Review Recap: Ippudo

BruniBetting was put to pasture just in time. Our once-fabled ability to foretell Frank Bruni’s restaurant ratings has gone astray. For the second week in a row, the lame-duck critic has confounded us—this time with a one-star review of Ippudo.

The review finds our critic “Worshipping at the Altar of Ramen.” At first, it reads distinctly like the two-star rave we were expecting:

At Ippudo in the East Village, which is where many of the most devoted ramen fans practice their devotion, I would sometimes look up from my ramen and realize that I hadn’t acknowledged my companions for several minutes, and had in fact forgotten that they were there.

With ramen like Ippudo’s at its finest, who needs conversation? For that matter, who needs company?

Ippudo opened early last year, but seems to become even more popular and fashionable every month. Ippudo, Ippudo, Ippudo: lately, acquaintances mention it all the time, usually in order to crow that they’ve just been. It’s an insider’s favorite, enjoying its gastronome-darling moment.

In the end, he has just enough complaints to take Ippudo into the Land of the One:

Ippudo doesn’t take reservations, and that’s one of several annoyances. In the end there are challenges to the ramen bliss here. There are complications and compromises that you have to edit out of the experience…

Pork is a useful compass for navigating Ippudo’s menu, which goes beyond ramen to an array of small and medium-size plates. If a dish centers or pivots on pork — the meaty, fatty, glorious Samurai ribs, for example — consider it. If it doesn’t, beware. There’s remarkable unevenness here, exemplified by the shockingly fishy black cod I had one night…

There’s unevenness even to the ramen, in which the slices of pork can be tender or tough, and in which the noodles can be just a tad too soft. With the turnover and bustle at Ippudo, consistency is clearly a challenge.

The crowd management could be better — warmer. During lunch on a recent day, nearly a dozen of us waited around the bar up front for an open table, but Ippudo hadn’t bothered to deploy a single bartender or dispatch a single server to see if we wanted a drink or, say, a glass of water. Service on the whole varies, alternately relaxed and rushed, friendly and aloof.

On the whole, though, this is one of those infrequent one-star reviews that is actually meant as a compliment. The trouble with Bruni is that, at least 2/3rds of the time, a star by itself is an insult. In Bruni’s starry universe, it’s tough to find the one-star reviews that are actually positive recommendations—like this one—because they get lost in a sea of mediocrity.

Review Recap (lame duck edition): Minetta Tavern

Well, blow me down.

The day after we wrote that “One or two stars are the only plausible outcomes here,” Frank Bruni awarded three stars to Minetta Tavern:

The minute you heard that Keith McNally was dusting off Minetta Tavern — that musty, sputtering Greenwich Village relic from the late 1930s — you probably figured he’d get the look and atmosphere right…

But were you prepared for a côte de boeuf like Minetta’s, a sublime hunk of glorious meat that you dream about hours later, pine for the next day and extol in a manner so rapturous and nonstop that friends begin to worry less about your cholesterol than about your sanity?

And did you expect that Mr. McNally, with the chefs Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, would come up with the best steakhouse in the city?

We never saw this one coming, nor did over 500 Eater.com voters, 91.4% of whom believed, as we did, that two stars was the maximum for this place.

Our experience here is limited to the $16 Minetta Burger (like us, Bruni prefers it to its $26 cousin), but this didn’t strike us as a three-star restaurant. Indeed, Minetta Tavern serves a slimmed down version of the Balthazar menu, and no one has suggested that Balthazar is unfairly rated at two stars (Amanda Hesser, May 2004).

We don’t agree with Bruni every time, but all of his other three-star restaurants were, in a sense, predictable. They were types of restaurants where you knew this outcome was possible. This is the first one that just came out of nowhere.

Indeed, even taken on its own terms, the review makes a poor case for three stars. Bruni concedes that “little of the rest of Minetta’s food rises all the way to the extraordinarily high level of the beef.”

What a bizarre way to begin the last three months of his tenure.

Moskin at the Morgan: A New Standard for Irrelevance

This week, as Frank Bruni recuperates from his Roman Holiday, Julia Moskin filled in with a two-star review of the Morgan Dining Room.

I suppose that if one is going to review a restaurant so far off the radar, the least one can do is award two stars — otherwise, why bother? But the Morgan Dining Room is open only for lunch six days a week, and for dinner just one day a week (Fridays, 5 to 9). And of the recommended dishes…

Green salad, beet salad, ricotta and Swiss chard tart, mussels, striped bass on squash risotto, salmon with baby carrots and parsnips, lobster salad, fruit cobbler, cookie plate

…most are salads or desserts. Of the mussels, striped bass and salmon, all we’re told is that they’re “successful.” All in all, if this is a two-star restaurant — and I’m not saying it couldn’t be — Moskin’s case is rather limp.

Steve Cuozzo of the Post says he doesn’t write reviews any more, but in a piece today called “Messed Western,” he seems to do exactly that, dropping the hammer on Ted Turner’s Montana Grill and Tim Love’s Lonesome Dove Western Bistro. The original Lonesome Dove carries the Zagat #1 food rating in Dallas, so Cuozzo’s review, if true, would be a significant fall from grace. Undeterred by Cuozzo’s review, I’m keeping my reservation at the Lonesome Dove a week from Saturday.