Bruni and Beyond: NYC Reviewing (2007)

[Fat Guy]

Leonard, I don't think the issue of expertise is as clear cut in the culinary arts as it may be in a field like music. Sheraton was referred to uptopic as a culinary professional but I don't believe that's the case, unless you define a food editor as a culinary professional (as the IACP does). I guess she did some work for Restaurant Associates, but I think it was in a research-type capacity.

It doesn't really matter one way or the other, though. Professional culinary training is relevant to becoming a chef, not to becoming a critic. Until recently there haven't been academic (as opposed to vocational) programs about food, and they're not all that relevant to restaurant criticism either. The restaurant critic is a self-taught creature. The subject matter is mastered primarily through experience, secondarily through research, and also to some extent through relationships -- Bryan Miller being a good example of that -- though these days relationships with culinary professionals are looked down upon at the Times.

So it's not so much that Sheraton had more expertise than Bruni according to some set of codified standards. It's just that, for her time, she knew a heck of a lot more about restaurants than Bruni does for his time. In addition, she came to the table with extensive culinary journalism experience. And really, it seems utterly amazing to me that the Times would ever hire a restaurant critic who has zero experience as a restaurant critic or at least as a serious culinary journalist. It's the Times, not some local paper in the middle of nowhere. But I'm easily amazed.

Put it this way: were she the critic for some free newspaper handed out on the subway, or a blogger if such a thing were to have existed in the '70s, I would care very much what Mimi Sheraton had to say about restaurants. Whereas, I don't think anybody would care at all about Frank Bruni's restaurant opinions -- except perhaps as a sought-after walking-tour guide to Rome -- were he not the reviewer for the New York Times.

[oakapple]

Based on what's said here, the implication is that a restaurant may well go through a three star swing in just a couple of years.  (Do we really believe that?  This seems an important issue in a discussion of reviewing practices.)

Mimi Sheraton seems to have construed the stars differently, given your earlier analysis:

Sheraton: her "default" rating is one star (nearly half of her reviews.) There are roughly equal numbers on each side of zero star and two star reviews (20-25% each). In fact, in my sample, there were more zero stars than two stars. Three and four stars are, as with everybody, a rarity. IMO, this is the most sensible system.

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I am assuredly not a food expert, and so I have to admit I can't, by myself, tell that it's obvious from the reviews that, say, Sheraton is more expert than Bruni.

I am not a food expert either, but when I read Sheraton, the writing seems to be more professional and more serious. She certainly doesn't drift into irrelevant sidelights, as Bruni so often has done.

I can't name specific provable errors Bruni has made. It's just a feeling one gets, which is clearly rather widely shared.

[oakapple]

one quibble: he clearly wasn't recognized at RTR -- of course, that just goes to show how sloppy the front of that house must be.

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It's hardly the first time that something happened to Bruni, where it's clear he wasn't recognized. In the grand scheme, however, I think they're isolated and fairly infrequent incidents. Indeed, he probably mentions them as a rare glimpse into the kind of service the non-V.I.P. might be expected to get.

Most of the time, I think he is recognized. At the RTR—a very expensive restaurant with a former three-star chef that knew a full review was forthcoming—he was surely recognized by most of the staff, on most of his visits.

Edited January 13, 2007 by oakapple (log)

[Sneakeater]

Leonard, I know I keep coming back to this, but if you want to see evidence that Bruni lacks culinary expertise, look at his review of Wolfgang's. The whole review is set up so that it leads up to this comparison of Wolfgang's steaks with Luger's. But when you finally get to the comparison, Bruni craps out. He simply (sorry oakapple) lacks the chops to analyze and describe steak quality with any kind of particularity.

(As always, I'll be quick to admit that I couldn't do it, either. But I'm not a professional restaurant reviewer, much less the most powerful one in the country.)

[Fat Guy]

I don't know that today's business models and practices of high-end restaurants would support a scenario where a one-star restaurant becomes a four-star restaurant. But 30 years ago, it's easier to imagine.

[Leonard Kim]

Leonard, I know I keep coming back to this, but if you want to see evidence that Bruni lacks culinary expertise, look at his review of Wolfgang's.  The whole review is set up so that it leads up to this comparison of Wolfgang's steaks with Luger's.  But when you finally get to the comparison, Bruni craps out.  He simply (sorry oakapple) lacks the chops to analyze and describe steak quality with any kind of particularity.

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Honestly, I'm not trying to be perverse. I re-read the Wolfgang's review and initially could see where you were coming from. It seemed kind of stupid, unbalanced, with very little actual writing about steaks. So then I thought, great, now I'll look at other reviewers' takes on Peter Luger and finally get a handle on what Bruni is lacking. I also re-read Steingarten's article, "High Steaks" to get a handle on what points a credible reviewer would hit when writing about steaks: steak quality, aging method and time, size, texture, juiciness, an ideal of a charred exterior with a rare interior, and flavors which Steingarten describes as "meaty tastes of minerals, iron, and blood. . . beefy tastes of butter, nuts, and broth."

Here is essentially everything Bruni says about steaks in that review:

are the juicy, buttery porterhouses here as delectably exceptional, in taste as well as heft, as the ones across the East River, at Peter Luger?  . . .  steaks hang in a dry-aging box in the basement for weeks, then are cooked under a high-temperature broiler that produces a deeply charred exterior. . . served on a tilted dish that lets blood and butter form a healthful dipping pool at one end.  [A steak] yielded striations of color and texture: the black, crisp exterior gave way to soft red pinpricks in the center. . . .  The meat was many wonderful things at once, or in rapid succession: crunchy, tender, smoky, earthy. . . . [Luger's] steak had been cut about an eighth of an inch thicker (we measured), which allowed for more contrast between the exterior and interior.

Doesn't seem like much, does it? But . . .

Reichl's *** review mentions dry-aging and the importance of buying good quality steak. Here's everything else she has to say about the steak:

You know the steak is great before you even taste it. You know it from the fine, funky, mineral aroma that wafts across the table and announces that this is a piece of meat. When the waiter appears with the platter, he stands there spooning a mixture of butter and meat juices across the sizzling porterhouse in an exercise of pure theater. He is merely prolonging the moment, allowing the aroma to revive all your primal instincts as he stretches out the time until you can actually sink your teeth into the flesh. Finally he serves, slowly doling out slices of fillet and sirloin. As your mouth closes on the incredibly tender piece of beef, aroma and flavor come together, exploding on the palate. . . . The steak's the thing here, an enormous porterhouse charred to perfection over intense heat. It is so good that if you're not careful you find yourself gnawing on the bone, picking the marrow out of the middle and generally covering yourself in greasy goodness.

The style is quite different, but is this really any more substantive?

Miller reviewed Luger twice (one star both times.) Both reviews combined, this is everything he says about the steak:

Steaks are dry aged, intensely beefy and deliciously charred from high-fire broiling.  Waiters serve them sliced on a family-style platter, elevated at one end so the juices run to the bottom. . . . nicely encrusted from high-fire broiling and succulent. . . .  The formidable cut of singed steak had been sliced in the kitchen and placed on a hot platter. Our waiter set a small dish under one end of the platter to let juice run into a corner while commenting, probably for the hundredth time that week, ''If you don't like this steak you don't like steak!'' He then portioned out enough beef to sate a tugboat crew. The beef was cooked rare as ordered and had a good meaty flavor and plenty of juice for bread dipping.

Finally here's Sheraton (1 star):

all top quality, hefty cuts. . . It can be delicious, but often is broiled over too high a heat, so that the outside is charred dry, while the inside is almost always underdone. . . Recently [a steak] was unevenly butchered, so that the thin side was well-done, while the thick side was medium rare.  Another day [a steak] was perfectly broiled, and if it lacked the essentially beefy flavor of steak at its best, it was still far above average.  The biggest flaw is that all steaks are brought to the table sliced, so that their juices run out and the meat turns cold before it can be eaten.  On request, they can be had unsliced.

I came away from this exercise impressed with how hard it must be to write much of anything about steaks (Steingarten says as much about reviewers in his article.) But I think Bruni actually hit all the points he's supposed to (except, perhaps, steak quality, but it's not like anybody wrote "USDA Prime" in their reviews), using the "correct" descriptors. I don't think his steak cred is proved lacking when compared with his predecessors. I agree the general tone of the review is kind of silly, but that's a writing thing, and I find the lavish sensuousness of Reichl no less silly. Sheraton is arguably at odds with what some of what Steingarten and the others look for in an ideal steak.

And now I'll give my contrariness a rest from the discussion.

[Leonard Kim]

Based on what's said here, the implication is that a restaurant may well go through a three star swing in just a couple of years.  (Do we really believe that?  This seems an important issue in a discussion of reviewing practices.)

Mimi Sheraton seems to have construed the stars differently, given your earlier analysis:

That's what I would have thought, but rich's post seems to indicate that QG, at least, really did go from 0 to 4 stars in about 5 years, and it wasn't just a quirk of Sheraton's rating interpretation.

[Fat Guy]

I'm not sure why the fine-dining reviewers review steakhouses at all, however since they all do they should have a good technical comprehension of steak. I'd say they all underperformed. True, they don't have the luxury of Steingarten's seventy-gazillion-word space allocation, however in 1,000+ words it should be possible to present a thorough brief on why a particular steak is great and still have, say 600 words left for everything else. And it's not hard. The critics have just not bothered to do it. They've failed to instruct on the most essential point.

That said, my reading of the excerpts above is that Reichl said it best. For one thing, Reichl's is the only example that even gets the mineral point, which I think is by far the most important aspect of first-rate dry-aged beef. Her "fine, funky, mineral aroma" is spot on -- I think Steingarten would agree that's a technically correct description. Whereas, when Bruni says "crunchy, tender, smoky, earthy," that's not particularly illuminating -- it has little to do with the salient feature of a Peter Luger steak, which is the unique flavor of that meat as opposed to what's true of any old broiled steak. I don't even get what he means by earthy -- I think he's either wrong about that or made a bad word choice -- and smoky is also misleading. Heck, crunchy is kind of a weird choice too, since Peter Luger puts a lot less char on its steak than the average steakhouse. But even if his description made sense, it would be pedestrian. It's the difference between one critic (in the Reichl position) describing Pouilly-Fumé as "smoky and flinty" and another critic (in the Bruni position) describing it as "white, liquid, poured and sipped." For another thing, Reichl is operating within the parameters she sets for herself as a critic. She's technically well-informed but strives for non-technical presentation, instead opting for an experiential account. I think she does that very well indeed. Her excerpt is really the only one that evokes much of anything -- it gets the point across.

Also if critics are going to bother with steakhouses, they should conceive of their writings as a body of work. They should, early on, spell out the criteria for great steaks, and they should keep hammering those criteria home through the whole unfolding series of steakhouse reviews: here's one that gets it right, here's one that doesn't, here's one that caused me to question or expand the criteria.

I think the best move, however, is to have steakhouses handled separately. Once a year, go around to all the top contenders and do a roundup: start with a discussion of criteria, move on to a couple of paragraphs on each place, put them in some sort of rank order. It's the sort of thing Ed Levine is better at than most of the actual restaurant critics: he really gets out there, does a ton of comparative tasting and presents his findings in a pretty compelling manner.

[Sneakeater]

FWIW, I, too, was going to say that, for me, the "mineral" makes all the difference.

[oakapple]

Aside from Italian food, steaks and burgers are what Bruni knows best. He doesn't write with Reichl's sure hand, but comparatively speaking it's one of his stronger categories. Nevertheless, the Wolfgang's review was one of his worst, for its glib and gratuitous references to heart disease.

The Wolfgang's review, like this week's EMP/Bar Room review, compared the restaurant he was rating to another that he was not—in that case Peter Luger. Rich lambasted Bruni for comparing the two, which shows that Rich is at least consistent, but I considered it totally appropriate. If Wolfgang's and Luger's aren't two similar and very comparable restaurants, I don't know what would be.

Fat Guy doesn't think the fine dining critic should review steakhouses. I don't see any objection to it, unless you are also going to exempt other formula restaurants, like sushi bars, classic French bistros, Greek seafood restaurants, and so forth. Indeed, given the pace of steakhouse openings these days, compared to other major restaurant categories with high check sizes, it's hard to see how Bruni could avoid them.

FG's idea of a periodic Ed Levine-style roundup sounds just fine, but I think you need to look at it more broadly. Steakhouses are hardly the only genre that would lend itself to that kind of treatment.

[Fat Guy]

Oh, I totally agree with that. Organizing genre restaurants into genres and treating them in groups is not just the best way to keep up with the rising numerical tide of restaurants but also the best way to discuss the genres. It also forces the critic to self-educate at a higher level than with a one-off review. I do think some genres should be handed off to an Ed Levine type of writer -- indeed, that's already the Times practice, it's just a question of expanding that practice. For example: hot dogs, hero shops, burgers. The relevant point of differentiation has been the focus on a single ingredient or dish. Steak already fits very nicely into that scheme -- you could shift all the steakhouses over to Levine tomorrow without changing the system at all. We already know that the conventional reviewers do a bad job with steakhouses. We wouldn't actually want them to restate the entire body of evaluative criteria in every review, so they state it in no review. This is a simple fix.

I think when you get into multi-item menu genres, it's a little more complex, unless the menus are close to identical. Sushi bars isn't as tight a category as steakhouses. Steakhouses get judged on steak -- on this everyone agrees -- with a sentence or two about starters and sides and, if applicable, seafood. The enterprise of sushi is more diverse, more nuanced. It doesn't stand or fall on, say, toro. I do think it would be interesting for the critic to devote 2-3 weeks of reviews in a row to covering perhaps the 9 most high-end sushi places. And a genre review on small, hip sushi places might be in order. But I wouldn't relegate sushi to a once-a-year (or less frequent) roundup. Also, the roundup format doesn't have to be monolithic. New openings can be covered throughout the year in capsule reviews by the person who does the roundup: Levine can put in 250 words, "Six months ago we evaluated the top steakhouses serving USDA Prime dry-aged beef. Last month Joe's opened and it definitely makes the grade, so to speak. The steaks at Joes' live up to the criteria we set out in . . ." Meanwhile, with less on the plate, the main critic can do more re-reviews and dig deeper into the part of the dining scene that reflects real culinary artistry.

[rich]

So if Porchetta gets two tomorrow and GR gets one next week, will that prove to be the end of the star system?

[oakapple]

So if Porchetta gets two tomorrow and GR gets one next week, will that prove to be the end of the star system?

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Well, that is a very possible result in the world of BruniStars. The same system permits the Bar Room at the Modern to be rated higher than the restaurant itself. It would certainly be another dent in the system's credibility, but it has suffered many such dents, and keeps on ticking.

Based on Bruni's known proclivities, I suspect GR will get two, with a chance at three, and a very remote chance at four. There's no question Ramsay came to New York thinking he was putting out a four-star restaurant. To award three fewer stars than the restaurant was built for would be Bruni's biggest smackdown ever. I wouldn't be shocked if he did that, but it's not likely.

Edited January 16, 2007 by oakapple (log)

[Leonard Kim]

Organizing genre restaurants into genres and treating them in groups is not just the best way to keep up with the rising numerical tide of restaurants but also the best way to discuss the genres. . .

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For those with a Times Select subscription, it might be worth checking out reviews from, say, 9/7/79, 6/23/78. and 2/4/77. These are "genre" reviews (in this case, Brazilian, vegetarian, and Thai respectively) which encompass 7-13 restaurants each. They are "official" reviews, as opposed to the dining directories (which were also presented thematically), assigning fresh ratings to each restaurant under consideration.

[Sneakeater]

Apparently Frank Bruni has entered his baroque, reflexive period:

"But Porchetta isn’t at all traditional. It chases an edginess that other Italian restaurants in its area don’t have in their sights. It’s not doing a tame, by-the-numbers number and asking to be graded on an outer-borough curve."

[Sneakeater]

So do we agree that he's admitting that he grades on an "outer-borough curve"?

[rich]

So do we agree that he's admitting that he grades on an "outer-borough curve"?

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Seems he admits it, at least the concept of it.

Still amazing he has never visited two of the best "outer borough restaurants."

[Nathan]

what do you mean? he's been to both Luger's and Sriphithai

[oakapple]

So do we agree that he's admitting that he grades on an "outer-borough curve"?

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It's a peculiar statement. Instead of admitting that he employs such a curve, he says that the restaurant isn't "asking" to be graded on one. While there may be some restaurants that are grateful for his earlier largesse, which restaurants is he saying ever asked for that?

Still amazing he has never visited two of the  best "outer borough restaurants."

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Which would they be, and how do you know he's never been there? He visits many more restaurants than he reviews.

[rich]

So do we agree that he's admitting that he grades on an "outer-borough curve"?

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It's a peculiar statement. Instead of admitting that he employs such a curve, he says that the restaurant isn't "asking" to be graded on one. While there may be some restaurants that are grateful for his earlier largesse, which restaurants is he saying ever asked for that?

Still amazing he has never visited two of the  best "outer borough restaurants."

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Which would they be, and how do you know he's never been there? He visits many more restaurants than he reviews.

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You're correct - should have used the word reviewed.

[rich]

what do you mean?  he's been to both Luger's and Sriphithai

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Luger hasn't been top notch since the mid '80s (and I'm not going to debate that - it's common knowledge among "old" people.)

Sri is excellent, but it's on the same scale with Parkside with Sapori d'Ischia, except the latter two have nice wine lists and a bit more comfort.

[Nathan]

Bruni has been to Sapori d'Ischia. He wrote it up in his blog.

(my Sri and Luger comment was partially tongue-in-cheek btw )

[rich]

Bruni has been to Sapori d'Ischia.  He wrote it up in his blog.

(my Sri and Luger comment was partially tongue-in-cheek btw )

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I don't read his blog - what did he say?

[Nathan]

he liked some things...but it turned into some long discussions about the water policy -- some posters on his comment section were real idiots.

you should read his blog, it's actually quite good....better than his reviews.

[rich]

he liked some things...but it turned into some long discussions about the water policy -- some posters on his comment section were real idiots.

you should read his blog, it's actually quite good....better than his reviews.

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The water policy is an issue for some. They try to emulate dining at an Italain bistro in the Ischia area, and only serve water by the bottle. The price is cheap, but they don't serve water by the glass. This may go a step too far. (They even post a list of 10 "don'ts" in the restaurant.)

The reason Italian bistros don't serve water by the glass is the quality. Since that's not an issue in NYC, I think they should. Since I rarely drink water with meals, it's a moot point with me, but I can see how others may be put off by the policy.

Edited January 17, 2007 by rich (log)