The Payoff: Shang

We didn’t get a chance to post our BruniBet this week. The Eater odds weren’t yet announced when I left work, and when I got home Frank’s one-spot for Shang was already posted—much earlier in the evening than usual.

For what it’s worth, I had planned to make the same one-star bet that Eater did, not because I agree with it, but because it was the safest guess. Bruni is a follower, and when the critics before him weigh in with a collective “MEH,” he usually does too.

Indeed, for the first time I can remember, he came out and admitted that he read his fellow-critics’ reviews before writing his own:

The dining room is relatively understated, apart from a cluster of circular orange banquettes and a few peachish lighting fixtures so oddly shaped and unusually textured that my fellow critics have outdone themselves with metaphors, which I’d be a fool to try to improve upon. “Papier-mâché breasts” are what came to one reviewer’s mind. “Rumpled old stockings” popped into another’s. Split the difference and you’ve got the picture. [See photo above.]

We liked Shang a lot better than Frank did, but I certainly think it was churlish to blame the restaurant for a staircase and a bar that it does not control. Doesn’t Frank realize this is a hotel?