Review Recap: Oceana

Yesterday, Sam Sifton awarded the expected two stars to Oceana, finding that in the move to larger digs, it had lost a star along the way:

More recent meals in the new Oceana, which opened around the corner from Del Frisco’s in the McGraw-Hill building in August, reveal a different scene: a retort to all those who thought the old Oceana was cramped and outdated, a little too much actually like a steamship. It is now a massive restaurant, open and white and blue and tiled, with enormous lamp fixtures that throw light into every crevice of the room, with giant flowers to soften that and beneath them deep leather booths with velvet backs and walnut trim…

Those who order carefully can partake of fabulous meals. They will certainly drink good wine, off a whites-heavy list that is ably negotiated by both waiters and sommeliers alike. But if the Oceana of old was a pleasant, shipshape room with elegant food and a caring touch, the new version is a high-functioning luxury mill, designed to service pre-theater crowds and to celebrate corporate success on expense-account dimes. It is in some ways a very good restaurant. But the room ensures that it is not entirely a pleasant one.

Although this counts technically as a demotion (since the old Oceana had three stars), the review finds plenty of things to like. Still, the chef and the owners are no doubt disappointed.

We and Eater made the identical two-star bets, winning $3 against our hypoethetical one-dollar wagers. 

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$2.00		–$1.00
Gain/Loss	+$3.00		$3.00
Total	+$5.00		$2.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	3–1 (75.0%)		2–2 (50.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 72–29 (71%).

Review Recap: Aureole

Today, Sam Sifton dumps a single star on Aureole. Make no mistake about it: this is a pan, even though there are many dishes he likes—especially in the more casual front room:

Mr. Palmer is a big-business restaurateur, a best seller, the Dean Koontz of the sauté and oven set. It wasn’t always so. In 1988, he was just a brash young chef who had cooked at the River Café, who struck out on his own to open a creamy, luxurious town house restaurant, Aureole, on the Upper East Side. The food was American, audacious, often excellent and expensive despite a sour economy. It was New York to its core…

Times change. In 2007, Mr. Palmer announced plans to move the restaurant south, into bigger digs. The result is a Las Vegas event restaurant airlifted into Manhattan, a corporate cafeteria with a soundtrack of smooth jazz in the George Benson style. The food can be quite good. It can also be the opposite.

Aureole, as the New York expression goes, is meh.

Sifton confuses matters by assigning one rating to both the upfront bar–café and the $84 prix fixe dining room. For the former, one star is a compliment; for the latter, it’s a curse.

There was no Review Preview yesterday, as Sifton didn’t tweet in advance what he would be reviewing. It is just as well, as we would have been wrong again. We would have predicted two stars for Aureole. It will be interesting to see what happens next to Chef Chris Lee. He was turning out acclaimed food at Gilt. Now he is “meh.”

Review Recap: Le Relais de Venise

Sam Sifton has been the New York Times restaurant critic for just four weeks, and already he is full of surprises. We have correctly predicted his rating just once—and that was for the rather obvious Marea.

We did not believe that this restaurant would get one star, based on the “meh” reviews we’ve read elsewhere. But we are glad that when Sifton gives a star, the restaurant is actually good—a contrast from the Frank Bruni era.

LE RELAIS DE VENISE L’ENTRECÔTE is a mouthful of a restaurant that opened a few months ago in a canyon at Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, convenient mostly to hotel guests and hamsters on the Midtown professional wheel. It has no real menu to speak of. There is only salad and steak frites. Some wine to drink and a dessert after. Women in French maid outfits serve the stuff as if they were characters in an early Preston Sturges film. And you know what? It’s terrific.

We still don’t quite understand why a restaurant that serves only one salad and one entrée required a review to itself.

Record to date: 71–28 (71%)

Review Recap: Imperial Palace

Some days, I am happy to be wrong. That’s how I felt about Sam Sifton’s one-star review of Imperial Palace.

Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but one star in the Times system is supposed to be “good,” but most of Frank Bruni’s one-star restaurants were mediocre. This led to a situation where it was nearly impossible to award one star, and have it be a compliment. The few restaurants so honored were lost in the scrum of many more where one star was an insult.

So I was gratified to read this:

Crab is the restaurant’s calling card. But a series of meals taken there over the last few months say more: The Palace is riding high, at the zenith of Cantonese cooking in New York City.  .  .  .

Entirely on the fly, it is possible to eat brilliantly there, in the manner of an improvised Cantonese banquet. It is not a formal restaurant nor in any way a perfect one; service can be slapdash, particularly if you speak no Chinese. But the cooking is extremely sophisticated.

Except for the reference to slapdash service, practically all of the review is positive—a rave, even. And it gets one star.

Sifton will need to file about a hundred more like it before people get the message that “one star means good.” But this is an excellent start. To make it stick, he’ll need to give zero a lot more often than Bruni did. I wonder if he has the guts for that.

Eater made the safe (and correct) one-star bet, winning $2 on a hypothetical one-dollar wager. We lose a dollar.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$0.00		$0.00
Gain/Loss	+$2.00		–$1.00
Total	+$2.00		–$1.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	2–1 (67%)		1–2 (33%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 71–27 (72%).

Review Recap: Marea

Today, Sam Sifton drops the expected threespot on Marea, the posh Italian Seafooder on Central Park South. Prose this purple hasn’t been seen in the paper before:

The very first item on the menu at Marea is ricci, a piece of warm toast slathered with sea urchin roe, blanketed in a thin sheet of lardo, and dotted with sea salt. It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined. The salt and fat give way to primal sweetness and combine in deeply agreeable ways. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the body. Not bad at $14 a throw — and there are two on each plate.

I don’t know yet if that paragraph will be the Best of Sifton or the Worst of Sifton, but it’s sure to be one or the other.

It’s a dark and stormy night by the time Sifton gets to crudi:

There is as well a crudo menu — and a crudo bar along the restaurant’s east side, with seats for 20. It is not part of the prix fixe, but a geoduck clam with fresh chilies and lemon helps explain in one bite why men would dive amid huge swells to retrieve the things from the angry Pacific.

The restaurant gets three stars despite weak main courses. “Better to hit shore for the steak (or a crisp roast guinea hen with asparagus) or upgrade into the whole-fish treatments.”

I cringed when Sifton described it as “unfussy.” I had prayed that with Frank Bruni’s retirement, that word and its derivatives be banished from restaurant criticism.

Both we and Eater predicted a three-star review. We both win $1 at EVEN odds against our hypothetical one-dollar bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	–$1.00		–$1.00
Gain/Loss	$1.00		$1.00
Total	$0.00		$0.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	1–1 (50%)		1–1 (50%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 71–26 (73%).

Review Recap: DBGB

Today, the Sam Sifton era began with a two-star review of Daniel Boulud’s DBGB:

A cynic would call this fashion and scoff. But one bite of the crispy lamb ribs that were served in the bar area when the place first opened — sweetly glazed, grassy meat, with a dab of creamy mint-flecked yogurt sauce — ended all snark: Mr. Boulud has opened a very good restaurant. The lamb was sublime, earthy and spicy and rich, evidence of superb technique, the sort of snack that separates his empire from others in the celebrity firmament.

Recent visits to all five of Mr. Boulud’s New York restaurants suggest: his kitchens put out perfectly cooked food. Diners may quibble here and there (with the sweetened cucumber juice in the Hendrick’s gin cocktail at Daniel, for instance), but rare is the complaint about technique. Jim Leiken, DBGB’s executive chef, a young veteran of Daniel and DB Bistro Moderne, is no exception. His food game, as they say in rap precincts, is tight.

What do we want from a review, anyway? Entertaining? Check. Relevant—that is, not self-indulgent? Check. Well informed? Check. Accurate? I can’t tell. Sifton liked the place a tad better than we did two months ago, and better than most other critics did. But two months in the life of a four-month-old restaurant is a long time.

It will take many more reviews before we can say whether we trust Sifton’s verdicts. We suspect, however, that we will much enjoy reading them. We are delighted that he can write a robust paragraph. We recall—not with fondness—Bruni reviews with a dozen or more one-sentence grafs in a row.

With the return of the Eater odds, we are now resetting the score to zero (as we had promised) and resuming our weekly guessing game with Ben Leventhal, with a hypothetical one-dollar bet on the line. Both we and Leventhal believed that DBGB would get a star, so we both lose a dollar.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$0.00		$0.00
Gain/Loss	–$1.00		–$1.00
Total	–$1.00		–$1.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	0–1 (0%)		0–1 (0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 70–26 (73%).

Review Recap: Saul

Record to date: 12–5

Yesterday, Pete Wells concluded his short tenure as interim critic with a two-star review of Saul. It was much overdue, as Saul was much changed since Eric Asimov’s $25 & Under review a decade ago:

Ten years is a respectable run for a New York restaurant. Most don’t make it that long, and many of those that do are slowly taking on water. A few may change course by bringing a new chef on board or, more and more frequently these days, trimming their sails and tacking toward cheaper, more casual shores.

Saul is a heartening exception. One of the first restaurants to bring a contemporary sensibility to Brooklyn when it appeared on Smith Street in 1999, it has neither faded, nor stood still, nor sought a personality transplant. Instead Saul Bolton, the chef and the owner with his wife, Lisa, has upgraded just about everything in their modest storefront. Saul is the same restaurant, but better.

Wells seems to approve of the restaurant’s Michelin star, an honor pooh-poohed on some food baords:

Like couples in a starter apartment, they dressed the place up as the money came in. The food is now served on white Bernardaud china and the wine is poured into Ravenscroft glasses. Such refinements gave Saul the feel of a destination. The first New York Michelin guide ratified this view when it gave Saul a star, a rating that was reaffirmed with the publication of the 2010 edition this week.

Mr. Bolton said in a telephone interview that the Michelin star lured visitors from around the country and beyond. But Saul is probably best understood as a neighborhood restaurant, although a very nice one.

Next week brings the first review from the new permanent critic, Sam Sifton. Unfinished business from the Bruni era, particularly Marea, will likely be high on his list, but a little bird told me that it won’t be his first review. Sifton was spotted at Daniel this week, but that was surely just expense-account padding, as the Times would not re-review it so soon after Frank Bruni re-affirmed its four-star status earlier this year.

Review Recap: The Standard Grill

Record to date: 11–5

Pete “the Hammer” Wells takes it easy on the Standard Grill, awarding one star:

At dinner, as the main courses are being set down, he sends out a cast-iron platter of fried potatoes dressed with pimentón mayonnaise, his spin on patatas bravas, the tapas bar classic. Crisp, smoky, spicy and very hard to resist, this little something rounds out the meal rather than slowing it down.

Small grace notes like this have helped the Standard Grill play to robust crowds since it opened three months ago.

It is not the place I would send friends who want to study the latest contortions of the yoga masters of haute cuisine. But it is exactly where I would direct anybody who needs to recharge by plugging straight into the abundant, renewable energy source that is downtown Manhattan.

I like the fact that Wells makes his one-star review positive (as one-star reviews should be), while finding enough faults to explain why the restaurant doesn’t get two:

The tiled, barrel-vaulted ceiling makes for treacherous acoustics. At times conversations across the room are beamed directly to your table. Sitting by the open kitchen one night, we heard an expediter shouting out orders as if he were communicating with cooks in Jersey City. . . .

What is billed as “million dollar” roasted chicken for two cost $32 and occasioned a service failure you wouldn’t expect if you were paying 99 cents. The chicken was set down before me in a cast-iron skillet. I did not get a plate, nor did the friend who was sharing it with me until he spoke up, and then he was given one scaled for an appetizer.

We didn’t blame the overwhelmed waiter, but we did want to wrap him in a warm blanket and pack him into a cab with the names of a few restaurants that give the staff more than 30 seconds of training before sending them into battle.

The place is full of small oddities: the restrooms that look unisex, but aren’t; the disc jockey in a glass booth whose tunes don’t play in the dining room; the very good chocolate mousse that you are meant to eat with a big rubber spatula. Does any of this make sense? No.

Does it, against the odds, add up to a worthwhile restaurant? Absolutely.

Wells’s off-key takedown of SHO Shaun Hergatt in a Dining Brief five weeks ago makes us wonder if he has the right temperament to review upscale restaurants, as well as downscale ones. We probably aren’t going to find out, as the Times is clearly saving the more important opening for Frank Bruni’s replacement, Sam Sifton, who starts in October.

Review Recap: Hotel Griffou

Record to date: 10–5

Star bettors could be in for a rough few months. After five years, it was usually apparent what Frank Bruni would do. Pete Wells has thrown a curve ball two weeks in a row, first dumping a FAIR rating on Gus & Gabriel Gastropub, and today unloading the dreaded SATISFACTORY on Hotel Griffou:

At every restaurant I’ve seen, a three top is a four top missing a chair.

Not at Hotel Griffou, where we were sent to the bar while someone hunted down our table. The restaurant has four dining rooms, and we had an excellent view of one, a bright space with long beer-hall tables that sat empty. We imagined that they were being held for a group. Naturally, this is where we were seated, 50 minutes after we had arrived.

I was afraid that if I returned they would hit the one-hour mark and lead me to a produce crate by the dishwasher. So I stayed away…

The cooking is hard to classify, partly because the menu is divided into “Seasonal” and “The Classics.” In the first category are garden-variety takes on Mediterranean-derived dishes… As modern as these dishes were, their presentations were often scattershot, as if the food had been lobbed in the general direction of plates as they sailed toward the kitchen door.

Frank Bruni never gave two goose-eggs in a row, as Wells has now done. Bruni’s philosophy seemed to be that, as the Times does not review every restaurant—indeed, it does not even come close—there’s not much point in calling attention to places that aren’t any good. So he gave out just enough goose-eggs to remind readers that it was possible to get less than one star.

I’ve long felt that too many of Bruni’s one-star reviews sounded like zero, and it led to a perception that one star could never be a compliment. Wells could be giving the star system a long-overdue course correction, which would be terrific if Sam Sifton keeps it up.

Unfortunately, I doubt that we’ll be so lucky. I suspect that the worthwhile restaurants have been laid aside for Sam Sifton, which has left Wells to pick up the scraps. Poor fellow.

Review Recap: Gus & Gabriel Gastropub

According to Pete Wells at the Times, Chef Michael Psilakis has his first fail with Gus & Gabriel Gastropub, which receives a devastating FAIR rating in today’s paper:

The anglicized Gastropub of the name is a red herring. Gus & Gabriel’s menu reads like the one at countless casual American pubs, with a few nods to T. G. I. Friday’s and all the strip-mall P. T. Pennyfathers it spawned.

Mr. Psilakis intended to improve mainstream food — fried mozzarella, spaghetti and meatballs, barbecued riblets — by making it all from scratch. The tortilla chips in nachos are fried in house; the ice creams in the shakes and floats are made at Anthos.

This may strike some people as pandering. But the problem with Gus & Gabriel is not that it aims low. The problem is that it fails to achieve even its low aims.

This was the paper’s first FAIR rating since William Grimes’s tenure. Frank Bruni never gave a FAIR. He once said that two kinds of zero—POOR and SATISFACTORY—were enough. The trouble was that most of his SATISFACTORY reviews didn’t convey much satisfaction. If a restaurant is this bad, then it isn’t satisfactory.

Gus & Gabriel is Micheal Psilakis’s seventh New York restaurant in five years. Three have closed (Onera, Dona, and the original Kefi), and this week he severed his ties with another, Mia Dona. The transferred Kefi is a disaster, and so apparently is Gus & Gabriel. That leaves the acclaimed Anthos, but heaven knows if he is actually paying attention to it—it doesn’t get much press these days.

It’s time for Psilakis to stop tossing out ideas like so many bullets out of a machine gun, and focus again on getting them right.