Michelin New York 2014 Ratings

The Michelin New York 2012 ratings were announced this afternoon. As always, we’re back with our tabular listing, after the jump, of the stars from 2006 (the first year) to the present.

There are fewer “head-scratchers” this year — actually, no new stars that seem completely ridiculous, like Shalizar in 2010 or Heartbreak in 2012. There are a few hold-overs, like Jewel Bako, that some people violently disagree with, but I don’t consider that as bad—if “bad” it is—as a new error, and there aren’t a lot of those.

Most of the city’s professional critics hate the Michelin ratings. They don’t want to admit that a French tire company is as good at it as they are. The fact is, all of the pro critics get restaurants wrong; sometimes, ridiculously so. Unlike Michelin, they practically never revisit their errors.

To give a couple of examples: Jonathan Benno’s Lincoln Ristorante had a terrible start in the fall of 2011. Most of the early reviews were lukewarm. Those critics are probably never going back. It’s not that they’re cruel or stubborn: they just don’t have the mandate to keep re-checking their old reviews. Lincoln now has a Michelin star. The tire guide was able to recognize the improvement. The pro critics couldn’t.

Picholine was demoted in 2012 from two Michelin stars to one, and this year from one star to zero, reflecting the restaurant’s decline. The New York Times? The best they can do is Frank Bruni’s three-star review from 2006, not likely to be updated anytime soon.

Many people found Gordon Ramsay’s previous two-star rating incomprehensible, but no local critic had reviewed it in years. People who said the rating was wrong had no clue. How could they? Anyhow, this year it suffered a rare demotion from two stars to zero. Given the restaurant’s recent troubles, it is no surprise.

Of course, there are individual Michelin ratings I disagree with. No one could construct such a list and please everybody; my list no doubt would displease some of you. But by and large it’s a more accurate list than any professional critic in this city can produce, simply because the pro critics spend so much of their time at restaurants that are brand new, and have only rare opportunities to revisit them.

The summary is below, the tabular listing after the jump.

Promotions:

• Jungsik, from one tar to two

Star Regained:

• Babbo, from zero stars to one (last starred in 2008). I am not sure what cost Babbo its star in 2009, or what changed to get it back again.

Demotions: (not counting closed restaurants)

• Gordon Ramsay at the London, from two stars to zero.

• Picholine, from one star to zero.

Starred in First Year Eligible:

• Aska
• Carbone
• Ichimura at Brushstroke
• Le Restaurant
• The Musket Room

The top three received multiple favorable reviews from the professional critics. The latter two have not, but they’re not complete head-scratchers like some of the Tire Man’s past star awards.

Other Restaurants Starred for the First Time:

• Caviar Russe. Probably the most surprising newly-starred place, but this restaurant has gone almost totally under the critical radar for years. Who knew?

• Telepan. Much deserved after all these years.

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db bistro moderne

Let’s bow down to Daniel Boulud’s genius. None of his New York restaurants have ever failed. Even at the flagship Daniel, which some people find stodgy, he has managed to keep it just enough up-to-date to remain popular and relevant.

More remarkably, he did this without ever abandoning his French roots, during many years when his cuisine was not exactly fashionable. Even that Italophile and Fracophobe Frank Bruni never gave him a bad review.

Boulud renovates his restaurants after a decade or so. Both Daniel and Café Boulud went under the knife at around their tenth anniversaries. This summer, it was db bistro moderne’s turn. I’m sure it was still doing decent business, but after a dozen years it was Boulud’s most off-the-radar restaurant. It was time.

My two previous meals there were in 2004 and 2006, so I don’t recall the original very well. The interior has been totally redone by Jeffrey Beers International in mirrors and dark paneling (see Eater.com for photos). They’ve added a bar, which the original db bistro lacked. Most of the tables have tablecloths. It looks a bit corporate, but very much in Boulud’s style, and appropriate for a neighborhood that sees a lot of hotel and commercial traffic. Boulud was never the sawdust and heavy metal type.

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Enduro

Note: Enduro did not endure. As of August 2014, the space is BV’s Grill, owned by the same people.

*

Welcome to Enduro, a handsome new West Midtown spot owned by the heir to the Junior’s restaurant chain.

The name won’t mean very much to the rest of us: the owner’s grandfather ran a string of “Enduro” restaurants in the 1920s. It’s also a type of off-road motorcycle racing, in case you were wondering. But the owners get plenty of mileage out of the name. On the corridor leading to the restrooms, there’s a bunch of fake ads for fictitious products called “Enduro.”

They dropped some coin to build this place, spending $7 million to renovate a former Outback Steakhouse. The dining room is spacious and masculine, with heavy wood tables and big horseshoe banquettes, dominated by a large rectangular bar in the center of the room.

Enduro claims to be a classic American grill, a sufficiently malleable description that allows the chef to serve almost anything. On a rotisserie grill, prominently visible in the partially-open kitchen, you’ll find pork loin, chicken, and rotating whole fish specials.

The dinner menu offers snacks ($4–16), salads ($10–24), appetizers ($10–17), mains ($16–49), and side dishes ($8–12). Those are wide ranges. You could get out cheaply with the burger ($16), or not so cheaply with the ribeye steak ($49).

The all-American wine list offers 13 choices by the glass, and 2½ pages’ worth by the bottle, with reds ranging from $40–600, and a decent selection under $60. I didn’t see many bargains, but it was clearly a list with a point of view, and not just the generic stuff that most new restaurants serve.

 

Pretzel Bread ($4; above left) is baked in shiny round balls, with creamy mustard that delivers a potent kick. Chicken Liver Spread ($8; above right) is a great starter, but it needed to come with twice as much bread. Extra bread came along later, at no charge, but we had to wait for it.

 

I didn’t taste my companions’ dishes, but there were general nods of approval for Linguini with clams, garlic, and olive oil ($17; above left), and Striped Bass with brown butter and bok choy ($28; above right).

 

Berkshire Pork Loin off the rotisserie ($24; above left) had a great smoky flavor, but it could have used some crisping at the edges for textual contrast. A side of thick-cut bacon ($8; above right) was a hit at our table; it won’t put Peter Luger out of business, but it’s well worth ordering.

You worry that it could get noisy here, but tables are generously spread out, and the high ceilings dissipate the sound. It was about 80 percent full on a Friday night, with a multi-generational crowd ranging from baby carriages to geriatrics.

Managers and servers seemed to be on top of things in the dining room, but it was a challenge to get a bartender’s attention. There were other minor service lapses: the long wait for a second helping of bread; entrées served with sauces on the side, but no serving spoons.

But the food is good enough for this type of place, the room friendly and welcoming. Enduro is located on the edge of Midtown, where there are plenty of business lunches to be had, with plenty of housing stock to the east, where there’s always demand for a place like this.

Enduro (919 Third Avenue at 56th Street, East Midtown)

Food: American grill standards
Service: Enthusiastic but not yet polished
Ambiance: A large corporate space where you can relax

Rating: ★

Domain

Remember Etats-Unis, the Upper East Side restaurant with an improbable Michelin star? I never quite bought into the star, but for what it was — straight, up-the-gut comfort food — it was certainly well above the neighborhood average.

I’m not sure why Etats-Unis closed (it was always reasonably full, in my experience), but close it did, nearly four years ago. The chef, Derrick Styczek, has resurfaced at Domain, a new restaurant in the space that was formerly Vareli in Morningside Heights, a short hop from the Columbia campus. The name might not be the best choice. Search on “Domain restaurant,” and you’re liable to get back a list of Internet domain hosting services.

There’s room to spread out here, in a roomy two-story storefront that was nowhere near full on a Wednesday evening (the Jewish holiday week, to be fair). It’s an attractive, romantic spot, with dark wood, low lighting, and acres of exposed brick. Not that you haven’t seen it before, but you haven’t seen it here.

Styczek’s cooking is more dainty and precious than I recall at Etats-Unis. There are hints of the former comfort-food style it’s not quite as pleasurable here. Prices are calibrated to the neighborhood, with only one entrée (lamb) abouve $29.

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Sushi Dojo

 

Note: This review was written when David Boudahana was Executive Chef at Sushi Dojo. The owners fired him in late 2015 after a series of run-ins with the Department of Health. The restaurant’s other sushi chefs were excellent, so the restaurant should be able to keep running without missing a beat.

*

Was I imagining it, or have we entered a Golden Age of Japanese cuisine in New York? New York’s Adam Platt seems to agree: this week, he posted a roundup of six new entrants—and he still didn’t manage to hit all of them.

I won’t have the time or the money for such an extensive survey. If I could only do one, I wasn’t sorry that it was Sushi Dojo, which opened in the East Village in early June and was an instant hit.

 

The chef getting all the press is an unlikely one: 27-year-old David Bouhadana (above left), a Jewish kid from Florida who trained with Iron Chef Morimoto and apprenticed for four years in Japan. To this gaijin’s ears, his Japanese sounds like the real McCoy. (I remember him vaguely from Sushi Uo, where he worked briefly in 2009.) Joining him are Hiromi Suzuki (one of the few female sushi chefs in New York) and Makato Yoshizawa, the only one of the group born and raised in Japan.

The restaurant’s name, loosely translated, means “Sushi Education.” The chefs will talk about their fish until you’re ready for a Ph.D., but they can leave you alone, if you’d prefer. It would be pretentious to suggest that you can’t get your education elsewhere, but these chefs are more talkative (in a good way) than many others I’ve encountered.

There’s a menu of hot dishes from the kitchen, sushi and sashimi à la carte, and omakases at escalating prices. On the evening we were there, the top omakase was $80 per head (since raised to $90), which compares favorably to $135 at Neta a few months ago. Ingredients are everything in sushi: much of the bill at Neta was taken up with an insane serving of toro tartare and caviar, which is $48 all by itself when ordered separately.

The sushi itself at Neta was pedestrian; here, it’s the highlight of the meal. The chef said that about 70 percent of the fish they serve is imported from Japan, with the rest sourced from the likes of Boston, New Zealand, Montauk, San Francisco, and so forth. In our omakase, I thought the ratio was more like 50/50.

 

There are about 40 sakes on the menu. We discussed our preference with the sommelier, who brought out a selection of three for us to try, and then steered us to an inexpensive choice. We ordered the $80 omakase with Chef Suzuki (above right), and she went to work. A poached South African ocotpus (upper left of photo) had just come steaming out of the oven.

 

We started (above left) with a few pieces of that octopus; tuna tartare with wasabi, soy, and yam; and a British Columbia oyster. Then came a selection of sashimi (above right) with shrimp, hamachi, tuna, and yellowtail.

 

The heads of the shrimp were sent to the kitchen, and came back deep fried (above left). This is a terrific dish, if you don’t mind the gross-out factor. I’ve always eaten shrimp heads, but I realize that many people don’t.

The planned omakase included five pieces of sushi: madai, golden eye snapper (Japan), shimaji (Japan), Tasmanian trout, and fatty tuna otoro (Boston). I’ve shown the trout (above right); you can see every piece in the slide show below.

 

We didn’t feel quite ready to be done, so we ordered five extra pieces. A scallop (above), seared with the blowtorch and finished with soy and yuzu zest, was one of the highlights. We also enjoyed the Japanese spotted sardine, salted and cured; the Santa Barbara sea urchin; sea eel; and seared fatty tuna with lemon juice and salt.

The omakase did not include dessert or anything from the kitchen, aside from the deep-fried shrimp heads. If our experience is any guide, you’ll probably want a bit more. (The kitchen sent out a pot of tea in a clay pot, which does not normally come with it.) I ought to add that we dined at the publicist’s invitation, and although we paid for our meal, it was at a discounted rate.

There are 36 seats, which were mostly full by 9:00 pm (when we were wrapping up), but only 14 at the bar. As usual for such establishments, you need to sit at the bar to get the most out of the experience, or should I say, the education.

If you want sushi around here, the sky’s the limit. At Kurumazushi, you can spend $1,000 in 45 minutes, and they’ll serve you slabs of imported otoro the size of porterhouse steaks. Sushi Dojo occupies a more rational sphere. In its price range, it is one of the better Japanese meals I’ve had in New York.

Sushi Dojo (110 First Avenue at E. 7th Street, East Village)

Food: Sushi front and center
Service: Personalized service from one of three sushi chefs
Ambiance: Austere but not too serious, in the traditional blond wood

Rating: ★★

Mighty Quinn's Barbecue

Barbecue is a cuisine I love, but all too rarely find the time to enjoy. Many of the recently acclaimed places have opened in Brooklyn or Queens, and I don’t love ’cue quite enough to head over there.

Mighty Quinn’s Barbecue is an exception, opening last December on a bright East Village street corner in the old Vandaag space. I had a mid-day appointment in the area, so I headed over at 11:30 a.m., when they open for lunch.

Good barbecue in NYC is still scarce enough that the better places can be packed at peak hours. Getting there early is a boon: I was served immediately. It’s not a huge space, and I’m sure at the dinner hour it’s packed.

The owners have put a high gloss on what is still, at root, a bare-bones operation. The space is bright, shiny, and comfortable. Nevertheless, you stand in a cafeteria line, and the food is served on metal trays.

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Estela

I’ve got mixed feelings about Estela, the new tapas-style restaurant from chef Ignacio Matos and beverage director Thomas Carter.

We last saw Matos at Isa, where he wowed audiences and critics (or most of them), but didn’t wow the owner, the world’s greatest poseur, Taavo Somer. Apparently unwilling to operate even one good restaurant, Somer fired Matos abruptly in the summer of 2012. Isa still exists, but is culinarily irrelevant, like all of Somer’s other places.

So it’s an understatement to say I was rooting for Estela to succeed. I didn’t love everything I tasted at Isa, but I loved a lot of it, and it mattered.

Alas, Estela is a let-down. The food is all pleasant enough and mostly pretty good. You won’t eat badly here. But most of it is beneath what Matos was trying to do at Isa. It was worth going out of your way to visit Isa. It’s worth dropping in at Estela if you’re in a few blocks’ radius.

It’s an even bigger come-down for Carter, who was beverage director at Blue Hill Stone Barns, and now serves a wine list that fits on a single page. (That is, unless there’s a larger list that the server neglected to show us.)

None of this is accidental. In a joint interview with Eater, Matos and Carter made their lower ambitions abundantly clear: “I don’t want us to think in terms of ‘developing dishes’ or anything like that,” says Mattos of the way he’s training his young and small kitchen to work. “These should just be plates of food, nurturing and relatively cheap, that remind you of the home-cooked meals you never experience anymore.”

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Alder

Note: Alder closed in August 2015. Wylie Dufresne, the chef and owner, did not explain the decision, but when we dropped in a couple of months earlier, we found the dining room almost empty on a weeknight. Earlier in the year, he instituted a tasting-menu format that, perhaps, didn’t go over as well as he’d hoped.

*

Give Wylie Dufresne credit. Give him double-credit.

When WD~50, his modernist—and not always approchable—restaurant, struggled during the Great Recession, he stayed open. For a while, he was doing just five nights a week, but he didn’t give up, and he never dumbed down the menu.

And for ten years, WD~50 was all he had. Unlike most chefs with three New York Times stars, he didn’t open a more casual restaurant that might’ve distracted him, or competed with the flagship for his attention.

In May 2012, WD~50 abolished the à la carte menu in the main dining room. Tasting menus are now all you can get. They’re also back up to seven nights a week. I guess the Great Recession is over. (Not everyone thinks the new format is an improvement.)

About that time, he started planning Alder, a new casual restaurant in the East Village, which finally opened in March 2013. Alder is à la carte and less elaborate than WD~50. It’s Dufresne’s take on classic pub food, recognizably in his style, but not as avant-garde as WD~50 sometimes can be. There are four cooks in the kitchen at Alder, as opposed to twelve at WD~50, so the food is a lot simpler.

Generally, you’ll recognize what you eat, which at WD~50 is not always the case. You can take grandma or perhaps even your picky Aunt Gertrude, provided she doesn’t mind the noise. Sound levels in the dining room can be punishing. We visited on a warm summer evening, and fortunately were able to sit outside. Indoors, I might like Alder a lot less.

But we ate outside, so I loved it.

The menu consists of eighteen items priced $8–24, served tapas-style, and suitable for sharing, with no explicit division between appetizer and entrée. Like most small-plates restaurants, it only seems inexpensive. Our fairly modest order of five plates, a cocktail each, and a $48 bottle of wine, ran to $177 before tax and tip.

 

Every meal at Alder begins with a serving of Giardiniera (above left), an Italian–American relish of pickled vegetables. It’s a bit odd, as several critics have noted, as it doesn’t really go with the rest of the food, and no bread is served with it. But it’s very good on its own terms: we made fast work of it.

“Pigs in a Blanket” ($13; above right), like so much of the food at Alder, is a play on the old classic, here made with Chinese sausage, Japanese mustard, and a sweet chili sauce. Consider it a must-order.

 

Sun Gold Tomatoes ($18; above left) are served with Peekytoe crab, fried naan, and edamame; but what comes through is mostly tomato, and not enough of the crab.

I could eat the foie gras terrine ($19; above right) all day. It was served with watermelon and shiso on a Ritz cracker. (Some critics have mentioned poached apple, so I think the recipe changes periodically.) But the Ritz cracker is a constant: who knew it paired so well with foie gras?

 

New England Clam Chowder ($16; above left) comes with “oyster crackers,” which you toss into the soup. It’s a terrific combination. A party of two need not worry about ordering this: they send it out in two bowls.

 

The kitchen aced the Roasted Chicken ($21; above left), served with oyster mushrooms and charred romaine. But Halibut ($24; above right) was bland and dry: I was more fond of the corn underneath it than the fish itself.

The pacing of the meal was just right; silverware was replaced after every course.

There’s about 40 bottles on the wine list, plenty of them below $50. The server decanted our 2010 Morgon ($48), which was served at the correct temperature, but in juice glasses. For a check that rises above $200 after tax and tip, you’d think they could afford wine stems.

Out of five dishes, I count three hits, one dud (the Halibut), and another in between (the tomatoes with crabmeat and edamame). That’s pretty much what everyone says about Alder: Dufresne and his team don’t hit a home run with every dish, but there’s more than enough to make the restaurant hugely worthwhile.

Alder (157 Second Avenue at E. 10th Street, East Village)

Food: A modernist take on pub food
Service: Very good; would be great if they’d bring in real wine glasses
Ambiance: East Village chic, and too noisy: east outside while you still can

Rating: ★★

Umami Burger

The California-based Umami Burger chain opened its first New York City branch three weeks ago, backed by a chorus of heavy panting by the usual sources. All that excitement for a burger joint, and an imported one at that?

You can see why. They serve a very good burger, named for that indescribable taste sensation common to such foods as aged beef, cheeses, and shellfish.

The whole menu consists of a handful of salads, starters and side dishes, and eight—count them, eight—kinds of burgers. That last castegory includes items like turkey, tuna, and duck burgers, in addition to traditional ones.

There are eight beers on tap and sixteen in bottles, nine wines (most available by the glass or bottle), and fifteen house cocktails ($12 each). That’s not the typical beverage list for a burger joint. If you’re teetotaling, there are the obvious sodas and odd ones too, like Mexican Sprite (whatever that is). I visited in the early afternoon, so I drank just lemonade.

I ordered the Truffle Burger with Fries ($12.50), and — what more is there to say? It was a great, thick burger, cooked to a perfect medium rare, and with an ideal patty to bun ratio. I didn’t detect much truffle flavor, nor did I care. But if you prefer the smash technique, perfected (should I say ruined?) at places like Bill’s Bar and Burger, then this place isn’t for you.

The fries are thin and crisped, excellent specimens of the style.

You’d call the bi-level space “bare bones” if it were anything but a burger joint. For a burger joint, it’s upscale. There are bars and free-standing tables on both levels, plus a row of banquettes on the ground floor.

A host seats you. Service is very good. There was no wait to get in, but I visited at an odd hour, although even at 1:30pm, well past the lunch rush, the place was about half full.

I don’t want to over-sell Umami Burger. It’s a burger spot, and a good one.

Umami Burger (432 Sixth Avenue at W. 10th Street, Greenwich Village)

Food: Burgers are the focus
Service: Very good, even excellent, for a burger joint
Ambiance: A comfortable bi-level restaurant with two bars

Rating: ★

Brasserie Cognac East

Sometimes, you can just tell that a new restaurant fulfills a neighborhood’s long-felt need. That’s my reaction at Brasserie Cognac East on the Upper East Side French, which was packed to the gills on a random summer Tuesday.

Classic French cuisine has been on the upswing the last few years, as I and many others have noted. Still, the swish of the scythe was so devastating in the 1990s and early aughts that the arrival of another such establishment is welcome.

More, please.

Cognac East is the second of the family. Its older sister opened in West Midtown in 2008, as Brasserie Cognac de Monsieur Ballon. The fictitious M. Ballon, it seems, has been kicked to the curb. The chef, Florian V. Hugo (the Les Misérables author’s descendant), clearly knows his French cuisine. When it’s right, it’s very right.

Both restaurants are built for volume: there are 100 tightly-packed seats at Cognac East, on two levels. The space (formerly the Italian restaurant Lumi) is loud, and not the most charming. Internet reviews suggest the service can be uneven. That was my experience, too, at the original Brasserie Cognac. I had a terrific vol au vent on opening night, but a meal about six months later that I’d rather forget.

This must all, of course, be placed in the context of a mid-priced menu, with most entrées below $30 and most appetizers in the mid-teens — higher than Sel et Poivre, lower than Orsay, both nearby. If I lived in the area, Cognac would be in my regular rotation.

 

We loved the cheese puffs (above left) that started the meal. A tomato-y lobster bisque (above right) was really good.

 

The tuna tarte flambé (above left) is an unusual dish, but it works. The version we were served was spiced with wasabi, which is probably not in Escoffier’s cookbook. There is no mention of wasabi on the Internet menu, so perhaps that has been phased out.

The shoestring fries (above right) were crunchy and salty, exactly as they ought to be.

 

Steak tartare (above left) was disappointing, as an overdose of pepper completely smothered the over-sauced beef. But all was forgiven with a perfect scallop (above right) with mushrooms and a squash purée.

 

The cheese soufflé (above left), made with emmenthal, gruyère and parmesan, was one of the evening’s highlights, a must for soufflé connoisseurs. The side salad it comes with (above right) doesn’t add much to the dish.

  

If the desserts we sampled are any guide, your last memories will be good ones. Our favorite was the coconut shell (above left), with bitter chocolate, coconut sorbet, exotic fruit salad, and passion fruit sauce. Or try the rose macaron (above center) with litchies, fresh raspberries, rose cream and berry sauce. The floating island (above right) with poached meringue with caramel and vanilla crème anglaise was okay, but I have had better versions of this dish.

Full disclosure: we dined at the publicist’s invitation, sat in the corner booth, and got Cognac East’s best. The throngs packing the dining room are evidence enough that the neighborhood wants such a place. I hope the chef and his team can give it to them.

Brasserie Cognac East (963 Lexington Ave. at 70th Street, Upper East Side)