Fabio Trabocchi Taking Over at The Four Season

Florence Fabricant has the news that Fabio Trabocchi will be the next executive chef at The Four Seasons, replacing Christian Albin, who died suddenly in June of this year.

Frank Bruni awarded three stars to Trabocchi at Fiamma, which restauranteur Stephen Hanson promptly closed at the first whiff of a recession. Trabocchi was bound to land on his feet, and you can’t do any better than this. The Four Seasons is the ultimate recession-proof restaurant.

Frank Bruni demoted the fifty-year-old restaurant to two stars in 2007, finding the service and the cuisine no longer living up to the gorgeous decor and stratospheric prices. In choosing Trabocchi, the owners are clearly hoping to get the third star back—if not more.

The track record of these experiments isn’t good, whether it’s Gary Robins at the Russian Tea Room, Joël Antunès at the Oak Room, or Craig Hopson at One if By Land, Two if By Sea. Great chefs seem routinely to fail in iconic spaces. Or at least, critics say they failed, and they move on to the next gig.

The Four Seasons is a bigger job than Trabocchi has had before, and for the restaurant to be relevant again, the service needs to improve. He has no control over that. It would be nice food at the Four Seasons that would live up to the space, but Trabocchi has his work cut out for him.

Who Will Take Over Café des Artistes?

As everyone knows by now, the charming but over-the-hill Café des Artistes has closed.

Both the space and the name are owned by the Hotel des Artistes, the apartment building in which the restaurant resides. I am quite sure that someone will re-open it. The question is, who?

How about Drew Nieporent? He told Bloomberg:

“I wooed my wife there over many a dinner and brunch,” Nieporent said in a phone interview from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. “I loved the Mitteleuropean sensibility George brought, that flair, that imagination, those pates. He has been a mentor to me and a very good friend…”

“It’s a great space,” said Nieporent, “and I’m always interested in great spaces.”

How Dumb Can Ozersky Get?

Josh Ozersky, editor of The Feedbag, is often called on as expert du jour when the press need a quote and don’t know whom else to ask. But unless the topic is burgers, barbecue or steaks, he doesn’t really speak expertly.

The latest example comes in today’s New York Daily News article, “Recession forces ritzy restaurants such as Café des Artistes to close doors.” The reporters, Leah Chernikoff and Edgar Sandoval, don’t exactly cover themselves in glory. The story purports to be about “ritzy” restaurants killed by the recession, but several of those listed don’t fit that description. Elettaria wasn’t ritzy at all. LCB Brasserie closed before the economic downturn, and the restaurant that replaced it (Benoit) was practically the same genre. La Goulue closed due to a lease issue; its owner insists it will re-open nearby.

The reporters say that “512 [NYC] resetaurants have closed this past year.” But the vast majority, as in about 95%, aren’t “ritzy.” As far as I can tell, “ritzy” restaurants (however one defines that term) are closing in roughly the same percentage as the fraction of the market they occupy. No more, no less. Take a tour through Eater.com’s posts tagged “The Shutter,” and tell me how many of them are “ritzy” in the same sense as Café des Artistes. It’s a tiny number.

Café des Artistes closed, as far as I could tell, because the owner was 85, and as he was going to have to retire eventually, now was as good a time as any. [ETA: Oh, that and a greedy union.]

One doesn’t expect much nuance from Daily News staff writers, but from Ozersky one expects better:

The great fine-dining fuddy-duddy restaurants were already on the wane before the recession hit… Overwrought and overstaffed, they were lingering in their own twilight. Now the meteor has hit, and these places have all gone under… The old white tablecloth dinosaurs have been supplanted by friskier mammals.”

It’s usually a safe bet that when people use words like “fuddy-duddy” and “dinosaur,” it’s shorthand for “restaurants I don’t understand.” Now, I am not suggesting that the loss of Café des Artistes is any great culinary loss: my last meal there was a disaster. But it filled a legitimate niche, and some of the remaining examples of the genre are still very good, for what they are (Le Périgord, for instance).

If Ozersky’s point is that the narrow genre that Café des Artiste occupied (Classic Old French) is shrinking, that has been true for decades—not so much due to the recession, but because their clientele is aging and is not being replaced. But to Daily News readers, when “white tablecloth” and “dinosaur” are put in the same sentence, there is no distinction between Café des Artistes (which Ozersky hated) and Marea (which he loves). Both have white tablecloths and elegant service. And I’ll betcha Marea has far more staff than CdA did.

What, exactly, makes Café des Artistes “overwrought,” and not Le Bernardin? Obviously the latter restaurant is far better (and still thriving), but its style of service is much farther over the top than CdA ever was. If the word “overwrought” applies to the service at any restaurant, on what principled distinction could Ozersky apply it to CdA and not Le Bernardin? Or is it really just a lazy term used to disparage a genre he never appreciated?

Dog Ear Tavern

Update: Maybe the space is just cursed! As of April 2010, Dog Ear Tavern gave way to Samalita’s.

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On our way to another restaurant, we walked past the Dog Ear Tavern, which occupies the space that was formerly home briefly to Dani, and even more briefly, to Archipelago.

It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that the space is cursed, but Dani was nothing special, and Archipelago was truly awful. Maybe both deserved to fold. Still, this is a tough neighborhood for destination dining. Dog Ear Tavern has taken the opposite approach: it serves neighborhood food, doesn’t take reservations, and doesn’t aspire to be more than a good drop-in place for the locals.

Whether it will succeed at those more humble ambitions we cannot say, but we had a friendly chat with the owner, and thought it only fair to give the place a shout-out. Someday soon, we’ll drop in and take a closer look.

Secession is Done

Last week, we returned to Secession to see how the ill-begotten restaurant was faring under four-star chef Christian Delouvrier. We found it much improved, but alas, mostly empty. Frank Bruni also circled back, finding the food better than it was, but marred by service gaffes. We often disagree with Bruni, but we believe him on matters like stale bread, absent servers, and wine served too warm.

Today, the penny dropped: Secession has closed. It will be replaced “by the end of the year” (meaning sometime in 2010, if we’re lucky) by a Japanese concept called Brushstroke, which David Bouley had intended to open across the street in the old Delphi space. That space, according to the Times, “ran into structural and other problems.”

Can't These Guys Name a Restaurant?

According to Grub Street, the former Grayz space will re-open in January as “Atria”. [Update: Atria closed in April 2009 after four short months in existence.]

That’s better than “Gneiss,” the last name these geniuses came up with, which lasted all of two weeks.

But still, if you’re going to walk back a dumb-ass idea, is “Atria” the best you can do? It’s rather generic, and says nothing about the identity of Chef Martin Brock’s cuisine.

At least we know that “Atria” will have an atrium—surely an indispensable reason for dining there.

Dead Restaurant Walking

We commented last week on a trio of restaurant closings first reported on Eater.com. It turns out that one out of three was completely wrong, and another was incomplete.

Devin Tavern has not closed. [Update: Now it has.]

And Archipelago plans to “relaunch soon with an exciting new menu designed for today’s more budget-conscious restaurant-goers.” At least Eater.com was right about Greenwich Burger: I checked it myself, and the “For Rent” signs are unmistakable.

We’ll give Eater.com a generous 1¾ out of 3 score. Archipelago is technically closed at the moment, whatever their plans may be. We’ve seen plenty of “temporary” closings that turned out to be permanent. Actually, they usually do.

Grim Reaper: Devin Tavern, Archipelago, Greenwich Burger

Update: Devin Tavern actually did not close at the time of this story, but it finally did about a month later. Archipelago claims it will re-open.

Yesterday, Eater.com reported three restaurant closures downtown: Devin Tavern, Archipelago, and Greenwich Steak & Burger. I have strong opinions about these restaurants, as all three are within walking distance of my office.

It’s easy to blame these failures on the economy, but that would mask the real story. Even in a booming economy, restaurants fail all the time. If there were no recession, perhaps one or two of these places would have hung on a while longer, and perhaps ultimately survived. Still, you can’t ignore management mistakes that led to their demise.

When I visited Devin Tavern on a weekday evening two years ago, there was no recession, but even then the large space was nowhere close to full. They fired the chef the following spring. An Eater Deathwatch came in June of last year, when the place was still not packing them in. I liked the place, but it never caught on with the neighborhood crowd—recession or not.

Archipelago was simply awful. Most of this town’s critics didn’t review it, which I assume was an act of kindness. I am not a believer in cursed restaurant spaces, but Hudson Square is not a neighborhood that attracts much foot traffic. People have to want to go there, and Archipelago didn’t give them a reason. Neither did the previous occupant, Dani.

The failure of Greenwich Steak & Burger is harder to explain, as it was comparatively inexpensive, and I thought the food was at least decent. But in a restaurant-rich neighborhood, perhaps “decent” wasn’t good enough. In the first few months after I posted my review, it got a very high number of search-engine hits (by my standards), so apparently people were interested in the place, but it never caught on.

We’re going to see more failures after the New Year. The economy naturally has something to do with it, but you need to look beneath the surface to see why. Every failure is its own story, and usually conceptual mistakes or poor execution are at least partly to blame. 

End of Dayz for Grayz

Crain’s reports today what many had already guessed: Grayz will close at the end of the year. Kunz was pushed out of the restaurant six months ago, and it made no sense to continue operating a place named for a guy who’s no longer there. On our last visit, we found Grayz less than half full. There was some terrific food, but the whole misguided concept was designed for an economic climate that no longer exists.

The owners will re-open as “Gneiss” (“nice”) in the same space, with Kunz’s former chef de cuisine, Martin Brock, still in place. We don’t have much hope for this reincarnation, starting with one of the dumbest names we’ve seen. The story of Grayz is that of one fumble after another. These owners still don’t know how to run a restaurant.

Along with the doomed Café Gray, this is Kunz’s second failure this year. We strenuously disagree with Cutlets, who exonerates Kunz in both of these failures:

While technically true, neither Cafe Gray nor Grayz was really Kunz’s restaurant. The first was a gilded deathtrap, that not even Fernand Point himself could have broken out of, and Grayz, with its strange corporate concept, was a similarly Sisyphean struggle.

Café Gray was Kunz’s concept. He is as accountable for the failure as anybody. (We’re not sure if “gilded deathtrap” accurately describes Café Gray in any case; Cutlets, the ultimate cheeseburger guy, is probably not the one to understand such places.) Kunz was very much the minority partner in Grayz, but in signing up for the concept, he must take some knocks for its demise.

Kunz is one of this town’s best chefs, but he has turned out to be a terrible business man. Both Grayz and Café Gray suffered from conceptual flaws that Kunz either failed to see or couldn’t correct. Kunz needs a backer with better business instincts—a Drew Nieporent or a Danny Meyer—so that he can concentrate on the one thing he does well, which is to cook.

Someone's in the Kitchen at Mai House

It looks like the soap opera at Mai House is over. Eater has the news today that David Lee, a former sous chef at Bar Room at the Modern, will be behind the stoves.

We were big fans of Mai House under founding chef Michael Bao Huynh. Top Chef’s Spike Mendelsohn replaced him, and Top Chef’s Lisa Hernandes replaced Spike. Neither one figured to be a permanent figure, and owner Drew Nieporent wasn’t going to let the place drift for long. Lee comes in with serious cred. He plans “serious menu changes,” with about half the dishes to be replaced by sometime in November.

We’ll give Lee a few weeks to get out the kinks before dropping in for a look-see.