the strict sense that Bryanz is using.)

dessert bars don't count.

yeah, NY has plenty of restaurants that are influenced by hypermodern food....but so does Chicago and any other major restaurant city.

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Well, I don't concur that Wylie Dufresne is the ONLY one.

At the same time, I don't worry about it too much because a lot of the modern cooking is happening at what would be considered "ethnic" restaurants. What Seki and Gari do would be considered very very haute in the world of sushi.... devi and tabla for that matter... i guess this also goes back to the definition of "haute', does it have to invovle spherification and fancy machinery...?

[BryanZ]

Within the context of this discussion, yeah, sort of. I think NYC may be at the forefront of updated/modern takes on ethnic (less-represented) cuisines.

[Megan Blocker]

Is it really the end of era or just a dry spell?

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I think this really speaks to Platt's last comment about burning the brush to clear the way...it's almost certainly not the end of fine dining in New York, but it's probably the end of its current era/incarnation. How it will appear in its next form is an interesting topic for debate.

[raji]

Within the context of this discussion, yeah, sort of.

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That's too bad...as it becomes less and less about the food... served in a sugar-glass test-tube or not...

[Megan Blocker]

Within the context of this discussion, yeah, sort of.

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That's too bad...as it becomes less and less about the food... served in a sugar-glass test-tube or not...

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But maybe that's what's happening - that it's becoming more about the food and less about the setting and trappings?

Or is that too simplistic?

[Fat Guy]

There are also some contradictions or at least tensions there, for example Platt says:

But the grandiose cycle of openings which began with the arrival of Masa and Per Se at the Time Warner Center four years ago and reached a crescendo early last year with the giant Meat District extravaganzas like Buddakan and Del Posto has more or less petered out.

and

Sure, there have a been a few tepid revivals (the Russian Tea Room), and bigfoot out-of-town chefs like Joël Robuchon and Gordon Ramsay have opened franchise outlets.

.....

The great super-chefs are moving on. Jean-Georges is pondering closing restaurants these days, not opening them, and Batali’s beaming visage has lately been replaced on the Food Network by the low-rent cheeriness of Rachael Ray.

So on the one hand Batali is irrelevant, but on the other hand Batali's restaurant, Del Posto, represents the crescendo of New York's hotness. On the one hand, out-of-towners like Ramsay and Robuchon are irrelevant, but on the other hand out-of-towners like Thomas Keller (Per Se), Masa and Stephen Starr (Buddakan) -- three out of four of his examples of the old hotness are imports -- represent the crescendo of New York's hotness.

To me, that sort of writing and thinking constitutes twisting the facts to support your argument, as opposed to building an argument from facts. The reality is that the globalization of the restaurant business is something that started long ago and will continue long into the future. Ducasse will open a new place in New York this year, and maybe another in another year or two. Danny Meyer just opened in Tokyo. That's the way it is these days. And while Batali and Jean-Georges may not be in expansion mode this year -- at least not in New York -- plenty of other chefs and restaurateurs are. I mean, ask Laurent Tourondel or David Chang -- today's "super-chefs" (to use Platt's silly designation) -- if their era is ending, or just beginning. These are guys who have to beat investors away with a stick because they don't have the time to open all the restaurants that people are begging them to open.

[Dave H]

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.)

[Sneakeater]

Wait a minute. In what way isn't head cheese offal?

As for sweetbreads, it sounds to me like you're such a hardcore offalhead (that's a compliment) that you push the mainstream into the margin. (Meaning that most people would consider sweetbreads quintessential offal.)

Edited April 27, 2007 by Sneakeater (log)

[Fat Guy]

But isn't offal by definition whatever is not in the mainstream? It's the waste, the by-product, the trimmings. When sweetbreads cost more per pound than tenderloin, can they really be called offal?

[Sneakeater]

I'm going to quote this definition because it supports me:

http://www.epicurious.com/cooking/how_to/f...y/entry?id=5063

I'm also going to admit that if you go onto the net you'll find several definitions that tend to support FG and DaveH. (I have to say that the idea of offal as a mutable category had never occurred to me.)

Edited April 27, 2007 by Sneakeater (log)

[Dave H]

Wait a minute.  In what way isn't head cheese offal?

As for sweetbreads, it sounds to me that you're such a  hardcore offalhead (that's a compliment) that you're pushing the mainstream into the margin.  (Meaning that most people would consider sweetbreads quintessential offal.)

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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.

Edited April 27, 2007 by Dave H (log)

[BryanZ]

This discussion could only happen on eG.

But yeah, labels aren't all that useful, for restaurants or animal parts. I think most people would agree there are degress of offal-dom. Foie gras is offal, its still a luxury item. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Which makes one question why New York has so few places that serve offal besides truly ethnic eateries. I'm guessing for all of NYC's cosmopolitan talk, it's never adopted the "weird" food of even "mainstream" countries like England, France, Spain, Japan, China, etc.

Of course, you'll have to forgive my usage of the words weird and mainstream. They're just semantic labels after all.

Edited April 27, 2007 by BryanZ (log)

[Nathan]

well..of course the nomenclature is

a. elastic; and

b. context-dependent.

that doesn't make it meaningless.

and offal can still be mainstream and still be offal (today).

one of the world's great offal traditions is found in Lazio...cause between the regular aristocracy and the Vatican aristocracy...all the good cuts of meat were taken.

but today, things like pajata are a fancied-up delicacy...but it's still offal.

(too bad we don't have any place like Checchino dal 1887 in NY)

Edited April 27, 2007 by Nathan (log)

[slkinsey]

But isn't offal by definition whatever is not in the mainstream? It's the waste, the by-product, the trimmings. When sweetbreads cost more per pound than tenderloin, can they really be called offal?

The 1828 Webster's dictionary defines offal as: "Waste meat; the parts of an animal butchered which are unfit for use or rejected."

The current (10th) edition of Webster's has it as: "1 : the waste or by-product of a process: as a : trimmings of a hide b : the by-products of milling used especially for stock feeds c : the viscera and trimmings of a butchered animal removed in dressing : VARIETY MEAT"

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the word origins as: "1398, "waste parts, refuse," from off + fall; the notion being that which "falls off" the butcher's block; perhaps a translation of M.Du. afval."

[Megan Blocker]

I have a feeling Platt is referring to his own review of Momofuku Ssam, specifically this bit:

Chang is a card-carrying member of what one of my dining friends calls the “Refined Meathead” school of cooking. Meathead chefs have a fondness for pork products and for offal (“We do not serve vegetarian-friendly items,” says the menu at Momofuku Ssäm Bar), and the best of them, including Chang, have a knack for creating big, addictive flavor combinations that get under your skin.

So he says offal, but he really means pork, liver, headcheese - all things unapologetically MEATY.

[raji]

But isn't offal by definition whatever is not in the mainstream? It's the waste, the by-product, the trimmings. When sweetbreads cost more per pound than tenderloin, can they really be called offal?

The 1828 Webster's dictionary defines offal as: "Waste meat; the parts of an animal butchered which are unfit for use or rejected."

The current (10th) edition of Webster's has it as: "1 : the waste or by-product of a process: as a : trimmings of a hide b : the by-products of milling used especially for stock feeds c : the viscera and trimmings of a butchered animal removed in dressing : VARIETY MEAT"

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the word origins as: "1398, "waste parts, refuse," from off + fall; the notion being that which "falls off" the butcher's block; perhaps a translation of M.Du. afval."

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According to these definitions, offal is what goes into hot dogs, mortadella and the like....

Meanwhile I think what most people seek out on offal is organs.

I just got back from a few weeks from Japan so I'll relay this: in Japan, the organs are a very popular part of the cow and very readily served and ordered at most Yakiniku (Japanified restaurants of which there is at least one per train stop. They are collectively referred to as HORUMON... hormones. Here's a handy guide.

http://www2.health.ne.jp/images/LVL3/3000653/hormone_man.gif

The the stomach, intestines, heart, liver, kidneys, and more are all served up sauced and ready to grill by yourself. They're usually pretty delicious. So add another country where organs are not offal...

[Fat Guy]

Okay, this definitely needs its own topic. Starting one now.

[Fat Guy]

For discussion of the meaning of the term "offal," please see this new topic.