Review Recap: The Redhead

With today’s one-star review of The Redhead, Frank Bruni’s tenure as restaurant critic is finally over. Why did he end with a one-star place, when he could have reviewed anything? I can only guess that this is the kind of restaurant where Bruni will be eating for fun, once he’s no longer paid to do it. Reviewing the three- and four-star places always seemed like a duty to him, not a joy.

Now more than ever, diners find principled, distinctive cooking in places where they wouldn’t have expected it before: dessert trucks, baseball stadiums, postage-stamp storefronts, wine bars, taverns and cocktail lounges. In fact the Redhead was mostly a tavern and cocktail lounge during that span of Thursday-only dinners, which exemplified the possibility of terrific eating with untraditional trappings and captured the sense of gastronomic serendipity that defines this culinary moment.

With its first-come-first-served seating policy and its televisions showing sporting events behind the bar, the Redhead speaks to the moment’s casual ethos. And it underscores the extent to which the East Village has become a center of gravity for young chefs intent on bold flavors. They clearly feed off of one another, a loose network of validation and motivation.

This was one of the most positive one-star reviews that Bruni has ever filed, but it does underscore one of the worst failures of his tenure. Most of his one-star reviews were insults. His last three one-star reviews — Spice Market, Bar Artisanal, and Monkey Bar — were negative. Those reviews create the perception that one-star restaurants are bad. I’ll bet the owners of The Redhead are getting condolence calls today, which is clearly not what Bruni intended.

Review Recap: Table 8

I haven’t been Frank Bruni’s biggest fan, but I have to give credit where it’s due: the man knows how to deliver a smackdown!

Today, Frank uncorked the final zero-star review of his tenure, giving the bagel to Govind Armstrong’s Table 8 in the Cooper Square Hotel. (Frank has only three reviews left, and as goose eggs are a rarity, it’s safe to assume there won’t be any more of them.)

For Frank, as always, restrooms are the index to a restaurant’s success:

In its opening weeks, [Table 8] rewarded anyone who went to the bathroom with a glass of sparkling wine.

At least that’s what happened the first time I dined there, when my companions and I noticed bubbly for the taking in a chamber beside the sinks.

What to make of this? Freud surely would have had one answer. We had another: diners were being congratulated for actually managing to reach this remote, ill-marked destination, a Herculean feat involving an instinctive left here, a speculative right there, a hunch, a leap of faith, a descent into the underworld and a fearless crossing of the river Styx.

That tortuous journey — only the final phrase amounts to exaggeration — isn’t just a mood killer; it’s a metaphor, too. The people behind Table 8 have given too little thought to logistics and comfort. They were inattentive when they put the place together, and they’re inattentive still. The acoustics are insane, the absurdly narrow lanes of foot traffic clog, the bread isn’t reliably fresh and the filet mignon on a recent night had the stringy texture and stew-y taste of something that would only barely pass muster on a tray table in coach.

A hard-to-find bathroom might be forgiven if the food were better, but alas it’s not:

I was struck by how overworked and overdressed many dishes were. A deep puddle of excess liquid was left behind once the grilled octopus with celery heart salad, tomato and Moroccan olives was gone, and a similar puddle outlasted duck sausage with grilled radicchio, pine nuts, grilled peaches and a watercress salad. I would have traded all those accessories for more sausage with more of a crisp-soft contrast than this one had.

On a subsequent night, the torn pasta that served as a bed for pan-fried sweetbreads was mushy. Another pasta was even worse: a gluey clump of linguine with a combination of ricotta and lemon that might as well have been Elmer’s and Pledge.

With such condemnations as those, why does the review end with “SATISFACTORY”? Did Frank seem satisfied?

*

We’ll be traveling the next two weeks, and most likely won’t have the opportunity to post our usual “Review Preview.” I know, I know, don’t all cry at once.

We’ll be out with speculative predictions early next week.

Review Recap: Locanda Verde

Today, Frank Bruni awarded the expected two stars to Locanda Verde, while also scolding chef Andrew Carmellini for not doing more:

Renown in the restaurant world can dawn so suddenly and grow so quickly that many chefs get ahead of themselves, winding up a half-dozen paces beyond where they rightfully belong.

For Andrew Carmellini, the opposite has been true. Now 38, he has lagged behind, without billing as prominent or a showcase quite as flattering as he deserves…

But in keeping with the Carmellini story, Locanda Verde doesn’t amount to the exactly right situation or perfect fit for him. It’s not the Carmellini restaurant that many of us have been waiting and hoping for, though it has plenty to recommend it. Hit the menu’s strong spots and you’ll have a terrific meal at a reasonable price.

Like the menu at A Voce, the one here is emphatically market-driven, as the restaurant’s name (which means “green inn”) telegraphs. But the dishes in aggregate tend to be more rustic and less elegant, perhaps a reflection of Mr. Carmellini’s mood, certainly a reflection of the moment.

Bruni has a long history of over-rating Italian restaurants, but he certainly gets the food:

The pasta dishes and entrees weren’t as uniformly successful. While the “Sunday night ragù” on top of big, floppy gigantoni was a porky dream and while a dish called “my grandmother’s ravioli”— filled with short rib and pork and sauced with San Marzano tomatoes — made me want to swap ancestors with Mr. Carmellini, the crumbled mix of meats in a white Bolognese was a total washout, and the noodles in several dishes were slightly overcooked. Neither his grandmother nor mine would approve.

Carmellini’s last place, A Voce, was obviously a two-star restaurant, but it got three from Bruni. Today, he walks it back:

When he left in 2005 to open A Voce, he got his own kitchen, where he did some of the city’s best Italian cooking. But A Voce’s coolly modern, oddly soulless cosmetics were more of a drag on his efforts than a complement to them.

I couldn’t agree more. Although some of the finger-wagging in today’s review strikes the wrong tone, this time he got the rating right.

Review Recap: Monkey Bar

Today, Frank Bruni awarded one star to Monkey Bar:

It’s a clubhouse, its members making their way to it not from the 18th hole but from the vanity fairways of Condé Nast, I.C.M., Time Warner and the like. Maybe they take a moment to glance at the listed appetizers and entrees, maybe not. It hardly matters, because they’ve been here often enough to know what’s what, and the lighting is too magnanimously dim for an annoyance like reading.

The obvious question is: why?

It opened about four months ago. But it didn’t open equally to everyone, as I learned when I called, using a pseudonym, to make a reservation. I wasn’t simply told that 6:30 was the closest to a prime time that I could hope for; I was told that anything better was for people with private lines to the owners…

All of that would be more objectionable if it weren’t just an amplified — and curiously forthright — version of the haughty games so many restaurants play.

And it would be less forgivable if there wasn’t actually something to savor on the far side of the velvet rope, along with signs that Mr. Carter and his crew truly care about that.

So let me see if I have this straight. It’s almost impossible to get in at a reasonable time, unless you’re a friend of Graydon Carter’s. And once you do get in, you’re as liable as not to be served mediocre food. Maybe you’ll see a celebrity or two…but you can do that on TV.

Once again, Bruni awards one star—supposedly meaning “good”—to a restaurant that isn’t good, thereby making it impossible to give one star to the restaurants that have truly earned it.

Review Recap: Aldea

Today, Frank Bruni awards the expected two stars to Aldea:

The cooking is precious, lusty, ultramodern, rustic and a host of other adjectives that don’t normally squeeze together but find themselves in a tight, mostly happy clutch here. Although Aldea has a clean, sleek and relatively spare look, it has a much more complex taste.

One minute you’re nibbling on crisp pig’s ears. The next you’re carefully maneuvering your spoon under a translucent, quivering orb of concentrated mushroom broth — one of those liquid ravioli that the Spanish alchemist Ferran Adrià made famous — in an avant-garde consommé.

The entree in front of you is a go-for-broke hillock of rice with duck cracklings and black olives. The entree in front of your companion is a refined, butter-soft fillet of wild bass that has been poached in a technique similar to sous vide and tucked under a billowing nimbus made from Arbois and air.

For dessert there are doughnuts (though they’re labeled “little dreams”). But there is also “chocolate in textures,” a dark tableau that seems as ready for exhibition as for ingestion.

I more-or-less agree with all of this, although I could have done without the pejorative “precious.” One could easily imagine Aldea earning the third star eventually, an outcome Bruni himself anticpates: “…there’s plenty to eat, whether you’re hungry for something delicate or blunt. It establishes Aldea as a restaurant worth trying, and Mr. Mendes as a chef worth keeping an eye on.”

*

In Critic’s Notebook, Bruni has a look at the latest trends in pizza:

I believe by and large that Neapolitan pies — if they can avoid soupiness, as they did at Motorino — are the most appealing. Yet the pan pizzas at Veloce Pizzeria, which opened in the East Village a month and a half ago, pleased me every bit as much. Sara Jenkins, the chef who supervises their production, said she isn’t sure whether to call them Sicilian or grandma style. Whatever their proper tag, these denser, richer, square pies were superb. The nicely charred crust — with a dough of potato, durum and fine zero-zero flour — was firm enough to support a generous measure of toppings. Its extra-crisp edges had the salty, zingy flavor and texture of a frico. And the toppings were first-rate, the mushroom pizza showcasing a bevy of hen-of-the-woods.

I believe that firmer, less runny cheese works better most of the time, and yet the Pugliese pie at Motorino, which uses wet-centered burrata, was a masterpiece, the burrata lending the pie an opulence and creaminess.

Crisp crusts, it turns out, aren’t so difficult: most places I visited had mastered that much. But crusts that are crisp without being dry — that have some give and suppleness — are an altogether trickier matter. That’s where Lucali, for example, fell down, though the ratio of mozzarella to tomatoes on its plain pie was faultless, and the tomatoes had a beautiful, round flavor.

This is Bruni at his best. Had he been doing this, instead of reviewing high-end restaurants, the last five years would have been much happier for Times readers—and, we get the sense, for Bruni as well.

Review Recap: Bar Artisanal

Today, Frank Bruni very strangely gets Bar Artisanal right, yet all wrong, in awarding one star:

With the new restaurant Bar Artisanal, positioned and presented as a casual spinoff of Artisanal, Mr. Brennan has made the journey all the way downtown, to TriBeCa, and his cheese, of course, has traveled with him. Much of it is exhibited at a counter not entirely unlike Artisanal’s, but since that’s old hat for him, it’s not the striking part. What’s more arresting, amusing and in many crucial instances rewarding is the way cheese recurs across Bar Artisanal’s menu, dotting and flecking it, like dill or caraway in a wedge of havarti…

Take away the cheese and what’s left is a calculating, somewhat cynical operation, connected to the Hilton Garden Inn, that’s not all that reflective of Mr. Brennan, who guides but doesn’t actually own it. Bar Artisanal pillages and repackages current trends with astonishing thoroughness, commanding attention for that alone. If restaurants could be preserved in amber and tucked away for future students of gustatory anthropology, this might be the one to save and label, “New York City, circa 2010.”

We are struck by this, because although Bar Artisanal does indeed bow to trends, they are the very trends that Bruni has worshipped and adored during his five-year tenure. We are not even convinced that it is true. The cheese course alone makes Bar Artisanal a destination restaurant, since only one other restaurant in town (sister establishment Artisanal) offers anything like this variety, at anything approaching this price point.

And for all that, he calls out only one dish for outright criticism:

…a few out-and-out duds, the overpopulated “duck” pissaladière — with duck gizzard, duck confit, duck liver and a duck egg — foremost among them…

Funnily enough, we had that dish ourselves a week or two ago and considered it excellent. Having lambasted the restaurant for being enslaved to fashion, the one dish he pans is among those being served nowhere else.

We predicted and agree with Bruni’s one-star rating. But in the Times system, one star is supposed to mean “good.” Here, Bruni’s text suggests “Not So Good,” which is all wrong.

*

In Dining Briefs, Ligaya Mishan channels her inner Restaurant Girl in a review of Public Fare at the Delacorte Theater:

Roasted baby carrots spar in a lively mix of pickled versus peppery… Among the sandwiches, the organic chicken salad ($6.50) pulls rank with the gratifying crunch of green beans, celery and radish, and a fillip of chili pepper… The big disappointment is the B.L.T. ($7). Mine was over-mayoed and under-tomatoed; the pallid slices of tomato, more outer edge than juicy center, were no match for the brash hickory-smoked bacon.

Review Recap: Spice Market

Today, the Brunatrix bends Spice Market over the table and administers a one-star spanking:

When Spice Market opened its doors in the fleetly evolving whirl of Manhattan’s meatpacking district in early 2004, it…suggested the possibility of excellence in a genre often content with frivolity.

Today it suggests the steepness of many a restaurant’s decline once it has made its first, glowing impression, especially if the restaurant was conceived as, or destined to be, the parent of money-making offspring elsewhere. Said restaurant comes out of the gate strong, whipping up the buzz and establishing the brand, but once that mission is accomplished, its motivation falters. Its cooking deteriorates. Sloppiness creeps in…

While it still looks gorgeous, sends out the occasional superb dish and delivers a measure of fun, much of its menu is executed in a perfunctory or even slapdash fashion. Once a compelling destination, it’s now a modest diversion.

He has some choice words for Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who is still nominally the chef at Spice Market, even though the menu hasn’t changed in five years:

Mr. Vongerichten is equal parts proud artist and profit-hungry entrepreneur, on the one hand making big-hearted contributions to the city’s restaurant scene while on the other wringing as much lucre from his stardust as he can.

Jean-Georges the Great helps finance and promote Wylie Dufresne at wd-50 and Jim Lahey at Co. pizzeria. He imports — and collaborates with — serious Japanese talent at Matsugen, a principled restaurant with remarkable prix fixe deals at lunch and dinner. He keeps careful watch over his outstanding flagship, Jean Georges.

Jean-Georges the Not-So-Great presides too distantly and cavalierly over the likes of Vong, Mercer Kitchen and Spice Market. He’s clone-happy, and in 2006 established a special wing of his empire, Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges, to supervise his swelling brood of restaurants in hotels worldwide. That wing oversees all the Spice Markets.

This is yet another one-star review that reads like zero. Although one star is supposed to mean “Good” in the Times nomenclature, Bruni has often used that category for reviews like this one, where the tone is overwhelmingly negative.

It creates a perception that one star is an insult, and makes it difficult to give one star to places that actually are “Good.”

Review Recap: Rye and Benoit

Today, a befuddled Frank Bruni files on Rye, awarding the expected one star:

It’s a somewhat confused and confusing enterprise, starting with the location, just far enough off any main artery to recommend some clear, possibly ostentatious signage….

But the confusion doesn’t stop at the ill-advertised entrance. Maybe because Rye hasn’t quite worked out what it really wants to be, it confronts you with too many riddles, complicating your effort to plot a coherent experience and undercutting its considerable sexiness and charms. Although it’s a restaurant worth knowing about, it’s not as simply and easily navigable as it should be.

Much of its menu promises fine dining of a relatively tame, buttoned-down sort: a beet salad with micro arugula and goat cheese; duck confit with wild mushrooms; pan-roasted halibut with haricots verts and sugar snaps; roasted chicken with spring vegetables.

But a disappointingly succinct list of wines suggests that, alternately, the real point of Rye is its cocktails, some of which come with the currently fashionable allotment of one large cube of ice, all of which can be savored at a long, gorgeous mahogany bar that visually dominates the dining room.

To that end there is, wisely, a menu category for snacks. Only here, too, nothing is quite what it appears to be. The sliders — one made with pork belly, another with short rib — are in fact closer to full-fledged sandwiches. And a meatloaf sandwich listed with them is a snack the way Godzilla is a garden lizard.

We agree with Bruni that restaurants sometimes need to do a better job of indicating what’s a snack and what’s an entrée, but was that really the best meme for this review? The emphasis on cocktails rather than wine is hardly a novelty these days.

Why did he bother to review this place? We assume it’s boredom. In the end, most of the dishes he likes are salad and bar snacks. There are a hundred places like this in Manhattan. Had it been on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge, we doubt he would have bothered.

* * *

Julia Moskin returns to Benoit, finding it much as we did: improved under new chef Pierre Schaedelin, but still phoning in the service:

Last year, Alain Ducasse brought in the chef Pierre Schaedelin to upgrade this New York branch of his bistro empire. Mr. Schaedelin has sharpened the flavors, improved the desserts, and broadened the menu until it now has many of the true pleasures of Paris — though it’s still shadowed by mindless service à la Midtown….

But there is a hint of airline food in the blandly rich repetition and limp sides of “mixed vegetables,” and more than a hint of highway robbery in $11 cold tomato soup and the aforementioned choucroute.

Benoit gives a warm welcome at the door and cheery wine service, but waiters seem to hope that dinner customers will leave early and stay away forever. A cold entree was reheated and sent back shrunken and overcooked.

Thus ends Alain Ducasse’s last, best chance to get the Times back to Benoit.

Review Recap: Savoy

Today, Frank Bruni bestows the expected deuce on Savoy, Peter Hoffman’s 20-year-old haute barnyard trailblazer:

It’s easy to forget about Mr. Hoffman and about Savoy, whose leafy, principled menu now seems less a breath of fresh cooking than the default setting of the urban bistro, where a chef contemplates ramps in May, butternut squash in November.

But if Savoy is no longer a trailblazer or paragon — and if, indeed, it makes a more modest impression than a latter-day temple of ethical eating like Blue Hill — it remains an attention-worthy restaurant, on account of how deeply pleasant an afternoon or evening here can be. Its low-key charms haven’t faded since its opening in 1990, and its adjustments over time have been wise ones.

Bruni seems to prefer the bustling downstairs bar to the refined dining room. Such a surprise! Perhaps if the restaurant were renamed Momofuku Savoy Bar, it would earn an extra star. His assessment of the two rooms is completely bass-ackwards:

Ask to sit downstairs. While both dining rooms have working fireplaces, the street-level one feels at once more intimate and livelier.

No, Frank, it’s the upstairs that is more intimate. There are a hundred restaurants that offer what Savoy offers downstairs. Upstairs is where it shines.

Review Recap: Flex Mussels and (not) Harbour

Yesterday, the food section editors led us to expect a double-review of Flex Mussels and Harbour. We weren’t the only ones misled: Eater.com’s Ballpark Frank featured a poll on the predicted star rating for both restaurants.

It turns out lame-duck Frank reviewed only the lesser restaurant, Flex Mussels, awarding the expected one star:

Restaurants benefit from having a clear identity and making a claim that dozens of other restaurants aren’t already making. In Flex’s case, that’s mussel mania.

And restaurants do well to give diners a clear path to a meal that’s relatively economical while also filling. That’s where Flex and its spotlighted fare really deliver, in that a hillock of the mussels, coupled with plenty of broth-soaked bread, makes for a sizable dinner without a sizable check…

You can drink relatively affordably at Flex, too. The succinct but appealing wine list, which supplements a terrific international array of beers, has few bottles over $75 and many under $50.

In the usual “yes, but…” style, Frank goes on to list Flex Mussels’ faults:

The rest of the menu isn’t priced quite as gently or coherently…appetizers of $16 (a mix of fried calamari, shrimp and oysters) and $17 (two crab cakes) seem just a tad exorbitant…

I also wish this Flex were as orderly, with service as smooth. At its busiest, the bottleneck of human traffic around the host station is impenetrable, and your table can become a lonely colony to which food is exported fitfully.

* * * *

Almost as soon as we posted our two-star prediction for Harbour, we were buffeted by misgivings. Frank bailed us out by relegating the restaurant to Dining Briefs, a treatment usually accorded restaurants not deemed worthy of a starred review. Surprisingly, he seemed to like the place. As we expected, he found one dish “overworked and busy,” but in its favor:

There’s nonetheless some arresting food and impressive cooking at Harbour, and on that night it included an appetizer of thick, smoky, intense clam chowder ($9); a gorgeously textured, dreamily rich entree of Arctic char ($24); and a broad, shallow plate of butterscotch pudding ($8) with — a kooky touch — popcorn scattered across, and embedded in, its surface

The prices, including a four-course prix fixe of $45, are reasonable, considering the formality of the service, the generous breadbasket, the amuse-bouche. And that mindfulness of tough times extends to an affordable, respectable wine list. You can sail these seas on the winds of a fine white Burgundy.

So why no full review? We suspect he harbours doubts [pun intended] about the restaurant’s future and didn’t want to invest three visits in a place that might not last. As almost every critic has done (including us), he mentions Harbour’s “strangely desolate location.”

That should be no obstacle to success, though. Someone had to be the first to open a fine-dining restaurant in TriBeCa, on the Lower East Side, or in the Meatpacking District. I’m not saying Harbour will be it, but sooner or later some restaurant will turn Hudson Square into a destination.