NYT Articles on Food, Drink, Cooking, and Culinary Culture (2002–2005)

[cabrales]

Today's NYT (Metro Section) contains an article on wine auctions, and the prices that certain buyers are willing to pay. For example, a 1961 Dom Perignon magnum bottled for Earl Spencer and prepared in 1981 to mark the Charles/Diana union was sold for $5,750.  

[Sandra Levine]

I wonder how that compares with the price of the same bottle without the Charles/Diana connection?

[Rail Paul]

The same article also discussed a curious inefficiency in the marketplace: single bottles of fine wine going for relatively low prices. Several of the bidders were agents for collectors or restaurants, so a one bottle lot wasn't of interest.

Goldberg mentions a single bottle of a 1982 Chateau Talbot ($70) and six bottle lot of  Domaine du Closel 1990 Cuvee Speciale ($180) as examples.

The article says the Christie's sessions this Thursday and Friday will feature the 1907 Heidsieck Monopole Gout Americain 1907, which was recovered from the Baltic in 1998. Estimated $700 to $1,000, the cargo went to the bottom of the sea, and remained there for more than 80 years.

[yvonne johnson]

In an article in last Sunday's Styles section of NYT, the owner of Gabriel’s (Manhattan) restaurant reported a dwindling business lunch crowd after 9/11. A big photo accompanied the article in which 2 lone diners were seated in an otherwise empty Gabriel’s restaurant. The caption read: ”Lunch at Gabriel’s”.

Yesterday, three days later an Editor’s Note appeared in the Corrections section of the NYT:

“[T]he picture was made after 3 p.m., and the owner says he served 63 lunch customers that day. In fairness, The Times should have chosen a more representative photo, or should at least have specified the time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/13/pageonep...orrections.html

(scroll down)

Quite right too, but maybe the damage is done, and who spots the Editor's notes days later? My husband for one read the original article with photos and thought to himself, "Well, I won't be going to Gabriel's".

[Original qrticle (without photos, and not that interesting)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/fashion/09LUNC.html]

[Liza]

For what it's worth, there was also a mention of the error in the New York Post's Page Six column of yesterday.

[yvonne johnson]

So, the NY Post noticed the Times' error before the Editor's correction? Did the restaurant complain directly to the Post?

[Suzanne F]

I'll bet the restaurant complained to every available media outlet. In the hope that someone -- anyone -- would pick it up -- oh, goody, more publicity, and positive at that (even if self-generated)!

Whether I like that or not, I think they had every right to do so. It's called "marketing." Think of all those Post readers who never saw the original article; now they are on Gabriel's side against the big, bad, NYT.

[russ parsons]

My husband for one read the original article with photos and thought to himself, "Well, I won't be going to Gabriel's". 

not to let the competition off the hook, but i'm curious as to your husband's reaction. do people really decide whether to go to a restaurant based upon whether other people are going? personally, i'd rather go someplace that had great food that nobody else was going to than to just another popular restaurant. of course, i may be misunderstanding the message ... or its intent.

[g.johnson]

While there's not a one to one correspondance between popularity and restaurant quality, the two are at least correlated, no? In the absence of personal experience, I will assume that a busy restaurant is probably better than one with 30 tables and 2 diners.

[macrosan]

And on a more objective issue, it is likely that an under-occupied restaurant will not get the turnover rate its food stocks need, and so is more likely to use food that is no longer fresh.

[Steve Plotnicki]

personally, i'd rather go someplace that had great food that nobody else was going to than to just another popular restaurant.

While this is an excellent sentiment, in reality it isn't true, Places with great food are usually crowded. Empty places typically don't have great food. So the inference drawn from the picture is that the food isn't so good, i.e., that's why nobody is there.

[elyse]

Slightly off subject, a while after Gabriel's first opened, I had a wonderful gnocchi there. A year or so later, I went back for the same gnocchi, and it was one of the worst meals I've ever had. If they continued to decline, no wonder. I would certainly never go back.

[Fat Guy]

I'm having trouble understanding what the problem was.

Let's say the photo was taken at 3:30pm. That's still "Lunch at Gabriel's." The photo doesn't say, "There are only two people in the dining room at Gabriel's at all times." It simply claims to depict lunch at Gabriel's on one occasion. Maybe the restaurant served 63 that day. But if the photo had been taken at, say, 12:00pm, how many people would have been in the room? What about on another day? Is Gabriel's saying it has never had only 2 lunch customers in the room between, say, 12:00pm and 3:00pm? This all seems farcical to me.

The photo was not manipulated in any way, and the caption was likely accurate by at least one commonly accepted definition of "lunch." The only objection I can see is that a strong example was chosen to prove a point. If that's the standard for unethical use of a photo in a newspaper, we may as well redesign the entire basis upon which newspaper photographs are chosen for all stories.

[Pan]

My take on it is that, pace Fat Guy, if the Times really thought it had made an error requiring correction, since the error was a captioned photo, the correction should have also been a captioned photo.

[Fat Guy]

Makes a lot of sense.

[Lesley C]

I don't agree. Lunch is not 3, and certainly not 3:30. That picture was unfair. Made the restaurant look like a big loser.

In these tough times, shame on them. I don't care how good or bad the restaurant.

[Steve Plotnicki]

I agree with Lesley C. If you are describing lunch, it would be fair for the picture to be a reasonable representation of the lunch hour.

[Lesley C]

I don't think it would even be fair to take a picture at lunch. Why point out what's obvious? And why does an article like that call for a picture anyway? What if they had picture Cafe Boulud at 3 p.m.? Or the room half full at 12? What does Le Bernardin look like at 2:30? Why pick on that particular restaurant? If they really wanted to show how bad things are, why not go to one of the biggies?

[=Mark]

Nobody goes there anymore, it's way too crowded...

[Bux]

I'm having trouble understanding what the problem was.

You're not a visual guy, you're a wordsmith. Let's say I write that "there's a crisis in restaurant buisness and nothing made it clearer to me than stepping into Restaurant Ex for lunch and seeing only two tables occupied." Would that be different from saying "I see Restaurant Ex has a lousy lunch business, because when I went in for lunch at 3:30 there were only two customers in the place." The latter is worded far more negatively towards the restaurant and yet I'd find it far less damning.

"They serve few lunches" rings quite differently from "they serve few lunches at 3:30." The picture, it is said is worth a thousand words so it's not as if they're saying they serve few lunches, they're saying "they serve few lunches in a desolte and deserted room that fails to attract even a small crowd for reasons that must be known to the locals we couldn't interview because they avoided the place like the plague ..." And I've left out 962 words.

[Lesley C]

Yeah Steven, you totally missed the boat on this one.

[Fat Guy]

"A reasonable representation of the lunch hour" seems a sensible journalistic standard.

[ideefixe]

This seems so typical of the Times, though. They must sit around in meetings and think up trends and then find ways to support their premise. Remember when every Times story on the homeless took the tone that "everyone is one paycheck away from being homeless" ? Not to mention the whole manufactured Masters Golf Club crisis.

The Times is convinced we're in the middle of the Great Depression of the 21st century and so, they've got to find "news" to go along with this.

[Pan]

The Times is convinced we're in the middle of the Great Depression of the 21st century

Things are pretty bad, and we might well be in the middle (or, God forbid, beginning) of a deep depression, particularly in New York, but that doesn't give news media the right to twist things. But I expect that type of behavior from news media, in any case. When I was at High School of Performing Arts, I was interviewed by CBC radio. I don't remember what they asked me, but I do recall that there were a lot of stupid questions, to which I responded with "That's not true at all!" and then went on to give pertinent information that was different and sometimes probably the opposite of what I had been asked about. After the interview was over, I heard the reporter speaking revised questions into her mic, in order to edit the interview to make it seem as if she had asked me exactly the types of questions I answered and was really smart. I was shocked, but when I recounted this story to people in the know, they laughed and said "You didn't know that that was standard operating procedure for interviews for all radio and TV stations and networks?" And I'm sure CBC is by no means the worst. I listened to "As It Happens"every evening one summer in Western New York, and it's the best news program I've ever heard. Nor is the NY Times the worst. The other day, I saw the headline "Powell Confronts Euro-Weazels" in the Daily News. Talk about the worst kind of editorializing in the news section!

[Superflytritone]

SINCE somebody requested for this thread to start.......I thought, why not?

My opinion: You can have a 4 star system, and give 2 stars to places as diverse as Otto and Blue Hill. You have to take each in context. What is the critic taking into account, and why? If Otto had pizza that was comparable to places like Grimaldi's and DiFara's, would you rank it 3 or 4 stars given everything else that Otto provides? If so, then the quality of the place now may indeed rate a 1 or 2 star rating. Of course, it's only one opinion. Grimes obviously likes the place, given that he's been there 20+ times, right?

Just my rambling thoughts.....