Rolling the Dice: The Four Seasons

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, His Frankness reviews The Four Seasons, one of New York’s iconic restaurants. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 6-1
One Star: 4-1
Two Stars: 8-3
Three Stars: 5-1 √√
Four Stars: 15,000-1

The Skinny: Opened in 1959, The Four Seasons is one of New York’s oldest continuously operating restaurants. Many celebrities are frequent diners, including Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger. Prices are astronomical, with the least expensive dinner entrée priced at $37, and many above $50.

Ruth Reichl awarded three stars in 1995, re-affirming Bryan Miller’s three-star rating from 1990. I also found a two-star Mimi Sheraton review dating from 1979. (There probably were earlier rated reviews that my cursory search failed to uncover. It’s hard to believe that Sheraton’s piece, after the restaurant had been open twenty years, was the first.)

I had a hunch that this week’s Bruni target would be a re-review, but I didn’t expect The Four Seasons. Classic elegance always seems to bore Frank Bruni, so it is surprising to find him dining at an established landmark that has mostly flown under the critics’ radar over the last decade.

Eater has framed the dilemma well. Most of us think of The Four Seasons as a restaurant that practically defines three-star dining. But Bruni’s tenure has been marked with a strong undercurrent of hostility towards precisely this type of restaurant: classic, expensive, elegant, beloved of celebrities, and not especially adventurous. No such restaurant has received three stars from Frank Bruni, and we don’t think tomorrow will be an exception.

On top of that, Bruni’s “unprompted” re-reviews—those not occasioned by a major event (new chef, new location, facelift)—have generally resulted in a rating change. As Bruni himself once said, it’s usually not worth investing the multiple visits required for a full review, if the only outcome is to re-confirm a previous verdict.

The Bet: Eater, for what he concedes are emotional reasons, is taking the three-star action. We are betting that Frank will do what he always does, slay the sacred cow, and award two stars to The Four Seasons. If we were inclined to be really adventurous, we’d bet on one star before we’d bet on three. But for now, two it is.

The Payoff: Rosanjin

As expected, Frank Bruni awarded two stars to Rosanjin.

It’s hard to complain about this review. Yes, it displays the usual Bruni foible of dancing around the subject, instead of hitting it straight on. By my count, it’s not until the 15th paragraph that Bruni actually says anything about the food. Once he gets there, he mostly loves it.

But in other ways, I have to give Bruni some credit—which I’ve seldom had occasion to do. Until now, Bruni has mostly been known for smacking down sacred cows, and giving rave reviews to places the foodies had long ago discovered. Unlike the Duke of Plaza-Toro, Frank Bruni didn’t lead fashions; he followed them. What kind of critic are you, if all you do is ratify other people’s judgments? With Rosanjin, you could say he “discovered” a place that practically everyone else had ignored.

I would add that I haven’t been to Rosanjin, so I have no idea if the rave is deserved. But at least Bruni, for the first time that I can recall, actually led critical opinion about something, rather than just ratifying it.

Eater and I both took the two-star bet at 5–1 odds, winning $5 apiece.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$10		$14
Gain/Loss	+$5		+$5
Total	+$15		+$19
* * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	5–1		5–1

Rolling the Dice: Rosanjin

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 “Samurai” Bruni reviews Rosanjin, the Japanese kaiseki restaurant in TriBeCa. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 5-1
One Star: 3-1
Two Stars: 5-1 √√
Three Stars: 30-1
Four Stars: 15,000-1

The Skinny: As Eater notes, Rosanjin “has generally flown below the radar.” I found only one review. Paul Adams of the Sun enjoyed himself, but thought that Sugiyama was better at half the price. Price, indeed, is the issue. Rosanjin’s prix fixe is $105–150, as opposed to $68 at Sugiyama. (When Adams dined at Rosanjin, he paid $150.)

Sugiyama carries three stars at the Times, dating from a 1999 Ruth Reichl review. Bruni is highly price-sensitive, so he’s not going to award three stars tomorrow unless Rosanjin is considerably better than Sugiyama. Adams didn’t think it was, and Bruni generally follows other people’s recommendations; he doesn’t lead them. To put it another way, it’s highly unlikely that there’s a three-star restaurant in the shadows that all the other critics have missed.

Yet, Bruni usually doesn’t review restaurants everyone else has ignored, only to insult them. For a restaurant at Rosanjin’s price level, anything below two stars would be an insult. On top of that, Bruni’s discretionary reviews — the restaurants he chooses to review, rather than those he must review — are usually two stars.

The Bet: No outcome below four stars would utterly surprise me, but I find three stars distinctly unlikely, and Eater hasn’t made the one-star odds (3–1) sufficiently enticing. Therefore, we are once again making the same bet as Eater: two stars for Rosanjin.

The Payoff: Varietal

As expected, the Brunmeister awarded one star to Varietal. As expected, he found the food uneven. As expected, he found it “a province of aggressive experimentation and eccentric, highfalutin name tags.” (“Highfalutin” is one of Frank’s favorite words to describe restaurants too clever for their own good.)

He was less taken with the desserts than some other critics, which I should have expected. Bruni will lament that avant-garde cuisine doesn’t have much of a toe-hold in New York, but when someone actually tries something, invariably he isn’t enthused. Jordan Kahn’s creations “will definitely get your attention. Your affection is another matter.”

Eater and I both took the one-star bet at 3–1 odds, winning $3 apiece.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$7		$11
Gain/Loss	+$3		+$3
Total	+$10		+$14
*
Won–Lost	4–1		4–1

Rolling the Dice: Varietal

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, His Frankcellency reviews Varietal, the Chelsea wine-themed restaurant with blow-the-doors-off desserts. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 5-1
One Star: 3-1 √√
Two Stars: 4-1
Three Stars: 30-1
Four Stars: 15,000-1

The Skinny: All the indicators this week point to one star. Varietal is primarily a wine restaurant. Frank doesn’t know much about wine, so he is unlikely to appreciate the restaurant’s main attraction. Varietal has white tablecloths, and Frank finds traditional formality a turn-off. The service at Varietal is, as Eater put it, “fussy.” Frank doesn’t like fussy. Varietal is rather expensive, and Frank tends to hold expensive restaurants to a high standard. Lastly, most critics have not been wowed by the food—other than Jordan Kahn’s desserts.

So, why even one star? Only because we think Varietal is the kind of restaurant Frank would simply ignore if he couldn’t find something good to say. Given that he’s reviewing it, we don’t think it will get goose-egged. Desserts will save the day. We do agree with Eater, however, that zero stars is more likely than two.

The Bet: For the second week in a row, we agree with the Eater bet, which in this case is one star.

The Payoff: Nish

This week, Frankie Fiveangels made a winner of both Eater and NYJ, awarding the predicted two stars to Nish. Bruni seemed to love the food—indeed, the tone was more enthusiastic than a few of his three-star reviews have been.

The review trotted out more of Bruni’s trademark assault on traditional fine dining:

To trace the changes in upscale restaurants over the last few decades, you can survey the losers: Lutèce and white linens; servers in tuxedos and diners in ties. You can salute the winners: Nobu and filament bulbs; mix-and-match menus and polyglot cuisines.

Or you can look at a place that doesn’t quite fall into either category, a survivor that hasn’t thrived, now relaxing its guard to restore its vigor. It’s called March, or at least it was for 16 years, until the first week of January, when it was reborn as Nish, which is really March after a stint in whatever the opposite of finishing school would be.

It’s March minus some of the manners and mannerisms, March in (nicely pressed) jeans. It’s also an interesting answer to challenges that currently face fine-dining establishments. How do you present a sophisticated experience in an accessible way? In a dressed-down era, what still qualifies as a relished indulgence, and what’s just a prissy vestige of bygone days?

Do those challenges really exist? I mean, the restaurant business is challenging in general, but is there any good reason to single out fine dining in particular? I mean, look at the successful high-end restaurants that have opened in just the last few years: Per Se, Masa, Asiate, Country, Del Posto, The Modern, Cru, Gordon Ramsay. To those, add a much longer list of those that have been open five, ten, fifteen or more years, and are still thriving: for starters, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin, Daniel, Bouley, Oceana, La Grenouille, Chanterelle, Le Perigord, L’Impero.

The excerpt above is full of Frank’s trademark phrases, betraying his hostility to traditional luxury restaurants, despite the fact that many of them are still doing land-office business: “white linens”; “mannerisms” (like what?); “accessible” (suggesting that many restaurants are not); “prissy” (the cousin of “fussy,” one of his favourite words).

Yes indeed, Lutèce has closed. But so has the Second Avenue Deli. If you are determined to manufacture a story, you can cherry-pick whatever facts seem to support your theory, and ignore those which do not. It is undeniably true that high-end classic French restaurants in the Lutèce mold have become scarce. But fine dining itself has not. In a “dressed-down” era, sometimes people still do want to dress up.

To round out the week, we present the running scorecard. Eater and NYJ both win our two-star bets on Nish at 4–1 odds.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$3		$7
Gain/Loss	+$4		+$4
Total	+$7		+$11
*
Won–Lost	3–1		3–1

Rolling the Dice: Nish

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 Nish, the casual makeover of the former three-star March. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 5-1
One Star: 8-3
Two Stars: 4-1 √√
Three Stars: 90-1
Four Stars: 15,000-1

The Skinny: For the first time in a while, almost any outcome is possible (except for four stars). March was a three-star restaurant. The last time he was there, Bruni loved the food, but he found the servers’ cult-like reverence for chef Wayne Nish a little off-putting. He also thought that its “dowager refinement” was overdue for a makeover — precisely as Nish has now done. Bruni’s track record is that he actually likes restaurants better when they’re more casual. If the food is as good as Steve Cuozzo says, Nish could be headed for the trifecta.

But Cuozzo also found irritating service glitches, and if Bruni found the same, he’s likely to blow the whistle and march off a one-star penalty. I also suspect the cult-of-the-chef mentality—something Bruni seldom finds endearing—isn’t totally gone. Indeed, given the name change, that factor could be even more prominent than before. If Bruni isn’t as wowed by the food as Cuozzo, then there’s no telling how low we could go.

The Bet: Eater—betting against its own odds—is taking the two-star action. We think that the chances of a three-star payoff are a whole lot better than Eater says, making the 90–1 odds awfully tempting. But we think the chances for a singleton are very real too, so we will compromise in the middle, and bet on two stars.

The Payoff: Sfoglia

His Frankness didn’t let us down this week, awarding two stars to Sfoglia, as we expected. Eater made the very reasonable one-star bet, based on what the restaurant most probably deserves. But we strongly suspected that a small, casual, family-run Italian joint in an out-of-the-way neighborhood would float Frank’s boat. And so it did.

We win our $1 bet at 6–1 odds, while Eater loses $1.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$4		$1
Gain/Loss	–$1		+$6
Total	+$3		+$7
Won–Lost	2–1		2–1

Rolling the Dice: Sfoglia

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 Sfoglia, an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. Eater’s official odds are as follows:

Zero Stars: 4-1
One Star: 3-1
Two Stars: 6-1
Three Stars: 400-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1

The Skinny: Folks, this is a tough one. For the second week in a row, we are torn between one and two stars.

Several times, Bruni has given two stars to small Italian restaurants. He clearly has a soft spot for the genre. He also has a soft spot for restaurants in neighborhoods where the fine-dining options are scarce, which is precisely the case at Lexington & 92nd. Like last week, this is a restaurant that opened quite a while ago. He doesn’t have to review it; he’s choosing to review it, and that usually means he has Something Important to say. Bruni’s “choose to” reviews have been, more often than not, two stars.

But Bruni already wrote a blog entry about Sfoglia over seven months ago, shortly after Adam Platt’s rave review in New York. He found “a mix of delights and disappointments,” along with “brusqueness and haughtiness.” Indeed, I found similar glitches when I reviewed Sfoglia in September. Bruni noted that restaurants sometimes flounder when they can’t handle the sudden influx of curious diners after a favorable review comes out.

It is rare that a restaurant can overcome a mediocre first impression. But the fact that Bruni is choosing to review it now almost certainly suggests that things have improved — otherwise, why bother? Has Sfoglia improved enough to get over the two-star hump?

The Bet: Adam Platt awarded three stars to Sfoglia. Bruni’s ratings and Platt’s have tracked fairly closely, and as far as I recall, they have never been more than one star apart. We are therefore, for the second week in a row, going out on a limb, and betting (against the Eater odds) that Sfoglia will receive two stars from Frank Bruni.

The Payoff: Robert’s Steakhouse

Against our better judgment, we took the long-shot bet that Frank Bruni would come totally unglued, and award two stars to Robert’s Steakhouse. But Frank kept his clothes on, and awarded a journalistically defensible one star to the strip joint. Eater, who made the conservative one-star bet at 2–1 odds, wins $2, while NYJ loses a dollar.

	Eater	NYJ
Bankroll	$2	$2
Gain/Loss	+$2	–$1
Total	+$4	+$1