Bruni and Beyond: NYC Reviewing (2004)

[slkinsey]

Oakapple, the reason Hesser's review was a waste of space was that it called for its own destruction. It contemplated a re-review by the new critic, and now that we have that re-review, which said pretty much what every other review everywhere has said, including Hesser's review, we have yet another 1,200 words spilled in making the same set of claims about how Masa serves such good fish. So why bother with her review? With only 52 slots available per year, why allocate 2 of them to what is probably the smallest restaurant ever to be reviewed, especially when both reviews make pretty much the same set of no-brainer claims?

I don't think she had mush choice. She was treading water and holding a slot for someone else, and everyone knew Bruni would be reviewing Masa eventually. Rather than devoting space to the review of an unimportant restaurant, I thought she actually managed to say something fairly interesting and revealing in her review of Masa -- not only about Masa but about NYT restaurant reviewing in general. But it's not as though she had a lot of options.

[Fat Guy]

To parapharase Fiddler: because she had a bad week, I should suffer?

[DonRocks]

You are therefore arguing—whether you realize it or not—for the abolishment of all published critical opinion that has the potential to influence purchasing decisions.

When you make leaping assumptions such as this, it shows that you didn't read what I wrote with any degree of thoughtfulness.

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What you wrote was, "Pull aside any restauranteur in the country. Ask him or her whether it's fair for one single person's whim in assigning stars to have such a dominant influence." That does on its face seem to me to be a species of the standard chef/restaurateur complaint leveled against all critics when unfavorable reviews come in: "Who is this person to criticize my establishment?" Those same chefs and restaurateurs can often be heard to say, when a favorable review comes in, "You know, he gets it. He really gets it! He gets what we're about!"

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Here is what I originally wrote:

No restaurant deserves to be pigeonholed into a bogus category of stars, points, tocques, macarons or whatever other numerical rating system happens to be used to quantify the unquantifiable.

It is utterly unfair to the restaurant for a reader to put any credence in such a system.  And for the critics who advocate these ratings, my response to you is:  learn how to write and you'll lose the need to assign a mathematical value to something entirely unrelated to mathematics.

Stars, points, tocques or macarons are an inherently flawed method of evaluating a restaurant. This is independent of whether or not restauranteurs use this entrenched system to their advantage when it's convenient for them to do so.

[Fat Guy]

I certainly agree with that.

[slkinsey]

To parapharase Fiddler: because she had a bad week, I should suffer?

The right questions are: what were her options, and what could she have done better given the hand she was dealt? I actually think her Masa review was one of the more interesting pieces of writing to appear in that space; far more so than a forced one star review of some obscure bistrattoria she had to dig up in the boroughs would have been.

[fiftydollars]

...With only 52 slots available per year, why allocate 2 of them to what is probably the smallest restaurant ever to be reviewed, especially when both reviews make pretty much the same set of no-brainer claims?

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Yes. Instead of going back to Masa, practically right after Hesser, why not go back to some of the restaurants on the NYT’s current list of 4-stars. I could be wrong, but according to my search of the NYT’s reviews, Daniel and Ducasse have not been reviewed since 2001 and Jean Georges and Le Bernardin not since 1998. I am much more interested in finding out what’s happened to Jean Georges in the last 6 years than what’s happened at Masa since Hesser ate there in June (of this effin year, no less). Did someone, up high, appeal Hesser's review?

Bruni’s review of Masa is a second opinion on what is essentially the exact same restaurant Hesser reviewed 6-months ago.

Bruni’s review is an entirely masturbatory exercise as he is pretty much the only one who enjoyed it or got anything useful out of it.

Edited December 29, 2004 by fiftydollars (log)

[Fat Guy]

Bruni’s review is an entirely masturbatory exercise

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Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[Fat Guy]

To parapharase Fiddler: because she had a bad week, I should suffer?

The right questions are: what were her options, and what could she have done better given the hand she was dealt? I actually think her Masa review was one of the more interesting pieces of writing to appear in that space; far more so than a forced one star review of some obscure bistrattoria she had to dig up in the boroughs would have been.

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As far as Google is concerned, you just invented the word "bistrattoria." Mazal tov.

[robyn]

Oakapple, the reason Hesser's review was a waste of space was that it called for its own destruction. It contemplated a re-review by the new critic, and now that we have that re-review, which said pretty much what every other review everywhere has said, including Hesser's review, we have yet another 1,200 words spilled in making the same set of claims about how Masa serves such good fish. So why bother with her review? With only 52 slots available per year, why allocate 2 of them to what is probably the smallest restaurant ever to be reviewed, especially when both reviews make pretty much the same set of no-brainer claims?

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I didn't think Hesser's review was a waste of space. Assuming I was contemplating dining at Masa - the review told me: 1) great meal; 2) extremely expensive; and 3) (and perhaps most important) you won't get the full experience if you don't sit at the sushi bar (she went so far as to say it meant the difference between a 3 and a 4 star experience). I would hate to spend $1000 and have a less than complete experience. Now Bruni made the same point (although not as forcefully) - but his review came after Hesser's - not before. If any review was a waste - it was the second review by Bruni - not the first by Hesser.

Note that I think it's important to talk about seating when where you sit can make a big difference in terms of your enjoyment of a meal. That's why I specifically noted that one should avoid the front room at David Burke & Donatella (unless you like people at the bar bumping into the back of your chair). Robyn

[Fat Guy]

Normally, if a newspaper ran the same story twice, I'd say the second instance was a waste of space. But in this case, the need for the second review arose directly out of the deliberate incompleteness of the first one. So the first was, I think, the waste.

[Jinmyo]

I don't think Bruni is qualified to judge a Japanese restaurant.

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... and he strikes me as no more or less competent to judge a Japanese restaurant than a French one.

...Virtually the only thing noteworthy about Bruni's four-star reviews is that they award four New York Times stars. They contribute little else to the discussion that hasn't already been said. Whereas, the work of someone like Ruth Reichl, Mimi Sheraton or Craig Claiborne had a certain internal force of authority to it -- it would not have been as widely read without the Times podium, but it would have been taken seriously by serious observers.

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I agree.

[Todd36]

This is all tempting me to spend the $500 or so at Masa. That's roughly about 5 times what I spend for pretty good stuff at Sushi Seki. Gotta spend that (not so large) bonus somewhere. I think I know enought about Sushi to at least say if it is any good.

[Stone]

How much can be said about sushi? It's good. It's fresh. It doesn't taste fishy. It does taste fishy. It was sliced very nicely. They used ingenious bamboo sticks to serve it. It's sushi.

Can one truly have a four-star experience sitting at a sushi bar and having pieces of sushi handed to one (with or without plates). How much service is involved.

If Masa was on 53rd St, between Lex and 5th, seated 100 and they charged $75 for the omikase, would it be four stars? (assume they could serve the same stuff for $75 a head.)

And if stars were handed out on the "whim" of the reviewer, it would be a silly system. But, putting aside people's thoughts about Bruni, the stars are not supposed to be handed out on a whim. The reviewer is supposed to have a meaningful system in mind.

Edited December 30, 2004 by Stone (log)

[Todd36]

How much can be said about sushi?  It's good.  It's fresh.  It doesn't taste fishy.  It does taste fishy.  It was sliced very nicely.  They used ingenious bamboo sticks to serve it.  It's sushi.

Can one truly have a four-star experience sitting at a sushi bar and having pieces of sushi handed to one (with or without plates).  How much service is involved.

If Masa was on 53rd St, between Lex and 5th, seated 100 and they charged $75 for the omikase, would it be four stars?  (assume they could serve the same stuff for $75 a head.)

And if stars were handed out on the "whim" of the reviewer, it would be a silly system.  But, putting aside people's thoughts about Bruni, the stars are not supposed to be handed out on a whim.  The reviewer is supposed to have a meaningful system in mind.

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I have no doubt that Sushi varies greatly in quality. But Masa is only partly a sushi place. In fact, the thing I found most surprising about Bruni's Masa review is that he viewed it basically as a sushi place. That makes me wonder about the review. Given a Masa sized budget , on the order of $200-250 on the sushi, and advance warning, there are a number of places in Manhattan that should be capable of turning out equallu quality sushi. Kurma would be an obvious example, and given Kurma's prices, perhaps they don't need advance warning. I would be curious to know if sushi at Masa is better than Kurma. They charge roughly the same. Compared to say Sugiyama, where the sushi is minimal and the cooked food is the point, I wonder what is going on. Has Masa changed its tack and become more of a sushi place? Why didn't Bruni talk more about the cooked food, which is where the chef's skills should really show.

[oakapple]

Here is what I originally wrote:

And for the critics who advocate these ratings, my response to you is:  learn how to write and you'll lose the need to assign a mathematical value to something entirely unrelated to mathematics.

But the star system as we know it was basically invented by Craig Claiborne, and no one disputes that he knew how to write. So did Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller, Ruth Reichl, and William Grimes.

Perhaps there's a reasonable argument why we shouldn't have stars. But when the reason given is that the writers haven't learned how to write, the argument can't be taken seriously.

[Pan]

[...]without the podium of the New York Times, nobody would take these reviews all that seriously as standalone pieces of work. Virtually the only thing noteworthy about Bruni's four-star reviews is that they award four New York Times stars.[...]

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Agreed. Which is why, when I saw SobaAddict's link to the review, I scrolled through it until I saw the star rating. I don't have any faith in anything much that Bruni has to say, so I don't pay attention to his prose anymore, but the star rating is newsworthy.

[Mark Sommelier]

Rocks, et al,

I would like to suggest that the one familiar acronym that is missing in this conversation about critics impact on a business is "PR". PR is what keeps the chef's name out in front of the public, not the review in the paper of record. Masa, as an example, has had huge buzz. His restaurant appeals to an extemely narrow segment of the dining public, to put it mildly. PR keeps chefs faces in front of our faces. Rocco, Thomas Keller, , Daniel Boulud, Emeril. Thoughts?

Edited December 30, 2004 by Mark Sommelier (log)

[Fat Guy]

But the star system as we know it was basically invented by Craig Claiborne, and no one disputes that he knew how to write. So did Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller, Ruth Reichl, and William Grimes.

Andre Michelin published his first red guide in 1900, and the stars assigned by publications the world over are I think derivative of his system. Although I haven't seen a direct comment on this from Claiborne, I think there's a strong inference to be made that when he decided on the four-star system he was using Michelin as a model. He was, most likely, also trying to do something different for New York, but I think the use of stars was an outgrowth of the experience and expectations of well-traveled epicures of that time.

I don't question the writing talents of any of the New York Times restaurant reviewers. If anything, William Grimes and Frank Bruni are two of the best. The problem with their reviews isn't lack of writing skill, but rather lack of depth with respect to the subject at hand. They know how to write, just not about restaurants. But they are certainly much better writers than Craig Claiborne and Bryan Miller were when they were writing restaurant reviews (Bryan Miller is, I think, a much better writer today than he was back in the 1980s). Ruth Reichl was probably the most complete of the Times critics: an excellent writer and extremely deep in the subject matter. Incidentally, she never seemed to take the star system all that seriously. At the four-star level she maintained a high level of rigor, but below that it was anarchy, so much so that Bryan Miller was filing written complaints. Indeed, Grimes's mission was supposed to be to get the star system back in order -- a very weak premise for selection of a reviewer, although he performed admirably (albeit without much enthusiasm) after a couple of years of on-the-job learning at reader expense.

[Fat Guy]

How much can be said about sushi?  It's good.  It's fresh.  It doesn't taste fishy.  It does taste fishy.  It was sliced very nicely.  They used ingenious bamboo sticks to serve it.  It's sushi.

Probably more appropriate to discuss this either on the actual Masa topic or its own topic, but I hope this is intended more as provocation than as a serious statement. What the statement demonstrates to me, mostly, is that if you evaluate sushi through the lens of European-derived culinary expectations, there really isn't much to say about it. That, however, is a limitation of European-derived culinary expectations, not of Japanese ones.

Can one truly have a four-star experience sitting at a sushi bar and having pieces of sushi handed to one (with or without plates).  How much service is involved.

One might also ask whether Masa is really a restaurant. Although it is technically a place of public accommodation, it comes closer to being a private dining room than most any restaurant I can think of. If you made a list of a dozen things that most restaurants have in common, Masa would probably lack half of them, for example menus.

To me, Masa seems analogous not to a four-star restaurant but, rather, to the chef's table at a four-star restaurant. If you dine in Alain Ducasse's "aquarium" or Daniel's "skybox," you have a chance to come much closer to the kind of up-close-and-personal experience you'd have at Masa. You'll probably also spend more money than at Masa. Yet you'll receive less service than in the main dining room. There's a certain minimalism to the service in those private rooms that actually has the effect of elevating the culinary experience. I think without a doubt you can have a four-star experience in Ducasse or Daniel's private room despite or perhaps on account of the reduction in the number of middlemen between the customer and the chef -- indeed, it's hard to regard the dining-room experience at any New York restaurant as being in the same category.

There are also, of course, analogs to Jose Andres's Minibar in Washington, DC; Joel Robuchon's Atelier in Paris; and Chika Tillman's ChikaLicious dessert bar here in New York. These are all derived from the sushi-bar concept, but serve Western food. Minibar, on account of its frenetic casualness and positioning, isn't intended to provide a four-star experience, but I could just as easily imagine Minibar transformed into a four-star experience (with very little change to the food) by, for example, being transplanted to a serene French Laundry-like setting.

Of course, Andres's Minibar, Ducasse's aquarium and Daniel's skybox are not actual restaurants. They are what one might call "business units" within restaurants. Masa, too, is a business unit of the larger operation that includes Bar Masa. One wonders, then, if we will start seeing separate reviews of the private dining rooms and other business units of luxury restaurants. If so, we could double or triple the number of four-star restaurants pretty quickly. We could start with the chef's table at Cafe Gray, $2,200 minimum on the table (seats six).

[Jason Perlow]

While I have had issues in the past with Bruni's writing, and I feel he lacks the necessary fundamentals to evaluate the qualitative level of Japanese restaurants and all restaurants in general, he's in a bit of a pickle because he did choose to review Masa, and he has to award it some kind of a rating. Unfortunately the NY Times star rating system is not well equipped to handle restaurants that are outside the scope of traditional fine dining and the evaluation matrix that goes along with it. I'm going to repeat myself like a broken record here as I (and Steven) have said this before on this thread, but that is to say there is a set of generally subscribed guidelines by which French, Italian or some type of modern Euro-eclectic haute dining establishment is evaluated, in terms of the pristineness/luxury of the ingredients used, the quality of the service, the relative luxury of the atmosphere/setting, the extent of the wine list, and the extent to which the restaurant or chef contributes unique additions or value to a cuisine. Short of the pristine/luxury aspect of its fish, Masa does not conform to what you would expect of a 4-star restaurant in according to the modern accepted 4-star criterion of the NYT, if you had to lump it in with ADNY, Per Se, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin and Daniel. It would be more fair to compare it to other high end sushi restaurants, such as Kurumazushi or Sushi Yasuda, or perhaps even Nobu, except that Nobu is a 3 star and it has unique dishes it has developed, where it is hard to say Masa has contributed anything new to Sushi as a cuisine.

[SobaAddict70]

Maybe make it a fifth star? You know, in a category all of its own.

Or not, as the case may be.

Soba

[Stone]

How much can be said about sushi?  It's good.  It's fresh.  It doesn't taste fishy.  It does taste fishy.  It was sliced very nicely.  They used ingenious bamboo sticks to serve it.  It's sushi.

Probably more appropriate to discuss this either on the actual Masa topic or its own topic, but I hope this is intended more as provocation than as a serious statement. What the statement demonstrates to me, mostly, is that if you evaluate sushi through the lens of European-derived culinary expectations, there really isn't much to say about it. That, however, is a limitation of European-derived culinary expectations, not of Japanese ones.

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It was semi-serious. Maybe I don't know what he's doing with "sushi". Are we talking nigiri, or wildly creative rolls? I assumed it was the former. With nigiri, what does the chef do beyond select fresh fish, handle it properly, slice it, form it and serve it? Toro is terrific, but is that due the "preparation" or the proper selection/slicing of the fish? (Yes this discussion is for a different thread.) I guess my question is similar to the question of whether preparing a good steak can be "four star." Sure there are good steaks, great steaks, and fucking amazing steaks -- but it's grilling.

[oakapple]

Responding to a few posts at once....

FG pointed out that Craig Claiborne's system was surely a derivative of the Michelin system, which dates back to 1900. At it's now over a century old, we might as well accept the star system as being a part of our culinary heritage that is no more likely to be abolished than knives and forks.

FG said:

I don't question the writing talents of any of the New York Times restaurant reviewers. If anything, William Grimes and Frank Bruni are two of the best. The problem with their reviews isn't lack of writing skill, but rather lack of depth with respect to the subject at hand. They know how to write, just not about restaurants.

The last part of that is undoubtedly true, but I find some of Bruni's prose uncommonly ugly. For instance, in the Café Gray review:

The appeal of a hazelnut soufflé depends entirely on your appetite for ultra-indulgence. If you skew gooey, rest assured that it does too.

The list of wines by the glass skews brief and somewhat boring. The service skews unreliable. Except on my last visit, there were overlong stretches when the table went unattended, usually toward the start of a meal.

Isn't that too much skewing for three consecutive sentences? Then, there are the lapses of journalistic judgment: the references to hardening of the arteries in the Wolfgang's review; the multiple mentions of Al Taubman in the LCB Brasserie review. Add to that the many comments by Bruni's friends, which he apparently thinks are witty enough to be worth quoting, but seldom are. We've heard less about them lately, so perhaps Frank is catching on.

Back to Masa: No need for a fifth star. Masa fits in just fine as a four-star restaurant, because it's at the pinnacle of a serious cuisine, namely sushi. Four stars means "extraordinary," and by nearly all accounts that's exactly what Masa is offering. On Mandy Hesser's no-star review, Sam Kinsey wrote:

I don't think she had mush choice. She was treading water and holding a slot for someone else, and everyone knew Bruni would be reviewing Masa eventually. Rather than devoting space to the review of an unimportant restaurant, I thought she actually managed to say something fairly interesting and revealing in her review of Masa -- not only about Masa but about NYT restaurant reviewing in general. But it's not as though she had a lot of options.

The piece read as if Hesser took this decision on her own. I don't have any inside dirt, but I would guess she was free to award stars if she wanted to. And had she done so, we wouldn't have seen a re-review from Bruni in the same calendar year.

[slkinsey]

The [Masa review] read as if Hesser took this decision on her own. I don't have any inside dirt, but I would guess she was free to award stars if she wanted to. And had she done so, we wouldn't have seen a re-review from Bruni in the same calendar year.

I'm not sure that this is, strictly speaking, true. We just don't know. There are a lot of things at play. Who knows, she might have been told not to assign a star rating precisely because the NYT wanted Bruni assigning all the stars for the big TWC places. Certainly the assumption all of us had was that the big TWC places were reserved for Bruni. My point was rather that she managed to do something interesting with the column that she would not otherwise have been able to do with the only other option available to her: picking out an obscure one-star bistrattoria to write up.

[DonRocks]

FG pointed out that Craig Claiborne's system was surely a derivative of the Michelin system, which dates back to 1900. At it's now over a century old, we might as well accept the star system as being a part of our culinary heritage that is no more likely to be abolished than knives and forks.

I agree that it's part of our culinary heritage (anything that has been around for 100 years is an important part of history), although I can think of numerous things that were around for many years that were examined and questioned - often to the derision of the people posing the initial questions - and then ultimately, when enough people began to see that they were wrong, became either greatly diminished in importance or abolished altogether.

Cheers,

Rocks.