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New York's finest restaurants


Wilfrid

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it appears to me that decent to very good restaurants that have something to offer and are well-managed are, in the main, getting through the economic downturn rather well.

I think businesses that have something to offer and are well run are generally going to do better than those that are not. They should be at least if there were any justice, although I would never count on too much justice. I often wonder about appearances though. It's always hard to tell which restaurants are staying afloat on their business and which are staying afloat on their investors. This begs the real question however, which is what are they offering and what does the paying customer want to buy at the high end in NY?

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

Recent WorldTable posts include: comments about reporting on Michelin stars in The NY Times, the NJ proposal to ban foie gras, Michael Ruhlman's comments in blogs about the NJ proposal and Bill Buford's New Yorker article on the Food Network.

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Having had dinner at Trio in Evanston, Illionois last night (review to come later today,) you couldn't find a place that had a "sharper edge." And furthermore, it was completely full and the crowd of people eating this totally atypical cuisine looked fairly middle of the road to me. No signs of maniacal foodies. Simple, suburban looking folk allowing thermselves to be fed unusual pairings and preparations. That NYC (in fact the NY metro area) doesn't have a restaurant of this type amazes me and underscores the uniformity of the cuisine there. Again, Paris doesn't have a place like it either. That NYC and Paris do not have anything like it can either be a coincidence, or it can be a harbinger that their culinary dominance is ending.

I think that we are giving short shrift to economics here. In order to have a place like Trio, which I guess the Paul Liebrandt restaurant on Central Park South was similar too, you need an investor to believe in the concept as a money maker. That's a tough one because it's risky. Bux mentioned Danny Meyer. Well one thing you can say about Danny Meyer is that he typifies the type of restaraunteur that investors are looking for. Safe, expanding the middle to include new diners. And that's why the food tastes the way it does at his restaurants. And while expanding the middle might be a good thing on a socio-economic level, it's bad for the people who want to eat cutting edge cuisine. So we are left with those who purvey top quality ingredients in simple yet perfect presentations as our standard bearers. So you get Craft and Jewl Bako as the preferred places to dine. And while I certainly enjoy dining at places like that or in that manner, neither of those places express a unique cuisine. And I don't really care how we get there. Whether it's through Wilfrid's suggestion of including harder to understand meats in the cuisine (more about this later) or whether it's a simple cuisine based on balance like Passard's, I want a chef with a personality so when I eat there he is nmaking an individualized statement. That's the thing that is getting harder and harder to find. And in some instances (Daniel Boulud most notably,) personality has almost been completely replaced by a certainly safety and uniformity which is great for that upper middle but boring for me.

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I deliberately omitted economic factors in my post just above, but since Bux has raised the bursting of the economic bubble, I wonder if there is an aspect that was part of the the bubble itself. I have been thinking if the quick, easy money that people were making, illusory as it may have been, created a mentality in some of the restaurant investors that also emphasized quick returns.

I think the bubble that spread from tech to other areas in the market reached contagion proportions and spread into everything from building contractors to restaurants.

I'm happy that that phase seems to be over. There's nothing like a good shakeout to get rid mouths that didn't know shit to begin with and charged way more than what they were worth.

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I had missed this thread and can only plead lingering debilitation from the Chez Bruce lunch on Friday. And I am generally reluctant to post on the New York board, since I know very little about this important restaurant scene.

Nonetheless here are two comments. First, and probably obvious, the form and substance of innovation can be wildly different. I recently posted (click here) a review of a London restaurant, Thyme, that had been enthusiastically praised when it opened a year ago. Its menu is filled with foams, raviolis and stacks of this and that. We kicked off with a beetroot-jelly-and-horseradish-foam that, I am sure, was supposed to be reminiscent of El Bulli or the Fat Duck or some such place. Thyme delivers food in the ‘tapas’ or ‘Club Gascon’ form that Steve praises. But there was absolutely no ‘wow’ factor present.

Second, on innovation and economics. For the most part, large and established companies struggle to develop and commercialise major innovations. This is a sweeping statement, and of course exceptions exist, but I think the facts largely bear it out. General Electric deliberately avoids ‘high velocity’ businesses, ones where products change quickly or where innovation rather than disciplined execution is the key to success. Xerox developed many important innovations – the personal computer, the mouse, the graphical/windowed user interface, the local area network – only to see them rubbished by ‘the toner heads’, as the scientists at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center referred to executives in the mother company, and taken up by other firms. Similar stories could be told about IBM, Microsoft, and so on.

The most intuitive explanation of this phenomenon has been given by Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, in The Innovator’s Dilemma. He argues that the largest and most successful companies will concentrate on the needs of their largest and most important customers. Hence they will focus on improving the same product, even to the point where it is ‘better’ than anything even their most demanding customers will want.

An example here would be Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet software. In its latest incarnation, this has so many bells, whistles and add-ins that it’s hard to imagine even the geekiest analyst wanting to use them all. Perhaps in the restaurant world a similar example would be one of those Ducasse restaurants where you are given a choice of elaborate pens with which to sign the bill. Yes, you can add in new features and new options, but you aren’t really improving or changing the core product very much.

Christensen contrasts this with what he calls ‘disruptive technologies’. These are innovations that, when they first emerge, look to be beneath the notice of a given company’s demanding customers. Example here would be the early ink-jet printers, which were slow, expensive (per page printed), and, by contrast to the more expensive laser printers, highly unreliable. What the laser printer manufacturers didn’t spot was that ink-jet technology brought printing within the reach of a new group of customers. Disruptive technologies start out below what a large firm’s customers will accept, but rapidly improve in quality until they start to displace the older technologies or products. For example, there are some very interesting products and services emerging in economically deprived environments like India … but we in London and New York don’t even see them – yet.

A related problem, and one I won’t go into at the same length, is that all firms find it hard to ‘play two games at once’, because elements of a firm’s systems tend to reinforce one another. Note that this is a good thing! It is what gives a successful company or restaurant its particular character, and it makes successful firms hard to copy. But it also locks them into patterns that are hard to break.

The big cities (Paris, London, New York) must be problematic for ‘radical innovation’ in catering because the base cost of operating a fine restaurant must be enormous, and the owners therefore have little choice but to stick with the tried and true, the dishes that their regular customers demand. As I understand it, The French Laundry started out on an economic shoestring. I would guess that they found it easier to innovate in the Napa Valley, where the ‘staying alive’ cost was lower than in New York. If you agree with what I’ve suggested above, we would expect Keller’s New York restaurant to do little that is truly new.

Jonathan Day

"La cuisine, c'est quand les choses ont le go�t de ce qu'elles sont."

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When I began dining at great restaurants, you needed to really splurge to get a great meal in NY: Cote Basque, Lutece, Four Seasons, Quilted Giraffe.

No longer. Restaurants like Etats Unis, Tocqueville, Annisa, Blue Hill, Il Buco, Red Cat, Prune, Tasting Room etc. simply did not exist in NY.

Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I do not need to challenged when I dine out. In general, I look for restaurants that are going to serve me a good meal, made with better ingredients than I could source given my work schedule and cooked at least as well as I could do on my own. I want a restaurant to make me comfortable, both in their choice of furniture and lighting, and in the tone of the service. And I want a wine list that is both interesting and well-priced.

Twenty years ago, you couldn't do that reasonably in NYC. So I for one think the restaurant scene is better today than it has ever been, even if the big boys at the top are not particularly on form these days (I can't judge, having not been to a NYT 4 star in the past year).

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On a personal level, with all the restaurants that opened on the lower east side over the last 3-4 years, you don't have any real trailblazers there. Yes I like Prune and I used to really like 71 Clinton when Wylie was cooking there but considering the lower rents, the area could have become a hotbed of innovation. Instead, it's more about trendy and less about creativity.

Mogsob - Well I don't see what eating at Annisa and Blue Hill has to do with the high end being on top form including being innovative in their cuisine. Can't those things both exist? I eat at Blue Hill probably as much as anyone else and with all the great meals they serve me, it doesn't replace the fact that I had to go to Illinois to eat a cutting edge meal.

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What does fine food at Blue Hill's price have to do with innovation at the top? My guess is that the diners most receptive to innovation are not the most well financed. The most well heeled, with great exception to be sure, are generally the older and the more conservative as well as the ones with the most well formed palates. In this sense well formed may also signify set in their ways and less adaptable. It's easier to innovate if the clientele is receptive and if the financial pressures fo the business are less. With each post we solidify the reasons you might not expect risk taking at the top right now.

As for the east side downtown, be it the llower east side, east village or whatever, I haven't seen that much risk taking, not have prices necessarily reflected the location. Then again is there "cheap" real estate in NYC?

It's worth noting that not everyone in this thread is looking to be challenged. A good part of the criticism is directed at the similarity in menus and food offered. An unwillingness to take risks may be seen here as well.

Clayton Christensen's explanation of how businesses work sounds very plausible. I'm certainly not an expert in the field and there are always going to be rogue companies (in the good sense) that break the mold and succeed, but what JD said makes a lot of sense.

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

Recent WorldTable posts include: comments about reporting on Michelin stars in The NY Times, the NJ proposal to ban foie gras, Michael Ruhlman's comments in blogs about the NJ proposal and Bill Buford's New Yorker article on the Food Network.

My mailbox is full. You may contact me via worldtable.com.

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My guess is that the diners most receptive to innovation are not the most well financed.

Why do you say that? The young are typically the biggest consumers of the modern. It's their generational expression that makes a school of cooking take hold. There is no shortage of young, well-to-do people in this town. The original restaurants cited in this thread are all a product of a demographic that was between 25 and 45 when they first started. It's just now the demograhic is 40 and 60 and both are getting a bit long in the tooth. But where are 25-40 year olds expressing their own generation through food?

It's worth noting that not everyone in this thread is looking to be challenged. A good part of the criticism is directed at the similarity in menus and food offered. An unwillingness to take risks may be seen here as well.

While I understand the intent of this position, I find it circular in its logic. Change means challenge whether people like it or not.

Edited by Steve Plotnicki (log)
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While I understand the intent of this position, I find it circular in its logic. Change means challenge whether people like it or not.

Does it?

Change means change.

Whether it is presented as a challenge (by the "cuisiner") or met as one (by a patron) depends upon many factors. Change can be presented invintingly or in many other ways. It can be met with wonder or beetled brow.

"I've caught you Richardson, stuffing spit-backs in your vile maw. 'Let tomorrow's omelets go empty,' is that your fucking attitude?" -E. B. Farnum

"Behold, I teach you the ubermunch. The ubermunch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the ubermunch shall be the meaning of the earth!" -Fritzy N.

"It's okay to like celery more than yogurt, but it's not okay to think that batter is yogurt."

Serving fine and fresh gratuitous comments since Oct 5 2001, 09:53 PM

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Regarding challenge, I think Wilfird had made the case for some good old fashioned cooking that is no longer fashionable. Since it's not here, I suppose it would be change to bring it back, but my point is that offering it may hold the same risk as offering El Bulli style food, but the challenge is quite different.

The young are typically the biggest consumers of the modern and there is no shortage of young, well-to-do people in this town, but I think well to do people make up a higher percentage of the middle aged population. NY has a very transient young population who settle for a while after college. They socialize a lot, but the majority have middling incomes. Many are paying off college loans. These people often leave town when they get married and have a family and they often leave because it costs too much to live in NY. I know of few people who come to NY and squander their fortunes here. Thus I think there are more wealthy older New Yorkers than younger ones. I could be wrong, but I've told you why I think that way.

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

Recent WorldTable posts include: comments about reporting on Michelin stars in The NY Times, the NJ proposal to ban foie gras, Michael Ruhlman's comments in blogs about the NJ proposal and Bill Buford's New Yorker article on the Food Network.

My mailbox is full. You may contact me via worldtable.com.

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Wilfrid, old fart that he is, is doing something that I find to be fairly typical. He is articulating the old as the new. Retro might be fashionable, but only for a moment. And even if it is fashionable it certainly is not new. In the music industry, every few years some guy with a lot of money comes along and believes that you can get rich by releasing CD's by all the famous bands that were dropped by the big labels. But this guy soon finds out that there is limited money to be made. That's because the big labels dropped the bands because they didn't sell anymore. And that's what would happen in this town if a place opened up and the cuisine was based on game, offal etc. It would probably work (if it was done well) but it wouldn't be a gold mine. It wouldn't be something that compared to St. John because there is a tradition in England of eating game and offal that doesn't exist here. Here, City Hall is probably as close as we are going to come to that type of restaurant.

Challenge could, but doesn't have to mean new ingredients. It can be the same old boring ingredients but paired and prepared differently. I didn't find any unusual ingredients at Arpege, what I found was extreme care given to balancing ingredients. I wish I could find someone in NYC who cooked at that level and with the same amount of care.

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I haven't seen the NYPL exhibit yet, but when I first got wind of it I had hopes that it would influence the current NY restaurant scene. Steve P., I don't think Wilfrid is neccesarily suggesting re-hashing crusty old classics, but, perhaps using the old as an influence, the way, say, Japan, was an influence. I also agree with Wilf in my boredom with what seems like the same 6 proteins. Is it more radical to change the garnish on a rare-seared tuna than it would be to serve something besides rare-seared tuna? When was the last time anyone saw turtle on a menu? Tongue? If you look at old menus you will see that NYers used to eat this stuff. I think tongue would "challenge" more diners than lemongrass foam at this point.

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I hate tongue.

Wilfrid does not want "essence of partridge" on his plate. He wants to gnaw at tough to chew game that has lots of flavor. That isn't the trend in cooking even if they were to veer away from the same six proteins.

If anyone hasn't noticed, meat is very much on it's way out as an important course in haute cuisine. To me it's a function of the technique the chefs want to apply. You simply cannot manipulate meat in the same way you can manipulate vegetables, or even fish. Meat is meat and is usually best when unadorned. This weekend I was served squab, partridge, venison and bison along with beef and lamb. Surprisingly, the beef was by far the best of the meats. It was slices of the cap of a prime rib and it had so much flavor we couldn't believe it. They just laid the slices of beef out and covered it with superthin slices of white truffle which were amazingly subtle.

And the partridge was great as well because it was wood grilled and they served it with cubes of golden beet and red beet and the smokiness from the wood played a good foil to the sweetness of the beets. Point is, it didn't make a difference what meat was being used as long as it was flavorful and it was paired with something that accented its flavor. But when the meats weren't super flavorful, I would probably have enjoyed them more if they were simply roasted.

The problem lies not in the proteins, the problem lies in the restaurants. I make a better steak at home then 95% of the restaurants in NYC. That shouldn't be the case. And indeed it wasn't where they served me that cap of prime rib because they got what I consider to be the appropriate amount of flavor out of the meat, something that doesn't happen often at the upper level in NYC.

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I hate tongue.

Then I don't even know why I discuss food with you. :raz:

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

Recent WorldTable posts include: comments about reporting on Michelin stars in The NY Times, the NJ proposal to ban foie gras, Michael Ruhlman's comments in blogs about the NJ proposal and Bill Buford's New Yorker article on the Food Network.

My mailbox is full. You may contact me via worldtable.com.

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Steve,

You should be a culinary trendspotter, then you could publish Plotnicki's "What's Hot, What's Not" chart like in Vanity Fair.

Talk of trends, or what's hot, whether or not meat is "in" or "out" is about as relevant to what makes a restaurant good as your disdain for tongue. Kiwi fruit was "hot" once, and people used to think oysters ond lobsters were plebe food. Who cares? Meat is not going anywhere just because Alain Passard says it is. Some hot (Probably French, maybe Spanish) chef will blow your (Steve P.) mind with the latest "innovation" in Snipe cookery at the newest home for the most cutting edge food, and then, meat will be back.

Back to the topic. Why does high-end cuisine seem a little dull in NY? I think it's been a while since any one new with any serious talent has opened a restaurant here (Alain Ducasse doesn't count as new). All the other four-stars have been here forever. Union Pacific was exciting when it opened but is fairly established by now. Liebrandt didn't catch on. Peacock Alley closed. For whatever reason (economy, chef as celebrity, lack of home-grown talent) the exciting new chefs seem to be springing up elsewhere (Illinois!).

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Most interesting.

No, I don't want tough partridge. I don't cook it tough at home, and I don't want a restaurant t cook it tough for me. At the same time, I don't want it turned into baby food. The texture question is more subtle than that, as Mr P. well knows. Ironically, the sear-it-and-bung-it-in-the-oven game at Lespinasse last week presented a challenge to the cutlery in the way that a well-made salmis or civet would not have.

Am I asking for retro cuisine? Let's be honest, a part of me is, and I accept I'm probably in a minority there. But even if we're not going to turn the clock back, I think it's worth contemplating the curious fact that New York restaurants today are serving a much narrower range of food and using a much more limited set of techniques than the restaurants of thirty, forty, even fifty years ago.

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I've had incredible wood oven roasted partridge stuffed with polenta and pancetta at the River Cafe in London,and I've been served precious little glasses of parmesan foam and other geegaws elsewhere.Guess which of the two that I'd crawl over broken glass to enjoy again...me too.

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JG=Britney Spears

Daniel Boulud=Justin Timberlake

Alain Ducasse=Christina Aguilera

David Bouley –10 years= Madonna 5-7 years ago

Dinner at Lespinasse=Listening to Crosby, Still, Nash (and optionally Young)

Let me just say that after two recent meals (in the last 2 weeks) at ADNY and Daniel, both of which had memorable moments but were essentially ploddingly boring, have convinced me that eating out at the high end in NYC is indeed damn dull at this moment in time. Atlas is closed. And Town deserves one more shot. And while I love eating once a month at Jewel Bako and Babbo is addictive, it has been a long time since I have walked away from a meal in NYC genuinely excited or moved by the total experience. This may or may not be function of my own jaded experiences, but everytime I eat at Daniel, JB and their ilk, I keep thinking that the scale of restaurants is a critical element in making a meal interesting. I am not saying that this is cause, but it is a factor. What if Daniel had a fourth restaurant where he charged 2x and served 40 people a night and one had the table for the entire night, instead of 200+. In the post bubble NY environs (the residential real estate bubble seems to be deflating as we speak), this is probably not economically viable, but it is something I would like to see.

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Also, Wilfred its been my recent experience that while it is hard to come by more unconventional cuts of food and meat (offal, feet etc.) at high end dining establishments, its not as if these "odd" dishes cannot be had in the city. In fact, they are quite common at most of the Asian restaurants in Queens (Iwahan in a recent meal) and a hotpot get together in Queens among a lot of Mandarin speaking people presented me with tastes of duck's blood, chicken feet, pig's feet and pig's intestine. The last being the most impressively yummy.

Edited by Mao (log)
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What if Daniel had a fourth restaurant where he charged 2x and served 40 people a night and one had the table for the entire night, instead of 200+.

Boy would I welcome this. But the chances of it happening are slim to none. Because in addition to the scale of the restaurant, the chef actually needs to be behind the stoves cooking almost all of the time. Not "executive cheffing" as has become the rage in chefland.

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"executive cheffing" as has become the rage in chefland.

I couldn't agree with Steve more. My husband calls this "generic cuisine" or "paint by the numbers food" --- boring, not well-crafted, minus the care and precision of fine dining food. But, if you ask most chefs, they would opt for the one seating, 40 seat restaurant where they could actually be the chef de cuisine instead of the "executive chef overseer."

But I don't honestly think that innovation for innovation sake is the answer. For example, although this really belongs on the Spanish Board, it seems to fit here in the context of the current discussion of lack of innovation in New York as opposed to Spain etc.

In the current issue of Food and Wine, they mention, Aitor Elizegui who is one of the most progressive chefs in Spain. (His restaurant is located in Zamudio, a suburb of Bilbao.)

Some of the items on his degustation menu are:

spaghetti alla carbonara - actually "translucent strands of squid with oat-bran foam and bacon"

"onion ice cream with potato foam, caviar, seaweed tempura and pig's skin"

He even uses Juanola, a menthol cough drop in his cuisine. The article further mentions that if you are a timid diner you can opt for a relatively tame dish like "chicken with licorice foam."

I, for one, would not like to see this become the newest rage of four star fine dining in New York or anywhere else.

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