Review Recap: Novitá

Today, Sam Sifton blows a two-star kiss at Novitá, a restaurant largely ignored by the city’s foodistas since it opened in 1994:

Novitá is a designer shoe box of a restaurant around the corner from Gramercy Park, a basement room on East 22nd Street, a perfect neighborhood trattoria.

It has excellent pasta. In any other metropolis in North America, it would be well known among that city’s best places to eat. In many cities, it would sit atop the heap.

But in New York, a lot of people have never heard of the place. (How cool is that?) This is testament to the strength of our restaurant scene, to the sheer abundance of good restaurants here. And Novitá is a very good restaurant.

This felt like a “Bruni two,” reminding one of all the forgettable restaurants that won two stars from Sifton’s predecessor: “Main courses are less successful, though by no means off-putting.” He also notes that it is less “fussy” than before: “plates are food, not art.” Bruni could have ghost-written this review. Novitá may well deserve its deuce, but the review reads like that.

We had guessed that Sifton would not bother reviewing this place unless he were upgrading Ruth Reichl’s original one-star rating, and we are rewarded with $3 on our hypothetical one-dollar bet, while Eater loses a dollar. 

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$9.00		$13.00
Gain/Loss	–1.00		+3.00
Total	$8.00		$16.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	7–7 (50.0%)		8–6 (57.1%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 78–33 (70%).

Review Recap: Le Caprice

Today, Sam Sifton delivered the first heavy-duty smackdown of his tenure as New York Times restaurant critic, damning Le Caprice with a rare FAIR rating:

The Manhattan outpost of this elegant St. James’s institution opened off the lobby of the Pierre hotel in the fall. It has a menu straight off the plane: mostly nursery food with colonial accents.

But the crowd that might offset it, that might offer wit to counter the mushy peas and sticky sauce, doesn’t run to British eccentricity and glamorous conflict. Instead, it’s just plain-Jane American wealth. There are business travelers and older residents of the Upper East Side, a few Eurobankers and the odd plastic-surgery victim.

The London restaurant may present a kind of British translation of class-free American culture: a democracy of fame. But the American retranslation of that conceit falls flat. At Le Caprice New York, there’s no lurching about with actors. There’s just a senior vice president having drinks and a salad, then checking the Nikkei before bed.

He also complains about a reservations policy that holds back most of the tables: the restaurant claims to be fully committed, even though it’s nearly empty. We tried to get in several times, and couldn’t. At this point, Le Caprice is off our list.

We don’t feel badly about our inaccurate prediction of two stars. Opinions about this place have been all over the map. This is one of the few times we can recall that New York Journal and Eater made different predictions, and both were wrong. We each lose a dollar on our hypothetical bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$10.00		$14.00
Gain/Loss	–1.00		–1.00
Total	$9.00		$13.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	7–6 (53.8%)		7–6 (53.8%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 77–33 (70%).

Review Recap: Maialino

Sam Sifton loves Maialino, and yesterday awarded precisely the two stars that owner Danny Meyer was hoping for. He thinks the food’s terrific, and in a few sentences really captures the Danny Meyer ethos:

It is warm and familiar, comfortable, a trattoria in an imaginary Rome where everyone comes from Missouri and wants you above all else to have a nice time. . . .

Here studious young men and women bend to the task of assembling cold antipasti and hot espressos alike, dressed in long bistro aprons and beanies: gastro-nerds studying at the University of Meyer.

Graduates work as waiters beyond them; doctoral students as managers. . . .

His [Meyer’s] restaurants have almost always done this in some way. They encourage their customers to appreciate what sits outside them, to rediscover Manhattan in the process. They direct attention to architecture, to parks, to the ideals of urban life. Mr. Meyer has changed the city with restaurants. Isn’t that something?

For those who are into betting, this week’s review didn’t present much of a challenge, as this was an obvious two-bagger. We and Eater both win $2 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$8.00		$12.00
Gain/Loss	+$2.00		+$2.00
Total	$10.00		$14.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	7–5 (58.3%)		7–5 (58.3%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 77–32 (71%).

Review Recap: The Breslin

Today, Sam Sifton awarded the expected one star to the Breslin. He loved the food (mostly), but noted that an awful lot of it strikes the same chords repeatedly:

The Breslin is the sort of restaurant you end up thinking about a lot, not always pleasantly, staring up at the ceiling at 3 in the morning in cold sweat and mild panic. Yes, the food is good. But it is monochromatically good: it is 10 colors of fat. Excess can become wretched, and fast.

He also notes the insane ritual of trying to get a table at this crowded place:

The restaurant takes no reservations; it celebrates a democracy of the committed. Save for at breakfast, over pancakes and Stumptown coffee, the restaurant is almost perpetually jammed.

At night, out in the bar, people dance in place, drink amber cocktails, listen to music that bounces smartly between rock and hip-hop. They wait endlessly for tables to clear.

I question the idea of calling this “democracy.” It is simply owner Ken Friedman’s way of making more money: no need ever to worry about no-shows, or tables vacant because the last booking has departed and the next hasn’t yet arrived. If the Breslin ever quiets down, rest assured that Friedman will suddenly be pleased to take your reservation—not that this is likely anytime soon.

Eater’s prediction and the many reactions to it show that people still haven’t adjusted to Sam Sifton’s grading curve. For Frank Bruni, two stars was the default rating. He usually didn’t give one star without reciting a long list of complaints. This would explain the attitude of the Eater commenter, who said, “it only deserves 1 star but the review barely took the restaurant down or explained why.”

Sifton has returned the star system to its historical roots. One star means “good.” It is not an insult. There is nothing fundamentally inconsistent with a positive review that awards only one star.

We are not about to say that we fully grasp Sifton’s system, but at least we got this one right, and are awarded with a whopping $4 against our hypothetical one-dollar bet; this is courtesy of Eater odds that were wrong to begin with. Eater loses a dollar.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$9.00		$8.00
Gain/Loss	–$1.00		+$4.00
Total	$8.00		$12.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	6–5 (54.5%)		6–5 (54.5%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 76–32 (70%).

Review Recap: Casa Lever

Yesterday, Sam Sifton awarded two stars to Casa Lever, finding that, although it does nothing innovative, it does many things very well indeed:

The service is appealing, comic-opera stuff. And the food, while basic, is often quite good. The spirit of Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant born in Milan in 1936 and mother to the society rooms in the Village, on the Upper East Side and Main Street in Southampton, has never been more serene. . . .

Is an appetizer of seared scallops with white asparagus and black truffle a good use of $18? That’s a question to wrestle, and there’s no correct answer. It’s the culinary equivalent of wondering whether Ferragamo shoes are worth the scratch. If they are to you, they are. The scallops are certainly well cooked.

We have to smile at this, as Frank Bruni most certainly would have insinuated that there is something deeply wrong with restaurants that charge a lot of money to those who have it to burn.

Predicting Sifton’s ratings is turning out to be a lot tougher than we expected. We and Eater were wrong again, losing a dollar on our hypothetical bets—a depressingly common outcome in the Sifton era. We’re glad to see that the Bruni era has ended, but it has made betting hazardous.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$10.00		$9.00
Gain/Loss	–$1.00		–$1.00
Total	$9.00		$8.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	6–4 (60.0%)		5–5 (50.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 75–32 (70%).

Review Recap: La Grenouille

If one needed confirmation that Amateur Hour has ended at the Times dining section, it has arrived. With today’s three-star review of La Grenouille, Sam Sifton showed that he understands the restaurant’s place in history, the cuisine it has mastered, and why that is important. He was not, in the least way, demeaning or condescending, as his predecessor surely would have been:

The decline of great French cooking in New York has been a subject of discussion among the food-obsessed for decades, since at least the closing of Le Pavillon in 1971. In the last decade the talk has turned funereal, with the demise of Lutèce, La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, Lespinasse.

Brasserie cooking survives in New York, even flourishes under old mirrors and subway tile. We will always have steak frites.

But the quiet opulence of the traditional haute cuisine that was first brought to New York by Henri Soulé for the World’s Fair in 1939 and which flourished at his Pavillon and other restaurants in the years that followed? The whole marvelous Tom Wolfe scene of it: blanquette de veau and Beaumes-de-Venise, and ladies in finery beside gentlemen in soft cashmere jackets and rolled silk ties? C’est fini!

A series of recent meals at La Grenouille suggests that isn’t so. Not so long as Charles Masson, who has run it since 1975, greets his customers at the door, quiet and French and welcoming. Not so long as people can take a seat on a scarlet banquette at his restaurant, sit beneath a spray of flowers and eat sumptuous food out of Escoffier.

We have no idea if La Grenouille deserves to be a three-star restaurant. What we can say is that this is how a review of such a place ought to be written.

We and Eater both win $3 on our hypothetical one dollar bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$7.00		$6.00
Gain/Loss	+$3.00		+$3.00
Total	$10.00		$9.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	6–3 (66.7%)		5–4 (55.6%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 75–31 (71%).

Review Recap: Ed's Chowder House & Tanuki Tavern

Today, Sam Sifton filed the expected two-fer on Ed’s Chowder House and Tanuki Tavern. We were correct that Sifton would uncork his first zero-star review; but wrong about which one would be the victim.

He clearly “gets” what the owner, Jeffrey Chodorow, is about:

For more than two decades he has run counter to restaurateurs interested in rubbed-wood authenticity and locavore cuisine. He has stood, always, for brash showmanship, the belief that in restaurants, the whole and complete point of the business is volume. In the face of recessions and in boom times alike he has accumulated more than 25 restaurants and bars in close to a dozen cities, all of them tied to the idea of dazzling, low-cut, cocktail-fueled good times…

From his first foray, the flashy China Grill, to his latest, Tanuki Tavern in the Hotel Gansevoort and Ed’s Chowder House in the Empire Hotel, he has promised that opportunity: fun, against the customer’s outlay of cash.

To our surprise, he thinks that Tanuki is the one that comes the closest to meeting those modest objectives:

The concept at Tanuki Tavern is that it’s an izakaya, or Japanese-style tapas bar. That is not entirely accurate. Really Tanuki is Ono, the immense Japanese-style restaurant Mr. Chodorow opened five years ago, now in a smaller space with almost the same number of seats. He sublets the rest of the space to the nightclub Provocateur. (Mr. Chodorow isn’t in this racket to spill soup.)

The result is young and exciting, with food from the same larder as Ono’s: respectable, perfectly good quasi-Asian fare. Also like Ono, it is pretty in design and execution: Japanese cabinetry and piped-in ’80s rock, LED candles, paper lanterns and two floors of tables full of men and women in clothing inappropriate to the weather. Tanuki is a fine place to drink sake, eat chicken wings and visit a simulacrum of South Beach, Sunset Boulevard, the timeless thump-thump-thump of Saturday night on the Vegas strip. It provides direct transport, in other words, to Chodorowland.

At Ed’s Chowder House, Sifton wonders if the restaurant’s namesake, Chef Ed Brown, has been watching the kitchen:

There was, one night, something of his style and worth in a terrific dish of smoked Chatham cod cakes with a roasted tomato-chili jam… But none of his delicacy was apparent in other meals — in greasy, overdone fried calamari with saffron aioli, for instance, or in celery-heavy, muddy-hued steamed clams with plonk broth…

Did Mr. Brown personally have something to do with the ammonia taste of a particularly elderly wing of skate served with horseradishy mashed potatoes and left untouched on the plate (to the shrug of a waiter)? It seems somehow unlikely.

We lose $2 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets. Eater wins $2 on Tanuki Tavern, but loses $1 on Ed’s Chowder House, for a net of $1.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$6.00		$8.00
Gain/Loss	+$1.00		–$2.00
Total	$7.00		$6.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	5–3 (62.5%)		4–4 (50.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 74–31 (70%).

Review Recap: Madangsui

Can I just admit that I was bored by today’s one-star review of Madangsui? Will you still respect me in the morning?

Commenters on the New York Times website were perplexed that “Manhattan’s best Korean barbecue restaurant” merits only a star, but it seemed rather clear to us:

Madangsui is not much to look at, really, just a long fluorescent-illuminated room with chocolate accents, almost barnlike, with exhaust hoods over the tables and a carpet down the center, leading to the tea station, the bathrooms and the kitchen. The clientele runs to groups of celebratory young Koreans texting as they eat, office parties and passers-by from local hotels; it is hardly a clear picture of fine dining in New York. But jiminy crickets, is the dining fine.

But first, a warning: responsibility for the pace of a meal at Madangsui belongs to the diner alone. Service at the restaurant is brisk, almost brutally efficient… .

But make sure not to ask for your barbecue, not yet. Diners who order soups and appetizers at the same time as main dishes at Madangsui will receive, far more often than not, the main dishes in advance of the appetizers. This throws a wrench into the works. Be firm on this point and be happy.

In a system that awards one conflated rating for food, service, and décor, these things have to take their toll. Besides that, it is no insult to get one star, which means “good”. True, it was so debased during the Bruni era that readers have been conditioned to expect that one star is an insult. Sam Sifton is re-training them.

We and Eater both predicted the one-star outcome. We both win $2 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets:

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$4.00		$6.00
Gain/Loss	+$2.00		+$2.00
Total	$6.00		$8.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	4–2 (66.7%)		4–2 (66.7%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 74–29 (72%).

Review Recap: SD26

Today, Sam Sifton drops the expected one-spot on San Domenico:

They really are trying down there at SD26, the old lion Tony May and his indefatigable daughter Marisa, the two of them working the dining room of their fancy new restaurant as if all that happened to their old one, San Domenico, was a face-lift. . . .

But what’s happened here is much more than simply a face-lift. The sedate and elegant San Domenico, which opened in 1988, has been kicked to the curb. SD26 is the restaurant equivalent of a second wife: younger, considerably more nervous, dressed in a way that might raise eyebrows in the social circles the original restaurant was opened to serve. . . .

Then there’s the long walk back through the bar to the street, past slightly stunned old regulars from San Domenico and gastro-tourists wondering what all the fuss was about. Emerging onto 26th Street, the overwhelming feeling a diner is left with is one of exhaustion, the sense that at SD26 we are a long, long way from the kind of restaurant Mr. May has stood for in New York City. It’s a restaurant to make anyone feel old.

You have to feel bad for Tony and Marisa May. They invested $7 million in this place—reportedly their own money—in the sincere view that this was what today’s diners wanted. But in chasing the latest fashions, they weren’t true to themselves. This isn’t the restaurant that the old San Domenico regulars wanted. And it isn’t the restaurants that the younger, edgier clientele wanted.

As Steve Cuozzo points out in today’s Post, recent upscale hits like Corton and Marea, and the dressing up of Eleven Madison Park, have proven that sophisticated diners will flock to places that present serious food in an adult setting. That’s not the only path to success, but it’s the only path that Tony May had ever known.

There are ways of subtly updating the original concept without entirely abandoning it. “Renovation of the original mission may have been a smarter course,” says Sifton.

Eater predicted two stars, and loses a dollar on our hypothetical bets. We win $4 at 4–1 odds.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$5.00		$2.00
Gain/Loss	–$1.00		+$4.00
Total	$4.00		$6.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	3–2 (60.0%)		3–2 (60.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 73–29 (72%).

Belated Review Recap: A Voce Columbus

I came down with a cold on Tuesday, and didn’t get around to posting a Review Preview: a pity, as New York Journal needed a win, and we would have correctly predicted Sam Sifton’s verdict on A Voce Columbus: two stars:

There are two A Voce restaurants in New York City. One opened in 2006, off Madison Square Park. It is dark and almost romantic, loud when crowded, pretty after a fashion, perfectly good. The other opened in September on the third floor of the Time Warner Center, in the space that used to be Café Gray. The second restaurant is bright and airy, loud when crowded, pretty after a fashion, also perfectly good…

But make no mistake. A Voce is a corporate enterprise, part of a master plan, and feels like it. Save for swiveling yourself around in the Eames-y leather chairs that appoint both restaurants, there is very little room for improvisation. Service is clinical, almost silent, beyond language. Wine is what a chairman would expect, what most would order: a lot of big California cabernets, excellent chardonnays.

Sifton clearly visited the downtown site. It’s a pity he didn’t squeeze in two more meals there, so that he could re-rate A Voce Madison in the same review. It’s abundantly clear that he thinks the two are interchangeable, but A Voce Madison remains on the Times’s list of three-star restaurants, courtesy of an air-kiss blown their way by Frank Bruni in 2006. That was with Andrew Carmellini as chef, and even then it was over-rated.