Review Recap: The Mark by Jean-Georges

Apparently, when an absentee chef opens a mediocre restaurant in a neighborhood accustomed to mediocrity, he gets two stars. That is the lesson of Sam Sifton’s review in today’s Times:

Mr. Vongerichten himself has been present, on and off, standing by the passage to the kitchen, his hands clasped in front of his waist, dressed in crisp kitchen whites. What he sees before him surely matches the prospectus he offered the newly renovated hotel: a neighborhood restaurant for a neighborhood sorely lacking in neighborhood restaurants, with the prospect of hotel guests as insurance against those periods when the neighborhood is in Palm Beach or Paris, Nantucket or Gstaad…

The menu at the Mark is a smart hedge against the possibility that his inattention would lead to a drop-off in quality there. It is so unambitious that it is difficult to fumble, at least as long as Pierre Schutz, a loyal Vongerichten lieutenant for decades who serves as the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, is there to keep a close eye on the plates…

Mr. Vongerichten’s great genius used to be how he used the spare aesthetics of Asian cooking to improve classical French cuisine. Then it became how he used the lessons of that experience to raid other larders, and to create steakhouses and street-food emporia, Japanese noodle bars and market-driven French bistros.

Now he opens hotel restaurants all over the world. This one is hardly a risk. But it is a welcome addition to the Upper East Side.

I wouldn’t really have an issue with the rating, if it wasn’t the identical rating awarded to a vastly better restastaurant, SHO Shaun Hergatt, a week ago.

Instead, Sifton just gives the impression that he is just a star-struck amateur.

Review Recap: SHO Shaun Hergatt

I never thought that I would be quoting @OzerskyTV for review commentary, but today Josh nails it:

Sifton’s off. his. rocker. Two stars for Shaun Hergatt? Absurd. The obligatory middlebrow preening. When will this mummery end? The whole review is one big cheap shot. I’m sorry. This “fine dining is over” meme has now officially jumped the shark.”

Here’s another thing I never thought I’d say:

Come back, Frank Bruni! All is forgiven!

Bruni, lest we forget, made many of the same mistakes. But he was at least an original voice. Sifton is just lazy. The review is a mash-up of what Pete Wells wrote eight months ago.

Can we count all the ways the review is incoherent?

• He complains that SHO isn’t locally sourced. Marea isn’t locally sourced. It got three stars.
• He complains that SHO is old-fashioned. La Grenouille is old-fashioned. It got three stars.
• He complains that SHO looks like it “a good business hotel in Sydney or Zurich, Miami or Bonn.” Colicchio & Sons looks like Vegas. It got three stars.

Does Sifton have any plans to be relevant? If so, Right Now would be a good time to start.

Review Recap: Nello a Nullity

Alert the media. Today, Sam Sifton files on Nello, finding (shock!) that it’s utterly irrelevant. In case you were wondering:

Nello, which opened in 1992, is an ecosystem that is almost incomprehensible to those not a part of it. The food is not very good. Yet the restaurant’s customer base is built of the richest and most coddled people in the city, who love it for its elegance and, perhaps, simplicity.

It is a private club of sorts, where the dues are paid nightly. The meetings are unadvertised. Nello’s dining room can be crowded at 3 p.m. or midnight. It can also be empty at 1 p.m. or 9 p.m. Regular patrons respond to whistles mere customers cannot hear.

As Ben Leventhal put it on Twitter, “So far the new guy needs work picking his wild cards.”

The slack pace of new openings—the comparative lack of places that require reviews—has given Sifton the chance to write about restaurants that ordinarily wouldn’t get much attention. So far, he is squandering the opportunity.

There’s a place, occasionally, to write about over-priced tourist traps like Nello, if only to call attention to how bad they are. There’s also a place, occasionally, to write about good neighborhood standbys that deserve a shout-out: Strip House and Novitá were examples.

But these are places are static: they execute classics, with varying degrees of competence. They aren’t “part of the conversation.” If the culinary moment is the product of a million little decisions made in restaurants all over town, they aren’t contributing to it. Neither is Sifton.

Frank Bruni has plenty of faults, but you’ve got to give him credit for one thing: he was always trying to find something new. Arguably, he had too little respect for classics done well. His five-year tenure was a mid-life crisis worked out before our eyes.

Sifton just doesn’t seem to care. He reviews the new openings, as he must, then spends the rest of his time at restaurants no one is talking about.

Review Recap: Faustina

This week, Sam Sifton awarded one star to Faustina, even though he liked the food very much:

The restaurant offers what may be the city’s best pork chop, a shoebox-size Berkshire behemoth currently recommended for two or more diners; it might serve four, and happily. You can find a wealth of interesting raw-bar small bites and bread-dippers, delicate salads and ridiculously hearty, delicious pastas.

On hand is a wine list that affords a chance to drink well at reasonable prices, up and down Italy. This being a hotel restaurant, you can have lunch, even breakfast — some oatmeal, perhaps, or a protein shake.

But no matter the meal, you will eat it uncomfortably, in a tough concrete dining room that juts off a large bar crowded with tall tables, in what is unmistakably an institutional setting, down to the space on the check where you can sign the bill to your room.

Sifton also dings the place for a “small plates” format that is being phased out, although Recette, which has that format, received two stars.

We subscribe to the view, best articulated by our friend Sneakeater, that the Times doesn’t review food, it reviews restaurants. Service and ambiance count. The whole package counts. But this is perhaps the severest “ambiance penalty” we can recall—in terms of stars—for a restaurant whose food he clearly liked.

We also, quite frankly, see very little difference between the “institutional setting” at Faustina and that at Colicchio & Sons, where Sifton inexplicably awarded three stars.

Eater had predicted one star, and wins $2, while we lose $1, on our hypothetical bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$7.00		$19.00
Gain/Loss	+2.00		–1.00
Total	$9.00		$18.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	9–10 (47.4%)		10–9 (52.6%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 80–36 (69.0%).

Review Recap: Chin Chin

Today’s stop on Sam Sifton’s restaurant irrelevance tour is Chin Chin, which gets one star:

There was a time in New York when the fundamental distinction in Chinese restaurants was not among regional cuisines, but among Manhattan neighborhoods. There was Chinatown Chinese, of course: voir-dire lunches, chop-suey perfection, the mystery and excitement of dim sum served over sticky floors. And there was uptown Chinese: cocktails and Peking duck served on starched white tablecloths, with prices to match. This, too, had its charms.

Chin Chin belongs to the latter camp. The restaurant is not particularly Cantonese, as was true of many of the early upscale Chinese restaurants in Manhattan. It is not Sichuan, either, nor tied in fact to any particular Chinese cuisine. It is what Mr. Chin calls a “restaurant chinois.”

But never mind that French talk. Order a dry martini and allow the pressures of the city to recede in its glow. Chin Chin is as American as pork dumplings and sticky spareribs, cold noodles with sesame sauce, three-glass chicken and fried rice.

As we noted yesterday, there is little point in re-reviewing such a place, except to change its rating. In our haste, we misquoted Bryan Miller’s review of a quarter-century ago: he gave it two stars, not one. Hence Sifton’s rating is one star, not the two we predicted.

Nevertheless, we suspect Sifton could go on all year re-reviewing decades-old one and two-star restaurants that are not what they used to be. What is the point?

Review Recap: Colicchio & Sons

This morning at 3:00 a.m., Tom Colicchio was spotted dancing nude in the Lincoln Center Plaza fountain.

OK, not quite, but we are sure he was out celebrating into the wee hours after winning an improbable three stars in the Times for his almost universally panned restaurant, Colicchio & Sons.

We don’t feel badly for having widely missed the mark with our one-star prediction. Nobody in town thought the review was going down that way. It is not often that a restaurant gets three stars in the Times when every other critic (and most bloggers) thought it was worth, at best, one.

It’s also not often that a restaurant announces a 30 percent price cut just days before the review comes out. It tells you a lot about the kind of review Colicchio thought he was going to get.

We and Eater both lose $1 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$8.00		$20.00
Gain/Loss	–1.00		–.00
Total	$7.00		$10.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	8–10 (44.4%)		10–8 (55.6%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 80–35 (69.6%).

Belated Review Recap: Strip House

Yesterday, Sam Sifton dropped the expected two-spot on Strip House:

The service is professional and attentive, with none of the gruff theatricality that attends tables at Sparks or Smith & Wollensky. The wine list is comprehensive and interesting, with reds to surprise palates and draw the attention of expense-account auditors alike.

And the food is generally marvelous, the steak often superb. Strip House belongs to Peter and Penny Glazier, the restaurant tycoons who own Michael Jordan’s in Grand Central Terminal, as well as mimeographed Strip Houses in Las Vegas and Houston, in Florida and New Jersey. The Glaziers buy a lot of meat. They use the leverage to secure excellent product.

John Schenk, the executive chef at Strip House since 2006, makes sure of its use. He has his line cooks grill the steaks tight and well, with a thick crust of salt and pepper that highlights the deep flavor of the beef.

We agree with the rating, but we are not quite sure why Sifton is spending so much of his time at restaurants that did not exactly cry out for re-reviews. There is still a long list of Bruni errors that require fixing.

This was the easiest two-star bet we ever took. We and Eater both win $2 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$6.00		$18.00
Gain/Loss	+2.00		+2.00
Total	$8.00		$20.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	8–9 (47.1%)		10–7 (58.8%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 80–34 (70%).

Review Recap: Choptank

Today, Sam Sifton dropped a surprisingly harsh goose-egg on Choptank. Despite liking many dishes, he found the food highly uneven and unfaithful to its Chesapeake namesake:

Choptank the restaurant opened this winter on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, taking the watershed as its muse and Baltimore as its butler. The restaurant evokes the Chesapeake region in the way that dorm rooms at Johns Hopkins do: Duck Head khakis in the dresser and lacrosse sticks leaning against the desk, postcards from Rehoboth Beach tacked to the wall along with the covering board from grandfather’s sloop, a thrift-store oil painting, sconces from mom.

So there ain’t no pit beef here, hon. Too low-class. No steamed crabs on paper tablecloths, either. (Though they say come summer.) You can’t buy a can of Natty Boh beer. (The company doesn’t distribute up north.) There is a fine Ostrowski’s Polish sausage sitting with its pretzel brother on a plate, garlicky as a Pigtown housewife, but there is no John Waters to Choptank, much less Avon Barksdale or Stringer Bell. The restaurant’s vibe is suburban, as safe as Cal Ripken.

The food is to match, especially among the appetizers: crab dip out of a Junior League cookbook, with potato chips russet with Old Bay seasoning, all celery salt and heat; church-supper Virginia ham, with biscuits that taste morning-made and midday-refrigerated.

We liked Choptank better than Sifton did, but he paid more visits and sampled more of the menu. We agree that if it’s that uneven, zero stars is the correct rating. We are surprised, however, that he bothered to waste a a review on a place he considered so unimportant. Whatever.

We and Eater both lose a dollar on our hypothetical bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$7.00		$19.00
Gain/Loss	–1.00		–1.00
Total	$6.00		$18.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	7–9 (43.8%)		9–7 (56.2%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 79–34 (70%).

Review Recap: Tanoreen

Today’s review of Tanoreen turned out just as we expected: an enthusiastic singleton from Sam Sifton in the Times:

Ms. Bishara’s translation of Middle Eastern cooking has Mediterranean accents, and occasional North American ones from her decades in the United States. And so the tang of cilantro enlivens some of her dishes, and the musk of basil, the welcome zing of jalapeño.

In the opposite direction, she makes a simple spiced roast chicken with potatoes (and, for children, a mean plate of fried chicken fingers with French fries and ketchup), and a stuffed cabbage that your Uncle Murray who only eats tuna salad would devour.

Tanoreen’s entrees are, in the main, less successful than the appetizers. Partly this is because the food doesn’t support the division of a meal into the Western tradition of starter and main course. After four or five delicious small plates, it’s difficult to do battle with a gristly lamb shank or one-acre lot of shepherd’s pie.

We win $3 on our hypothetical one dollar bet. Eater, which thought that two stars was the more likely outcome, loses a dollar. 

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$8.00		$16.00
Gain/Loss	–1.00		+3.00
Total	$7.00		$19.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	7–8 (46.7%)		9–6 (60.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 79–33 (71%).

Review Recap: Motorino

The Times posted tomorrow’s restaurant review (one star for Motorino) before we gamblers could place our bets. For the record, one star is exactly what we would have predicted.

Sifty loves the place:

Motorino is having a moment. That seems fair. It serves the city’s best pizza.

It does so consistently, at both locations, whether Mr. Palombino is cooking or not. Made to his specifications and cooked in the tempering heat of a wood fire, his crust emerges from the oven as a Neapolitan fantasy of crispness that is also pillowy and soft, sweet but not sugared, tangy without too much salt.

Multiple visits to the restaurants conform: Motorino pies are great hot out of the oven, 5 minutes later, 10. You can order too much, watch a pie go cool on the plate, eat it anyway and discover: terrific.

We aren’t so sure that any one guy could really know whether Motorino is serving the best pizza. Given the vast range of restaurants he covers, how many of the candidates could Sifton have tried recently? Beyond that, given the wide range of pizza-making styles, are they all even comparable?

Anyhow, we haven’t been to Motorino, but the review is certainly consistent with everything we’ve read, and Sifton is entertaining as always.