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New York's finest restaurants


Wilfrid

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...my question is whether the ability of some of these restaurants to deliver the spectacular, occasionally, and the high quality, regularly, has significantly declined without their reputations yet suffering.

Maybe the problem is (and I say this entirely without sarcasm) that the "gastronomic elite" who give these restaurants their reputation are so small, and therefore eat so infrequently there, that the reputation lingers on for lack of proper re-appraisal.

Or perhaps (and now I rescind my previous parenthetical qualification) that elite feels that to rescind their past approval would be a form of self-criticism, therefore they simply decline to do so.

Perhaps the problem lies with the fact that there are an increasing number of high end restaurants and the "elite" few are not able to be re-reviewed in a timely fashion.

I think the one exception was Ruth Reichl's re-review of Union Pacific which occured less than a year (if memory serves) from her original one......

No one with the ability to reach the dining public at large (save e-gullet) is able to follow up on these places and give them a much need kick in the toque to keep them on top of their game.

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All true, Bux.

But your perspective is wider, and if I may, longer than mine.

Longer anyway.
I don't know whether the cooking at Delmonico in 1902
but not that much longer. :biggrin:

My experience may be of fewer great restaurants over a longer time span. More time to think about what I've eaten and time to forget.

Wilfrid's tip on how to spend your money: [Le Cirgue's specials deleted]

You don't expect me to pay le Cirque prices for that kind of food do you? :biggrin:
I would apply "muted" to Blue Hill, in fact

Yes, but they're trying and sometimes a big flavor does get through. Generally I think their ambition exceeds their ability but what do I know? (Sorry, bux, just not a big fan.)

No apology necessary and certainly not to me. It's very much my kind of food and certainly not everyone's. Although I can understand why people might not like it as much as I do, "muddled" seems an odd reaction if it's to the dishes themselves. If you mean the direction of the kitchen seems muddled, that might be something different. I've found the food rang clear, but perhaps too mute for some tastes. I prefer subtle as a the description. I wonder if their ambition exceeds their ability. I find it a curious comment here when we're asking why no one has the ambition to strike out with jaw or drawer dropping food. Well here we are with amitious gentle food, if that meets a consensus.

The closest NYC has come, I think, is Paul Liebrandt -- who failed to create a sufficient following at either Atlas or Papillon.

Liebrandt is talented, but when I finished the dish, I still wondered what made him think of chocolate and scallops. Adria and Blumenthal won me over in a way, even when I didn't like a dish. Note that in France and even in Paris I found unconvincing fusion food, which was a relief as I wondered if I didn't take to Liebrandt's food because it was served 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.

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

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Are there some inherent limtations in food creativity? Probably not but . . . .

We (in the West) have brought into our lives Indian; Greek (yes, yes, that's already in the West); Chinese; Japanese; Thai; Vietnamese; Korean; Middle-East (and its variants); Brazilian BBQ; etc.; etc.; etc.;

We've fused them all in permutations too pervasive to discuss.

We've engineered new fruits, new grains, new strains. And fused them.

We're combining tastes and flavors without hesitation (and if you don't think they're brilliant, your palate is obviously pedestrain).

We've gone to enough high-end restaurants (ok, you've) that we've seen it all before.

Is there naturally a time when we cease to be surprised? When the same dish that amazed us 5 years ago bores us now? When a brand new pairing of flavors isn't impressive because we expect the unexpected? What more can chefs do? If they could stick their tongs in their hearts, spill them all over the stage? Would it satisfy you?

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We're combining tastes and flavors without hesitation (and if you don't think they're brilliant, your palate is obviously pedestrain).

I question whether peoples' palates are always 'pedestrian',or whether we try really too hard sometimes to find the meaning in 35 flavors being thrown together.I often find that one or two,maybe three, flavors predominate in fussy dishes,and the rest just gets lost.The few dishes that manage to pull this off are the exception,not the rule.In my[somewhat limited] experience of high end dining,I've noted that the flavors in my favorite dishes are really'clear',though deceptively so,given what may go into preparing them.

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Responding to Nickn, laborious years of practice have brought me the status of being a reasonably competent home cook, quite good at some things and hopeless at others. However, my cooking is good enough that when a restaurant provides me with a dish I could have made better myself, it had better be a cheap restaurant. Reflecting the thread currently running on Lespinasse, I think I could do something better with a wild duck and some red cabbage than their kitchen was able to manage.

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I question whether peoples' palates are always 'pedestrian',or whether we try really too hard sometimes to find the meaning in 35 flavors being thrown together.I often find that one or two,maybe three, flavors predominate in fussy dishes,and the rest just gets lost.The few dishes that manage to pull this off are the exception,not the rule.In my[somewhat limited] experience of high end dining,I've noted that the flavors in my favorite dishes are really'clear',though deceptively so,given what may go into preparing them.

Brava, Wingding.

Last night at Union Pacific, the tropical fruit carpaccio was outstanding in its simplicity and beauty. A great presentation of something that sang its own song very well.

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Before I add a response, I just have to take a joust at this one;

I know my partial "solution" is generally unpopular round here, but I often wish the chef's would show us a few old tricks. That wild mallard would have made a fine civet or salmis - but maybe you just can't charge those prices for stewed meat, especially stewed on the bone: it has to be the same old lightly cooked square of breast.

That's because you just want to keep rolling back the clock until you come to the day where Britsihs cooking is the equivelent of the cooking from you know where :raz::raz:.

If you take the "food as metaphor for life theory" (Plotnickiism section 1 paragraph 1,) interesting food follows in the footsteps of societal expression. And I'm not trying to get myself into too much trouble here by trying to bite off too much specificity when I say that but, I think that in threads when we analyze the cooking of various countries we eventually get around to that point. Interesting cooking is some sort of expression of the populace as educated consumers with a high level of aesthetics. And since consumerism drives cooking, i.e. the restaurant business, chefs play for their audiences by creating these fantastic things that hold our interest. It's not unlike pop music or fashion which is why I made the comparison. The pop hit ala Beatles, the mini-skirt and sea bass wrapped in a potato crust all probably have similar useful commercial lives (I'm waiting to see what is going to replace the mini skirt.)

So I think in order to get at the heart of this issue you have to ask yourself why the population in the dining capitals of the world eat the way they eat?

For example, I recently bought a cookbook that featured modern tapas dishes from Spain (can't remember the name of the book.) The book goes through each region of Spain and gives recipes from various tapas restaurants. Well even at the tapas level, so many of the dishes are so interesting and in a number of cases much more interesting then what most restaurants in NYC serve. And what I think the important issue question isn't why do they have so many chefs there doing interesting things, I think the question is, why did it catch on there and not here or in other cities?

If you take a restaurant like Cub Gascon in London, which if it resided in Spain, could be an entry in this book, you have to ask yourself, why hasn't there been a number of spinoffs or copycats of the Cub Gascon style in London? Or why is GC in London and not in Paris? Why did a guy from Gascony have to go to London to create a new style of French/tapas cuisine? Why don't we have something like it in NYC? Or as Suzanne asked, why didn't Liebrandt catch on (which is an entire conversation in itself.) Or why didn't Alex Urena catch on here in a big way? The answers to those question lie in the fact that something special is going on in Spain. And it can't only be in food. It has to be part of a greater manifestation of societal expression because the population accepted it. And if you look at upper end dining in NYC, that's really what it always has been. Like Bux says, it's dining for the "upper middle." Well if you want to get at the source of why the restaurants are boring and jaded, it's because our lifestyle is boring and jaded. Once upon a time it was an exciting experience to eat that potato scaled sea bass in your designer suit. But that expression of a NYC lifestyle has been going on for the last 20 years. Personally, I don't see it changing anytime soon. I think it's expanding downward and outward and not up. That means, they are expannding the definition of the upper middle. As long as that is going on, why give us anything new? Jean-Georges, besides his two restaurants in Trump has Jo Jo, Mercer Kitchen, Vong and now he is going to have the restaurant ion the new Richard Meier building on the river. What's his motivation to creat a new cuisine? Not only that but, the strength of his overall business occupies a half dozen good restaurant spaces where if he didn't have such a strong brand name, would most likely be available to up and coming chefs. It's a viscious cycle.

Wilfrid raises another good point in that we are far more competent as home chefs and that has taken away part of the magic. Last night I was having dinner and one of the diners was talking about how much he loved sauteed foie gras. I was able to recite a recipe from memory of a foie/apple dish that could be prepared in 4-5 minutes (excluding that nasty prep time of course.) And when you make that dish which isn't difficult, it's every bit as good as what you might get in Le Cirque. How much has our ability to cook like that lessened the thrill of the restaurant experience? It has to be by a lot.

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A few weeks ago in Romorantin, we had a really great meal at the Lion d'Or. Great in that we thoroughly enjoyed the food. It was a meal worth ananlyizing, but a meal that didn't make us stop and analyze it while we were eating. We split two game courses. The first was a pigeon roasted with spices under the skin and a no brainer for us. Our attention was on the hare and which preparation to order. There was the more elegant saddle and then there was the civet of leg.

We enjoyed very much lunch there two years ago on our trip through the Sologne. The civet de lievre a la royale they served as very good. So was the pigeon. As for Wilfrid's comments about Blue Hill, Annisa etc., it has been my experience in the last year or so that the most exciting meals have been at relatively small, new places where the chef/owner was young, on the way up and had a real passion and excitement for their craft and their work. I think there is a certain loss of edge that happens when a restaurant reaches the superstardom level. People who are less critical heap praise on it, lulling the chef/owner into feeling he is still creating excitement. But to people who have a long resume of earting in top places and a good frame of reference, the edge is gone.

Last year I had Daniel high on my list of next "special" meals, and it has now dropped off the list, mainly because the return for the price I expect to get is no longer as high as it once was relative to alternative places I would like to try por repeat, like Annisa, Fleur de Sel and Blue Hill.

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Let me pick out the bits I agree with for once. Steve, you know more about the kind of people who make up the upscale New York dining community than I do - I'm still an outsider in many respects, and thus hesitate to make sociological generalizations. But your take on it sounds right to me. A style of cuisine which became well-established - when, in the 1980s? - which has been gaining a steadily wider audience over the last ten years. (This may change if the economy dives, of course.)

Can we define that cuisine? It has its glories, of course, but isn't it focussed around tender, delicate pillows of protein - foie gras, filet de boeuf, rack of lamb, squab breasts, salmon, tuna, etc - prepared in a pan and sauced and garnished?

I want to sow some thoughts rather than leap to conclusions. Is one of the reasons for this cuisine's success and entrenchment over the last twenty years the fact that it features, by and large, very "safe" food. Forget the foie gras, forget even the squab; the centerpiece of these entrees is typically a soft, easy-to-eat, mildly flavored sample of familiar protein. Is the audience for this cuisine one which - by and large - grew up in an era of fairly unadventurous and safe home cooking? Is it a generation which had relatively little exposure to strong meats, offal, game, oily fish, bony fish, unusual seafood? Is it a generation which has come to expect the excitement on the plate to arise from interesting garnishes or the addition of a little spice, rather than from the selection and preparation of the main ingredient? Is a lot of "new American" and fusion cooking geared to giving exotic accents to the same old dishes?

Ah, questions, questions. We should all go and read Liebling again, especially the chapter which deals with the difficulty rich people face in acquiring an educated palate - to paraphrase: a diet of foie gras and pheasant may be a better habit than a diet of hamburger and fires, but it's a habit just the same.

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Wilfrid raises another good point in that we are far more competent as home chefs and that has taken away part of the magic. Last night I was having dinner and one of the diners was talking about how much he loved sauteed foie gras. I was able to recite a recipe from memory of a foie/apple dish that could be prepared in 4-5 minutes (excluding that n

One question I ask when I am eating something I enjoy at a restaurant: could I make this dish myself if I put my mind to it? Rarely is the answer no. Now I am by no means a talented chef. I am an amateur who has learned some technique and knows how to follow a recipe, and make some of my own emendations. Bouley, in his original restaurant served some incredible dishes that I know I could never aspire to. That to me is a sign of a really unique and talented chef. There are some dishes I've had at Le Bernadin I know I could not duplicate. Here we are talking about ingredients, technique and an alchemy of timing and seasoning that would be impossible to copy with the exact same result. Unfortunately it is increasingly rare to have this experience.

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Someone in the thread used the term jaw-dropper. I think it is appropriate and describes precisely what I expect when I go in ready and expecting to drop 3-400 dollars per person (or more at ADNY). Whether or not this is too much to expect is open to question.

Having said that, THE ONLY jaw dropping meals I have had in New York over the past two years -

My second trip to Nobu

My first trip to Sugiyama (benefitting from the shock factor)

One out of 3 trips to Babbo (the sample size is pretty big)

Second meal at Bouley

I think Nobu and Sugiyama are out now for various reasons. I do expect consistently excellent meals at Babbo and Mr. Inconsistent Bouley to sock me in the belly once in a while.

Places like JG, Gramercy Tavern and Daniel do not excite me at all. And there is nothing akin to Passard's cooking in NYC to make you drool over the subtle. I look to travel to have jaw dropping meals. Whether or not my experience is representative OR is significantly different than the NYC high end scene from ten years ago, I do not know.

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Wilfrid - Well the phrase "upper middle" implies that new money has access to luxury items. And luxury items tend to be smooth and silky rather then rough and coarse. Along with making luxurious food for that class of people, the clothing was made from luxurious fabrics, the furniture was styled a certain way, automobiles etc. When I was growing up, Shetland wool had a little panache to it. Today cashemere can be so reasonably priced that I never hear Shetland wool mnentioned anymore. That's why I always come back to these things being sociological. I believe that anytime a newly formed class or segment of society acquires affluence, everything changes. Fashion, food, furniture. Artisans need patrons and patrons need wealth.

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Since I've been here last, there's little I need to express disagreement with and much to inspire new thoughts, thank you all. With age and experience, I think we do have a falling of epiphanies. Second meals at Gagnaire and El Bulli were marvelous, but not the same edge of your seat experience as the first. Granted, we can't discount that the later work of any artist is unlikely to have the shock value of the first exposure and at some point you are likely to see refinement rather than genisis.

Increased ability in the diners own kitchen has got to play a factor, but twenty years ago, I might have been able to recreate some of the impressive dishes I had in restaurants. Today I am unable to deconstruct them as the ingredients and techniques are no long traditional and classic and I have less familiarity with them. I don't even know where to do the research sometimes. But even that get's boring, or does it remove the food from my experience in a way that I tire of it quicker?

One thought occurred to me when Wilfrid referred to pillow of protein, and that was how much I dislike alliteration--whoops that was not my point at all. I mean it made me think of one trend which is to present several forms of meat on the same plate. I'm thinking of braised short ribs along side a rare steak and that sort of thing. At Blue Hill recently a lamb chop and lamb canneloni is an example. Daniel Bouloud does this a lot.

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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I am sorry I gave Vivin's good post short shrift. He has raised what I see as two issues. The culturally different but still haute like Nobu and Sugiyama, and the acute sharpening of technique which he raised through his point about Arpege. What is wrong with the restaurant world in NYC is that there doesn't seem to be any value in chefs inventing a better wheel. I always use it as an example but the Robuchon potatoes are a better wheel, so is the DB Burger. The Hachis Parmentier with Boudin Noir I ate at La Regalade was a better wheel. What we are really all complaining about from a technical perspective is that it doesn't seem to be worth a chef's time and effort to sharpen their cuisine. All the places Wilfrid mentioned in the original post, those guys are all fantastic chefs. Except their energies are not directed at fine tuning their cuisine. Their energy is directed at turning tables.

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I should acknowledge Bux's point about several different styles of meat preparation on the same plate. I welcome that, at least, and am reminded of the excellent braised guinea fowl leg served alongside the breast at Bid. Got to have that breast filet in there, though.

Without addressing whether Steve's explanation of how we have got to where we are is right or not, I think it's still valid to ask whether we are satisfied with the status quo. The twin experiences this week of reviewing old menus at the NYPL and having a let-down dinner at Lespinasse sharpen my sense that variety and adventure are now at a premium in upscale restaurants in New York, unless maybe one orders off menu. Maybe the new rich, or whoever, do like everything soft and smooth, but am I the only dissenter who despairs of the monotone?

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What we are really all complaining about from a technical perspective is that it doesn't seem to be worth a chef's time and effort to sharpen their cuisine. All the places Wilfrid mentioned in the original post, those guys are all fantastic chefs. Except their energies are not directed at fine tuning their cuisine. Their energy is directed at turning tables.

But, to repeat myself, the four star chefs' reluctance to innovate does not explain why ambitious young chefs are not innovating.

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I think they (broad sweep here) are innovating - and too much - at a superficial level. I repeatedly find menus where the same old suspects - beef filet, rack of lamb, etc - are decked out with odd garnishes or unexpected spices or overfussy sides. Because the customers must always have the illusion of being at the cutting-edge. My example here is always the roast duck with mediaeval spices and individual purees of several different root vegetables at JoJo. Now, maybe Jean-Georges invented the dish and it's a bad example of what young chefs might do - but I found myself wishing for a really good roast duck, served at the proper temperature, and one well-cooked recognizable vegetable, rather than the uninteresting, lukewarm plate I was served.

Why are they not innovating at the deep level - i.e. ingredients and techniques? I guess because their first job is to put those big-spending upper middle bums on seats frequently enough for the restaurants not to go bust. So, on the one hand, no Paul Liebrandt making curried cod with cherry foam - and on the other hand, no-one serving civet of wild duck.

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My view is that the dining public is largely happy with the four-star NY restaurants, and the vast proportion of diners believe that they are receiving excellent food and service, and perhaps might not be able to tell the difference. It is subjectively sad for me that almost all diners in the US (speaking of the population of the US, to be clear)believe they can find cuisine in the US (presumably, including in NY) that could rival that in Western Europe. The problem with innovation in the US is that it is not, largely, being done by people who have the rigorous training that the people innovating in France have. (Breach #6)

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But, to repeat myself, the four star chefs' reluctance to innovate does not explain why ambitious young chefs are not innovating.

You need the right business environment to do that. Where is a new chef to be innovative if it's hard to attract patrons and the rents are so high? Add to that, the start up cost for a new restaurant can easily be a million dollars. That's quite a bit if debt. I hate to point out that money is the most important factor in the equation but, the cost of trying is onerous. Look at the few places that are trying to be innovative. Anissa, Blue Hill, Fleur de Sel, they're not even full every night. The foundation of any retail business is a good lease with cheap rent. Tell me where in NYC you can get a cheap lease? You can't. So where are the new chefs going to be creative? This is why you end up with 71 Clinton on the lower east side, or chefs on Smith Street in Bkln.

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