Review Preview: Aldea

Record to date: 5–2

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Aldea, George Mendes’s lovely new Portuguese spot in the Flatiron District.

The Skinny: Everybody loves Aldea. We loved Aldea, giving it 2½ stars. Among the other star-bestowing critics, Restaurant Girl and Bloomberg’s Ryan Sutton both awarded three. Alan Richman has a rave in GQ, published earlier today. He doesn’t do stars, but in review that compares Mendes to Alain Ducasse, there’s little doubt about where he stands.

The misanthropic Adam Platt awarded a more circumspect two stars in New York, as is his wont, adding that “If the menu were slightly larger, we’d add another.”

Bruni has never panned a place that all of the other critics liked, so we figure that Aldea is a shoo-in for at least two stars. (Remember, if you’re a neophyte at this, that two stars is a compliment, even though it’s only half of the way to the top rank of four stars.)

Could Aldea get three stars from Frank Bruni? Aldea is a good deal better than at least half-a-dozen places that have received that honor from him, so it’s a distinct possibility. If it were Italian, you could pencil in the third star right now. As it is merely Portuguese, he’ll be grading on a different curve, and we suspect it will fall a hair short. Adam Platt’s ratings tend to correlate with Bruni’s, and Platt gave an enthusiastic deuce.

The Prediction: We wouldn’t mind being wrong, but we believe that Frank Bruni will award two stars to Aldea.

Review Preview: Bar Artisanal

Record to date: 4–2

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Bar Artisanal, Terrance Brennan’s cheese-themed brasserie that replaced the doomed Trigo.

The Skinny: We have to admit it up front: we’ve really taken a shine to this place. It’s on the way home, it’s a cuisine that we love, and the menu is perfect for grazing, as often suits our mood after work. Oh, that and the food is very good. We haven’t had a bad dish yet.

All of our visits have been relatively early, before the crowds arrive. Many other reports have complained that as the restuarant gets busy, service starts to slip. We’ve heard it often enough to believe there must be some truth in it.

Other data points? Bar Artisanal’s slightly more ambitious sister restaurant, Artisanal, carries two stars from William Grimes. Bruni visited there in Dining Briefs, finding “some consistency problems.”

Our own rating of Bar Artisanal is 1½ stars, but Bruni doesn’t use half-stars, and in the absence of them I am inclined to round down.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will award one star to Bar Artisanal.

Review Preview

Record to date: 3–2

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni corrects one of the most egregious errors in recent New York Times reviewing history, when he will demote Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market.

The Skinny: Spice Market currently carries three stars, thanks to Amanda Hesser in 2004, when she served as interim critic before Frank Bruni arrived. The much-ridiculed and much-lampooned review began with these memorable bon-mots:

As you approach Spice Market, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s new restaurant on West 13th Street, the stench of blood and offal from the surrounding meatpacking district intensifies. It’s hardly an olfactory amuse-bouche.

It turned out that Vongerichten had written a gushing jacket blurb for Hesser’s book, Cooking for Mr. Latte, which the Times admitted that Hesser ought to have disclosed. (Vongerichten later claimed that he had never met her.)

No one thought that Spice Market was a three-star restaurant then, when it had Vongerichten’s full attention, and it certainly isn’t one now. When I visited two years ago, I gave it 1½ stars, an option not open to Bruni, as his system lacks half-stars.

I am not saying that Bruni will demote Spice Market because this blog does not consider it worthy of three stars. It’s because nobody does. There have been no intervening events that would justify a return visit, except to correct the rating, and it has only one direction to go: down.

Bruni has done this to Vongerichten before, when he double-demoted Vong and Mercer Kitchen, knocking two stars off the rating of each. The only question here is whether Bruni will give Spice Market the full-body slam (one star or even zero), or if he’ll leave Vongerichten with a shred of dignity intact (two stars).

We can see it going either way, but we have to go with a full-body slam. Let’s charitably assume that the original rating should have been two stars. Does anyone doubt that the restaurant has gotten sloppier over the years, and that it has less of its owner’s attention than any in his large empire? How could the rating today not be lower than the “correct” original rating? Now add Bruni’s well known disgust for the whole Meatpacking Scene, and the blatant cynicism of the place, and the odds point to a monumental smackdown.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will give one star to Spice Market.

Review Preview: Rye

Record to date: 2–2

Say what? Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Rye.

The Skinny: Haven’t heard of Rye? We hadn’t either. A bit of elbow grease with the google got us to the restaurant’s humble website. Apparently its first mention in the Times was just two weeks ago, when it got the full FloFab:

RYE Vintage décor sets the tone in this transformed bodega. There are 10 ryes at the bar, and the chef and co-owner, Cal Elliott, formerly of Dressler, serves inventive American fare: 247 South First Street (Roebling Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 218-8047.

We figure that Bruni was already well into his sequence of visits and dropped a hint to her Flo Fabishness that maybe his review shouldn’t be the first time keen-eyed Times readers hear of the place.

Bruni loved Dressler, awarding two stars—which for that kind of place is like winning the lottery. (We liked Dressler too, though we gave it a more realistic one star.) That’s really our only data point, since no other critic has reviewed Rye, and we haven’t seen any food board posts we can rely on.

From the photo on the website, Rye looks like a dressed-down Dressler, which itself is hardly a bastion of formality. Bruni never gives zero stars to obscure places no one has heard of, and we’re hard pressed to believe it gets two when the rest of the city has not yet awakened to it. The menu shows only five entrées, all of which sound like solid neighborhood comfort food.

The Prediction: With the Brunz now in his lame-duck phase, anything is possible. However, we take the safe money this week, and predict that Frank Bruni will award one star to Rye.

Review Preview: Savoy

Record to date: 1–2 

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Savoy, where chef Peter Hoffman has been doing haute barnyard cuisine since long before you could find it on every street corner.

The Skinny: The Times has reviewed Savoy twice. In 1993, Bryan Miller awarded no stars:

Savoy is a baffling restaurant. It is a seductive little place on a shadowy corner of SoHo, with a brick hearth, folkloric knickknacks and a determined husband-wife team in charge. Yet the food is as uneven as the craggy cobblestone streets around it.

The two-and-a-half-year-old Savoy is the creation of Peter Hoffman, the chef, and his wife, Susan Rosenfeld, who runs the front of the house and makes pastries… This neighborly setting is not the kind of place where you want to discuss your divorce settlement unless you don’t mind unsolicited advice from everyone else in the room.

Bryan Miller, it should be noted, was a much harder grader than any of his successors. Ruth Reichl, on the other hand, was much more generous. Despite significant caveats, she awarded two stars in 1995:

Savoy may very well not be for you. There is something resolutely unprofessional about a place that revels in its unevenness, refusing to do the same thing twice. The service can be slow and the chef’s experiments sometimes fail. But if you have an adventurous spirit, you will discover a sense of fun that is missing in most modern restaurants. Eating at Savoy you get the feeling that the people who run it like food, like themselves and like what they are doing.

The restaurant was remodeled in 2002, leading to this Diner’s Journal update from William Grimes:

A restaurant as tiny as the Savoy doesn’t seem as if it could subdivide, but it has. After nearly 13 years the restaurant has shed its Garbo-like image of secrecy, transforming the ground floor into a modern-looking cafe with diner overtones. The upstairs bar has been moved downstairs, the entrance to the restaurant has been shifted northward to the corner of Prince and Crosby Streets, and huge windows now make the Savoy’s interior almost shockingly visible to the outside world. The upstairs remains old-fashioned and intimate. The brick fireplace survives intact.

Peter Hoffman, the Savoy’s chef and owner, sticks with the same cooking philosophy that has won the Savoy a loyal following over the years, shopping the greenmarkets for local produce and pushing organic foods whenever possible. The makeover now gives him two formats: an all-day cafe menu and a more formal menu in the upstairs dining room.

We have visited the current version of Savoy twice, in November 2006 and three months ago, rating it at at two stars on both occasions. It is precisely the kind of earnest, family-run restaurant that Frank Bruni loves. The chef has since opened Back Forty, a more casual place, in the East Village. Except for that, he has kept his eye on the ball, and we doubt that Bruni would see any point in demoting it to one star.

The trifecta is an outside possibility, but we strongly believe that three-star restaurants don’t hide in plain sight. If a twenty-year-old place that everyone knows about is one of the top 20-odd restaurants in the city, we doubt that Bruni would be the first to notice.

Re-reviews need a raison d’être. Obviously a rating change is reason enough in itself—and, to be honest, most of Bruni’s re-reviews do bring a change of rating. But in this case, given that Savoy hasn’t been reviewed in 14 years, the opportunity to give a shout-out might be all the reason Bruni needs.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will re-affirm two stars for Savoy.

Review Preview: Flex Mussels and Harbour

Record to date: 0–2

I used to think I had a feel for what Frank Bruni was going to do, but we’re oh-fer-two since Review Preview launched a fortnight ago. With a double-review coming up, we’ve got the chance either to level-up or to dig ourselves an even deeper hole. Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Flex Mussels on the Upper East Side and Harbour in Hudson Square.

The Skinny: The general rule with double-reviews of new restaurants (not before reviewed in the Times), is that Bruni must not think either one is especially important. He has never given three stars in a double-review, unless he was upgrading a restaurant previously reviewed. That’s not the case here, so we start with two stars as a ceiling for both of these places.

Flex Mussels hasn’t been on our radar. It has been open for at least six months, but none of the other star-bestowing critics have reviewed it. We’d entirely forgotten (or never noticed) reviews in the New Yorker, Village Voice, and the Insatiable Critic until we looked them up just moments ago.

Bruni doesn’t usually review restaurants in out-of-the-way places only to trash them, and for him Flex Mussels, at 82nd and Lex, is a major detour. At the same time, most of his two-star awards go to places that are already very well known, which Flex Mussels is not. That leaves one star as the most likely case here.

With Harbour, we have a bit more to go on, as we had dinner there just this past weekend. Although we gave two stars to our meal, some of the dishes seemed over-wrought. Frank Bruni is liable to call them “fussy,” a word we abhor in this context, because of his over-use of it. My girlfriend said, “Frank Bruni is not going to like this food.” In Harbour’s favor, Adam Platt awarded two stars in New York and Restaurant Girl three in the Daily News. Platt’s rating is often a good predictor of what Bruni will do.

The folks at Flex Mussels probably won’t mind a one-star review—they could probably use the exposure—but for Harbour one star could be devastating. That has never stopped Bruni before, but Harbour is one of those places he could have skipped reviewing altogether. We’re not at all sure about this, but our guess is that if he’s bothering to review Harbour, he finds it at least modestly promising.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will award one star to Flex Mussels and two stars to Harbour.

Review Preview: Ippudo

[Kreiger via Eater]

Tomorrow, lame-duck Frank reviews Ippudo NY, the Japanese Ramen Noodle Brasserie. BruniBetting is defunct, but we offer our sense of what the departing critic will do.

The Skinny: Peter Meehan reviewed Ippudo for the Times a scant thirteen months ago. He loved the place, a verdict repeated in most of the other reliable reviews we’ve found. We haven’t been there ourselves, but the Internet consensus is that Ippudo is pretty damned good. That fact alone would seem to guarantee two stars.

On top of that, it’s hard to see any journalistic purpose in reviewing Ippudo again so soon, unless Bruni feels that it deserves another shout-out. Of course, shout-outs can be negative sometimes, but mediocre Asian restaurants are a dime a dozen. The only conceivable purpose of the review is to hand out another rave. We’ll assume that outrageous, indefensible three-star reviews don’t come very often, and as he did that last week, we aren’t going to see another trifecta.

Frank Bruni has a history of promoting $25 & Under Asian restaurants to two fine-dining stars. Sripraphai, Spicy & Tasty, and Momofuku Ssäm Bar have been among the beneficiaries (the latter since bumped up to three stars). Given his lame-duck status, we figure that Bruni just wants to have fun. He doesn’t have to review Ippudo. We assume, therefore, that he wants to review Ippudo.

The Prediction: We predict that Frank Bruni will award two stars to Ippudo.

Review Preview: Minetta Tavern

Are you feeling withdrawal over the death—or at least, suspension—of Eater’s BruniBetting, and the end of our weekly competition? Yeah, us too. As recompense, we launch “Review Preview” (pronounced “REEview PREEview”), in which we’ll showcase the weekly Times review, either by Frank Bruni or his successor.

This week’s subject: Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern makeover, and Bruni’s first review as a lame-duck critic.

The Skinny: We’re not sure how Keith McNally got to be so good at turning out one hit after another. Fine dining ain’t his thing—his restaurants hover somewhere in the nether-regions between one and two stars. But somehow, wherever he lands, he attracts a gaggle of celebrities, often to neighborhoods not previously considered dining destinations.

And his restaurants stay hot, years after he opened them. We’ve still never been to his flagship, Balthazar — the trouble of getting in just never seemed to be worth it. Our one visit to Pastis left us unimpressed. We walked by Schiller’s Liquor Bar recently, and kept right on walking, deterred as we were by the ridiculous crowd.

McNally has never had a failure in New York (at least that we’re aware of), but his Italian restaurant, Morandi, has never caught on the way the other ones did. McNally is still smarting after Bruni slammed it with one star. He accused Bruni of hating women chefs, but he fired the chef, Jody Williams, anyway.

At Minetta Tavern, McNally takes no chances. The restaurant has been in the heart of Greenwich Village since before most of us were born. Formerly an undistinguished formula Italian place, McNally acquired it, spruced up the décor, and installed the same kitchen team that runs Balthazar.

McNally must be the only guy who could replace one formula restaurant with another, and still have a big hit. Service probably has a lot to do with it. We were impressed with the coddling we received when all we did was order a burger at the bar.

The Prediction: One or two stars are the only plausible outcomes here. Most of the critics have been impressed with the Minetta Tavern reboot. Frank Bruni seldom goes against a solid consensus, so we assume he’ll be impressed too. We predict that Frank Bruni will award two stars to Minetta Tavern.