Momofuku Ko: I Got to Third Base

Today, I got to the screen that actually showed a few green check marks for next Thursday. That’s farther than I got yesterday.

But every time I clicked on a green check mark, I got back a screen with more red X’s, and less green. That meant someone else was clicking faster than I was.

Within moments, everything was all gone. The day sold out in 43 seconds. I hadn’t scored. I’m going to be traveling, so I won’t be able to try again for a couple of weeks.

According to Team Ko: “On the other hand we did have 5 cancellations yesterday and a couple of those actually lasted for over ten minutes before getting snapped up.”

Ko Interruptus

Today was the first day I actually tried to make a reservation at Momofuku Ko. That would have been for next Wednesday: the site opens every day at 10:00 a.m. for six days in advance.

Two days ago, the site debuted, and its instability quickly became a joke. Yesterday offered a respite: since the restaurant is closed Tuesdays, there would be no 10:00 a.m. rush. The Ko team took the extra day to add some spit ’n’ polish to their still-raw website.

So today at 10:00 a.m., I was poised and ready to go. The site stayed up this time, but with hundreds logged in simultaneously, snagging a reservation would be the luck of the draw…  Alas, no. Next Wednesday sold out in 92 seconds!

Until tomorrow…

Wayne Nish's Career Path

Wayne Nish is now in charge of the menu at Spitzer’s Corner, the Lower East Side gastropub. Incidentally, it’s named for a former dress shop that occupied the space, not for the disgraced former governor of New York.

What an odd career path Nish has had:

• In the 1980s, he served an apprenticeship at the Quilted Giraffe, rated four stars.
• In 1988, he took over one of the city’s old-guard French palaces, La Colombe d’Or, earning three stars.
• In 1990, he opened March, earning three stars.
• In 2007, he closed March and opened Nish in the same space, a much more casual restaurant that earned two stars. It closed within six months.
• While Nish (the restaurant) was in its death throes, Nish (the chef) signed on at Varietal, which had recently been slammed with one star. It also quickly closed.
• As of this week, with no restaurants to his name, he’s designing the menu at the “zero-star” Spitzer’s Corner.

If you’re keeping track, it’s taken Nish a bit over twenty years to get from four stars to zero. (To be fair, no one has actually given Spitzer’s Corner zero stars; no critic that awards stars has rated it at all.)

March was a serious restaurant, no doubt about it. But by the time it closed, in 2007, it had lost some of the early luster. My own visit there, in 2004, was mildly disappointing.

The casual make-over that turned March into Nish was a miscalculation. Though it won rave reviews, Nish (the chef) had turned a destination restaurant into a neighborhood joint, and there wasn’t enough foot traffic at 58th & First to pay the freight.

The failure at Varietal wasn’t Nish’s fault: after blistering reviews, the place was clearly on life support, and Nish’s menu—which won praise from the few who tried it—arrived too late.

So now he is at a Lower East Side gastropub, where he says, “What I’m really looking to do here is three-star bar food.” I’m actually eager to try it. It might be great, or it might not, but at these prices—nothing over $16—who wouldn’t be curious?

Yet it is a strange career path: four stars to zero. I wonder if Nish has another serious restaurant in him?

Fiamma Capitulates

As we noted yesterday, the SoHo Italian restaurant Fiamma jacked up its prices, while reducing choices and banishing luxury ingredients from the kitchen, not long after Frank Bruni awarded three stars. Bruni took them to the woodshed in the Times dining section.

Hours later, Fiamma waved the white flag. Chef Fabio Trabocchi e-mailed Frank, and announced that prices would be lowered once again—not back to November 2007 levels, but to lower levels than they’d been just twenty-four hours earlier.

Mr. Trabocchi said that he and Mr. Hanson decided today to lower the three-course prix fixe from $92 to $85, the five-course from $120 to $105 and the seven-course menu from $138 as of early this week to $125.

Anyone want to take bets on how long this lasts?

The Payoff: Bar Boulud

Yesterday, Frank Bruni awarded a slightly generous two stars to Bar Boulud, even though “there’s little wow from the kitchen, which turns out treatments of salmon, sea bass and roasted chicken that, while not quite losers, are definitely snoozers.” He actually preferred the lunch sandwiches to anything offered at dinner.

Frank has never cared much for classic French food, but the charcuterie won him over:

Bar Boulud is a terrine machine, a pâté-a-palooza, dedicated to the proposition that discerning New Yorkers aren’t getting nearly enough concentrated, sculptured, gelatinous animal fat, at least not of a superior caliber.

I’ll buy that, and I’ll buy it on the basis of the restaurant’s smooth pâté grand-mère (chicken liver, pork, Cognac) and coarse pâté grand-père (foie gras, pork, port), both of which are such pure joy to eat — on their own, on toasted bread, with mustard, without — that they sent me on a search across the menu not only for close relatives but also for distant cousins. I was ready to ingest the entire extended family.

And it gave Frank an opening to write another meta-review, to meditate on the micro-trends that fascinate him so:

Much of what you need to know about the direction of fine dining these days is distilled in Bar Boulud, where one of the most accomplished French traditionalists on this side of the Atlantic stages a production whose weakest facet is the conventional three-course dinner.

It’s not just white tablecloths that have fallen by the wayside at Bar Boulud, which extends the chef Daniel Boulud’s trajectory toward ever-more-casual restaurants, mirroring the culture around him. Gone, too, is the notion that sitting at a proper table and ordering a proper sequence of dishes is the way you want to eat.

You can certainly take that route, which in fact has rewards enough for anyone who does elect it. But unlike Mr. Boulud’s other New York restaurants — Daniel, Café Boulud and DB Bistro Moderne, in their order of birth and descending degrees of formality — Bar Boulud doesn’t press that path on you.

Many of its roughly 100 seats are stools at a high, long counter or chairs at a circular communal table. The fraction of menu real estate claimed by entrees is only about a quarter.

You get the sense that if Boulud had installed white tablecloths, Frank would have deducted a star.

We took the one-star odds, and lose $1 on our hypothetical bet. Eater took the two-star odds, and wins $4.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$70.50		$86.67
Gain/Loss	+4.00		–1.00
Total	$74.50		$85.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	33–14		33–14

Etats-Unis, Twice

Note: Etats-Unis closed in November 2009.

*

A friend and I were overdue for a “catch-up” dinner, and I suggested Etats-Unis. I had good memories of the restaurant when I dined there about a year ago, and the neighborhood was convenient.

Everything that made Etats-Unis worthwhile then is true now, but we had a peculiar experience. My friend asked for a tissue, or in lieu of that a cocktail napkin, or a paper towel, or anything made of paper that one could wipe the nose with—and for some reason the server refused, and in fact, was quite insistent that she would not. It was not, to be sure, a run-of-the-mill request, but why refuse?

Eventually the server complied, but after that we were all but ignored. As my friend lives nearby, she went back the next day to complain. The restaurant was very apologetic, admitted they’d had problems with that server, and gave us a gift certificate more than ample to cover the cost of a second meal.

So this is a review of Etats-Unis, twice. The second time, we had a different server, and Etats-Unis shone—as I’m sure it usually does.

The printed menu changes daily. And it really does change. I brought home copies of the menus from both visits. Two weeks apart, only two of five appetizers and one of five entrées were identical. And the others hadn’t just changed slightly; most had changed totally, aside from the chicken entrée (present both times, but with different preparations and accompaniments).

Frank Bruni wrote up Etats-Unis on his blog about five months ago. He clearly was reviewing it through the prism of the restaurant’s Michelin star status. Most restaurants so honored are considerably more luxurious than this one, and he expected more of the dishes to be knock-outs.

What strikes me, rather, is that so much of the food at Etats-Unis is just incredibly solid. After three visits, I remain impressed. Everything is robust, hearty, and impeccably prepared.

Its failing, if you’d call it that, is that Etats-Unis goes straight for the gut. These aren’t meticulous, composed artistic creations, with sauces laid out in squiggly lines, plates with funky shapes, and dollops of caviar or truffles. Most could be described as comfort food, but executed at a level that commands attention.

The portions are also enormous. I have never finished a meal at Etats-Unis, and I probably never will. It’s not for a lack of desire. It’s just more food than I can eat.

It is also expensive. Appetizers are $17–22, entrées $28–38. On my second visit, there was an aged prime rib for two, for $96. The wine list somewhat makes up for it, with plenty of reasonably priced bottles. There are about 20–25 choices by the quarter-bottle (a little more than the standard glass), and almost twenty half-bottles.

 
Tiger shrimp and Dungeness crabmeat chowder (left); Twice risen wild mushroom soufflé (right)

On our first visit, my friend started with a shrimp and crabmeat chowder ($18), while I had a wild mushroom soufflé ($17), which for me was the knockout dish of the evening—an impressive creation.

 
Seafood paella “Etats-Unis” (left); Veal chop (right)

Seafood paella ($38) is the one entrée that was on the menu both times we visited. I hesitate to order paella sometimes, because the seafood is usually in the shell, and the effort to eat it isn’t always repaid in flavor. At Etats-Unis, all of the seafood is out of its shell, and therein lies much of its merit. It includes lobster, shrimp and scallops, along with onions, chorizo, artichokes, bacon and rice. My friend loved it so much that she ordered the same thing two weeks later.

I had the veal chop ($38), which was one of the least interesting things we tried. It was perfectly done, as is everything at Etats-Unis, but not much was done with it, aside from supplying a boatload of rather unmemorable vegetables.

 
Date pudding (left); Chocolate soufflé (right)

Among the desserts, date pudding ($12) and the chocolate soufflé ($14) never leave the menu. Both are baked-to-order, and you need to request them at the beginning of your meal (the server will ask). As I mentioned last time, either one is easily shareable, especially given the size of the appetizer and entrée portions.

Anyhow, we ordered both anyway. The data pudding is the better of the two, particularly given that no one else in town is serving anything like it. The soufflé is very good, and you won’t go home unhappy, but there are plenty of restaurants that do it as well.

 
Fresh pea soup (left); Organic roasted chicken (right)

The second time back, we both chose the same appetizer: a terrific pea soup ($18) garnished with chives, lemon, and Dungeness crab meat.

Lemon poppyseed soufflé

For the main course, my friend had the paella again, while I chose the organic boneless chicken ($28). Whereas my veal chop last time was rather simplistic, there was much more going on here. The chicken was rolled and stuffed with cilantro, onion, and avocado. On the side was a luscious potato terrine, made with six-year aged Gouda cheese.

To finish, we re-ordered the date pudding, but this time there was a new soufflé to try: lemon poppyseed ($14). It was just fine, but not quite gooey enough. If you’re going to have a soufflé, the chocolate is better. (There are always four desserts; both times, there was a lemon pudding cake available. On the first visit, a key lime cheesecake took the place of the lemon soufflé.)

I was impressed that the staff at Etats-Unis essentially comped an entire meal because of the poor service we experienced the first time. Any restaurant would abjectly apologize, but an entire comped meal at this price level is unusual, especially for a restaurant like Etats-Unis that generally has no trouble selling out.

The space remains spartan and somewhat cramped, but the service (aside from a certain individual) is otherwise very good.

Etats-Unis (242 East 81st Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues, Upper East Side)

Food: **½
Service: **
Ambiance: *
Overall: **

Fiamma Flummoxed

[Kalina via Eater]

In today’s Times, Frank Bruni slaps Fiamma with a wet noodle, after hearing complaints that prices went up dramatically, while quality went down, after he awarded three stars in November 2007.

Indeed, the prix fixe menu went up from $75 to $95, while many of the luxe ingredients were banished from the kitchen. New Yorker’s “Tables for Two,” which often reviews restaurants much later than the other critics, caught Fiamma after its downturn, and it wasn’t pretty. The Eater Complaints Dept. sprang into action, noting not just the price hike, but also fewer choices than before.

The prix fixe was $92 on Bruni’s most recent visit, “an increase of more than 20 percent in just three months.” The five-course prix fixe had risen from $100 to $120, while the chef’s tasting menu “had contracted from seven courses to five.” He says, “The number of choices within the prix fixe was slightly smaller than on a menu I’d saved from mid-November, and in some slight ways the food on the more current menu seemed less luxurious, a shift noted and debated on several dining blogs recently.”

While the cost of dining, like everything else, has continued to rise, the shift at Fiamma—more money for less luxury—was especially abnormal, and deserved the dubious distinction of being called out in the newspaper itself. Normally, Bruni saves this type of news for his blog.

But he left Fiamma at three stars, while noting that it “makes me feel a bit less enthusiastic about a restaurant with so much to recommend it.”

The trouble is that most people who are searching for restaurant reviews will find Bruni’s original three-star rave, and not the far less conspicuous correction. You can’t tell whether Fiamma has slid to the lower end of the three-star range, or if Bruni would award two if he were doing it all over again.

Unfortunately, Times policy doesn’t allow a re-rating without three full visits, rather than the one visit that preceded this update. Bruni is no doubt unwilling to make that investment for a restaurant he reviewed only four months ago.

Had Bruni lowered Fiamma to two stars, the repercussions would have been substantial. It would have been a cannon-shot across the bow of restauranteurs: “As quickly as I gave you the third star, I can take it away.” Instead, restaurants can feel free to take advantage of the consumer after the rave reviews are in, knowing that they are not likely to be revised for many years to come.

More Ko Envy

Momofuku Ko’s online reservation site debuted at 10:00 a.m. yesterday. It crashed at 10:02.

All day long at Eater.com, breathless editors chronicled the site’s ups and downs—mostly downs (here, here, here, here). It took about five hours for the first week to sell out, though it would have taken only minutes if the site had been working.

At Ko HQ, engineers said they’d been hit by a denial-of-service attack. To us, it looked like they simply weren’t ready. It turns out that building your own website isn’t as easy as it looks.

The money quote was in the Eater.com comments: “Oh wait I get it now. In keeping with the whole concept of the restaurant, they’ve put the reservation system on a server that only can handle 12 people at a time!”

It didn’t take long for scalpers to start hawking reservations on eBay and Craig’s List. Team Ko added a word of warning to their home page, phrased in their trademarked sentence fragments:

please note you must show id that matches
your reservation info when you come in to eat
(wish we didn’t have to do that)

As we expected, David Chang’s publicity machine is in high gear today, the first day the restaurant is open to paying customers. A photo of Chang tops this week’s Dining section in the Times, and Ko leads off Julia Moskin’s feature article, “Your Water Tonight… Will Be the Chef.” Naturally, Momofuku Ko is also the top item in Florence Fabricant’s “Off the Menu.”

Our cynicism notwithstanding, we do intend to dine at Momofuku Ko very soon…if the website cooperates.

Momofuku Ko (163 First Avenue at E. 10th Street, East Village)

Rolling the Dice: Bar Boulud

Every week, we take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We track our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Daniel Boulud’s Lincoln Center charcuterie palace, Bar Boulud. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 8-1
One Star: 3-1
Two Stars: 4-1 √√
Three Stars: 8-1
Four Stars: 5,000-1

The Skinny: This week’s bet is a tough one, with the BruniTrends^® balanced on a razor’s edge. Though early reviews haven’t been rapturous, you’ve got to figure that if anyone can right the ship, it would be Daniel Boulud, whose restaurants already carry nine New York Times stars. Charcuterie takes center stage here, and Bruni is a confirmed meathead. Lastly, the restaurant is on his beloved Upper West Side, where the grading is always easy.

But was Boulud able to correct things quickly enough? Reports of bumbling service still come across the transom fairly regularly, and aside from the charcuterie no one has really loved Bar Boulud—not counting celebrities who go there to “see and be seen.” Great charcuterie, on its own, is probably a one-star deal, and Bruni loves to take down celebrity haunts. Bruni has been awfully lenient lately, with five positive reviews in a row. If this keeps up, people might almost start to think he’s gone flaccid. Frank wouldn’t want that to happen, would he?

Alas, we can’t bring any personal experience to the decision: our own first look at Bar Boulud was on opening night, and we tasted too small a sample to get a good idea of the restaurant’s capabilities.

The Bet: Our reasons, we admit, are soft. But we feel that Bruni is overdue to bring someone crashing down to earth. We are betting that he’ll award one star to Bar Boulud, with strong praise for the charcuterie, but too many other things wrong to justify the second star.

South Gate

[Krieger via Eater]

Chef Kerry Heffernan first came to prominance as executive chef of Danny Meyer’s Eleven Madison Park. He left in 2005 to helm another Meyer establishment, Hudson Yards Catering, a behind-the-scenes job that didn’t really suit his temperament.

At South Gate, in the Jumeirah Essex House Hotel on Central Park South, Heffernan is back in a restaurant kitchen, where he belongs. I loved Heffernan’s work at Eleven Madison Park the one time I visited, but both New York Times critics that reviewed it awarded only two stars, which for a Danny Meyer restaurant has to be considered disappointing.

The newly refurbished Essex House is practically synonymous with luxury. Not long ago, it was home to Alain Ducasse, probably the fanciest restaurant New York has seen in recent times. With South Gate, the Essex House has gone down-market. The Tony Chi interior dazzles, with its floor-to-ceiling wine wall, gleaming mirrors, and a working fire place. But bare wood tables and floors, and a large space dominated by a wrap-around bar, send a decidedly casual vibe. So does the booming sound system in the adjoining lounge, which made us decidedly uncomfortable.

If Heffernan has brought along some of his old recipes from Eleven Madison Park, he certainly hasn’t brought along his old service team. It was amateur hour on a Saturday evening, when the amuse-bouche and the appetizers arrived simultaneously, but dessert (cheesecake) took twenty minutes. And good luck flagging down a server when you need one.

Heffernan was in the house and greeted most diners (including us), but he couldn’t have been pleased to see the place half-empty. Judging by the many accents we heard, we guessed that most of those in the dining room were hotel guests. To survive, such a large restaurant will need to attract a broader clientele.

The menu is one of low ambition. There are six appetizers ($14–21), four soups & salads ($12–16), five seafood and vegetable entrées ($26–39) and four meat entrées ($29–38). The obligatory foie gras and lobster make appearances—they’re the most expensive appetizer and entrée respectively—but you don’t find any caviar, black truffles, or Kobe beef. There’s no tasting menu.

The wine list is on the expensive side, but there are some decent options that don’t break the bank. I don’t claim any great expertise, but I thought that the 1998 Chateau Camensac Haut-Médoc ($74) was one of the better wines we’ve had in a while. They don’t decant it, as they do at Eleven Madison Park, and the same glasses are used whether you order red or white.

  
Amuse-bouche (left); Wild Mushroom Martini (center); Hamachi (right)

The bread service was much better than usual for this class of restaurant: warm bread rolls with individual soft butter servings for each of us. But is it possible to have too much bread? The amuse-bouche was foie gras torchon with orange jelly and lemon zest on a cracker, accompanied by warm gougères.

I was sufficiently intrigued to take a chance on the Wild Mushroom Martini ($16). It was basically a hot mushroom soup with spinach fondue, a poached egg, and a slice of crostini. There was allegedly crisp pancetta in there too, but I couldn’t find it. Give Heffernan credit for serving something no other chef in town has thought of, but the dish was a failure. The various ingredients were clumpy and hard to get at, especially when they came in a teeter-tottering martini glass.

The dish was also, quite frankly, extremely unappetizing to look at. Look at the photo, and write your own disgusting caption. At another table, a French woman took one look at it, and sent it back. It didn’t taste bad at all, but I really didn’t see the point.

My girlfriend’s Hamachi ($18) was a good deal more successful. 

 
Gianonne Chicken (left); Short-Cured Salmon Pavé (right)

Chicken ($29) and Salmon ($31) are hotel restaurant clichés, and I’m not sure that Heffernan did much to elevate them beyond their usual fate. The chicken was competent enough, but once again it was not all that appetizing to look at, and it was over-sauced. Did paprika really belong here?

Salmon was alleged to be “short-cured” — that is, cured for exactly one hour, according to the server. Can an hour of curing really make a difference? We certainly didn’t detect any, but the fish was tender enough. 

 
Cheesecake (left); Petits-fours (right)

For dessert, we shared an order of cheescake ($10). With cheesecake, pastry chefs sometimes get too cute for their own good, but this one was the real McCoy, albeit dressed up a bit. We enjoyed it, and also the petits-fours.

With appetizers averaging over $15 and entrées over $30, South Gate needs to do better. The only dish on the menu that seemed to take any real chance—the Wild Mushroom Martini—is surely destined for an early retirement. Is this meant to be a dining destination, or an unadventurous hotel restaurant with a hip bar scene? Whichever is the case, at these prices patrons deserve much better service.

South Gate is barely a month old. Given Kerry Heffernan’s track record, I assume that it will improve.

South Gate (160 Central Park South between Sixth & Seventh Avenues, West Midtown)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: *½
Overall: *