Rolling the Dice: Chop Suey

Every week, we take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We track our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Times Square’s latest Chinese restaurant, Chop Suey. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 4-1
One Star: 3-1 √√
Two Stars: 6-1
Three Stars: 25-1
Four Stars: 5,000-1

The Skinny: Chop Suey has attracted a little bit of critical attention, thanks to its two “consulting chefs,” Zak Pelaccio (savories) and Will Goldfarb (desserts). The Post’s Steve Cuozzo loved it. New Yorker’s Ligaya Mishan wasn’t impressed at all. Cuozzo’s tastes are notoriously opposite of Frank Bruni’s, so we’re more inclined to trust Mishan.

In case the term “consulting chef” is new to you, it basically means they phoned in a couple of menu ideas, pocketed a fee, and have hardly visited the place since it opened. Pelaccio and Goldfarb are talented guys, but these days no one can keep track of all their projects. We don’t expect Bruni to look favorably on chefs who can’t be bothered to show up, and Bruni has never been much of a Goldfarb fan anyway.

If the online menu is accurate, appetizers at Chop Suey average around $15, and entrées around $30, which means you can’t get out of there for less than $50 a head, assuming you drink cokes. That’s a lot of money for Chinese food. It had better be good, or Bruni will bring out his hatchet in a hurry.

Ordinarily we’d be grabbing the zero-star odds, but we hesitate for a couple of reasons. In Times Square, there’s a zero-star restaurant every fifteen feet. It’s one of the city’s few neighborhoods where you expect every restaurant to be bad. Is there any news value in a zero-star review of a Times Square restaurant, especially one that most of the city’s other critics ignored?

The Bet: We agree with Eater that Frank Bruni will “award” —we use the term loosely — one star to Chop Suey.

Eighty One

Note: Eighty One closed after service on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010. The space is now occupied by Calle Ocho, which moved from its former home on Columbus Avenue.

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The Upper West Side isn’t known for destination dining, but that has changed with the arrival of three wonderful new places, all within the first three months of 2008: Dovetail, Bar Boulud, and now Eighty One.

So far, Eighty One is a hit, with prime-time tables regularly selling out on opentable.com. Longer-term, Eighty One could face tougher challenges. Bar Boulud, with its modest prices and its Lincoln Center perch, is almost surely there for the long haul. Dovetail, which is about four blocks south of Eighty One, racked up nine stars from the city’s major restaurant critics; it’s a bit cheaper and a lot more casual than Eighty One.

At Eighty One, entrée prices average in the mid-thirties. If you want black truffles shaved over any of them, it will set you back another $42. Appetizers are $15–19, but another section of the menu, peculiarly named “Tasting Collection,” offers another half-dozen appetizer-sized items from $15–39. These aren’t “neighborhood” prices. Luckily, Eighty One resides in the tony Excelsior Hotel, from whence it will no doubt draw many of its customers.

The décor screams “upscale chic,” though we felt that the deep red-velvet hues sucked up the available light, and made the dining room seem a bit depressing. (The drapes were drawn when we visited.)

Amuse-bouche

Chef/owner Ed Brown runs the kitchen, coming off a thirteen-year stint at Rockefeller Center’s Sea Grill. Chef de Cuisine Juan Cuevas has stints at Alain Ducasse, Bruno Jamais, and most recently Blue Hill on his resume. They’re doing a terrific job, serving what I assume is intended to be three-star food, but to which most critics will probably give two.

We loved the amuse-bouche, a square of Hiramasu crudo with a Hawaiian seaweed salad. Bread service came with nice soft butter at room temperature, but the accompanying bread rolls were pedestrian.

 
Sea Scallop & Foie Gras Ravioli (left); Tuna Tartare Tasting (right)

I started with the Sea Scallop and Foie Gras Ravioli ($16) in a straw wine sauce, a buttery ethereal pleasure.

My girlfriend had the Tuna Tartare Tasting ($21), with three half-dollar-sized cylinders of tuna, each in a different preparation. Our favorite the one on the left, with an Indonesian soy sauce, wasabi leaves and a dollop of cream. The other two weren’t bad either: blood orange (center) and olive oil with chervil (right).

 
Lamb Three Ways (left); Dry-Aged Black Angus Sirloin (right)

Lamb Three Ways ($39) was a beautifully composed plate, with sheep’s milk ricotta gnocchi, pine nuts, wild mushrooms and braised butternut lettuce hearts. There was a wonderfully smooth potato purée, served on the side. The “three ways” conceit is becoming a bit cliché, and perhaps it would be better to hit a home run with just one way. I loved the juicy and well marbled rack of lamb, but neither the roasted loin nor the confit shoulder rocked my world.

My girlfriend was happy with a Dry-Aged Black Angus Sirloin ($37), which also included the short rib.  We didn’t quite understand the point of an accompanying Caesar wedge with aged parmigiano. The preparation was just fine, but it would have made more sense as a salad or mid-course.

The wine list includes plenty of bottles at reasonable prices, though you can splurge if you want to. We enjoyed a 2003 Château Lafleur Pomerol ($60). I don’t believe I’ve ordered a Pomerol before, but this bottle made me want to explore more of them.

Service was generally smooth and professional, but the staff paid decidedly less attention to us near the end of our meal, after the restaurant had started to fill up. Our appetizers came out awfully fast (it seemed like just moments), so we had almost half-an-hour to kill later on, before we headed over to Lincoln Center for our show.

Of the three new Upper West Side restaurants that I mentioned at the top of this post, Dovetail and Eighty One are the most similar, with broadly comparable culinary ambitions, and located within a few blocks of each other near the Museum of Natural History. Indeed, based on one visit apiece, I can’t really separate the two in terms of food, though the service and ambiance at Eighty One are considerably better—with prices to match.

Most of the critics in town will have their swords drawn when they review an expensive place with luxury trappings.  That explains why Adam Platt awarded two stars to Eighty One, though he had given Dovetail three. I suspect that Frank Bruni will do the same. I give them identical 2½-star ratings. You can decide for yourself if Eighty One’s more comfortable atmosphere and smoother service is worth a few extra dollars.

Eighty One (45 W. 81st Street between Columbus Avenue & Central Park West, Upper West Side)

Food: **½
Service: **½
Ambiance: ***
Overall: **½

Bar Boulud

The restaurant scene around Lincoln Center—rather, the lack of it—is inexplicable. Its theaters and auditoriums, with about 10,000 seats between them, are in use almost every night of the year. The programs they put on appeal to the city’s most affluent and sophisticated people. Many of them need to eat dinner.

Yet, the vast majority of the restaurants on the surrounding blocks are dull, if not awful. If you broaden your search to Columbus Circle and the Upper West Side, there are certainly plenty of pre-show dining options. But I can’t conceive of a reason why the restaurants in the immediate vicinity should be so depressing. Until recently, Picholine and Shun Lee West were the only ones I could seriously recommend.

Enter Bar Boulud, the most recent creation of über-chef Daniel Boulud. As he did at his previous three New York restaurants, he seems to have grasped exactly what the neighborhood needed. Both the food and ambiance are casual, and equally suited to a quick pre-show meal or a snack afterwards.

But Bar Boulud has become a destination in itself, which in this neighborhood is almost unheard of. Reservations have been tough to get—it took me nearly three months. And unlike most restaurants catering to a pre-theater crowd, we saw no appreciable clearing-out after 8:00 p.m.

GougèresSylvain Gasdon’s chacuterie menu has garnered rave reviews, including two stars from Frank Bruni in the Times. But hardly anyone has raved about the standard appetizers and entrées. Bruni said “there’s little wow from the kitchen, which turns out treatments of salmon, sea bass and roasted chicken that, while not quite losers, are definitely snoozers.”

I loved the Pâté Grand-mère the last time I visited, so I persuaded my girlfriend to join me for an all-charcuterie dinner. It wasn’t a tough sell, as we both love to order pâtés and terrines wherever they’re served. And no restaurant offers anything like the variety on offer at Bar Boulud.

Dégustation de Charcuterie

The items on the charcuterie menu run anywhere from $5–18, or you can get a good sample with either of two dégustation plates ($22, $46). We ordered the larger of these, which appeared to have a bit of almost everything.

They only thing they don’t supply is the roadmap. There were sixteen pieces on the plate, and even the server wasn’t sure what they all were. His explanation went by awfully quickly, and we could barely hear him in the loud room. So we gave up trying to figure out exactly what we were eating, though I can tell you that the pâtés are on the right side of the photo, the more gelatinous terrines on the left.

Anyhow, it is all excellent. There were two different mustards and a basket of bread, but I was happy to enjoy the pâtés and terrines on their own.

 
Rillons Croustillants au Poivre (left); Cervelas Lyonnais en Brioche (right)

There are also a few hot dishes on the charcuterie menu. Rillons Croustillants au Poivre ($12), or pork belly with pepper, was predictably good, though I thought it should be a bit warmer.

Cervelas Lyonnais en Brioche ($14) is a Lyon sausage baked into a brioche (see photo, right). I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it’s a fun dish. The menu promised black truffle, but if it was in there, it was a trace amount that my taste buds couldn’t detect.

Besides charcuterie, the other theme at Bar Boulud is wine. Indeed, the long, narrow room is in the shape of a wine bottle. The first time I visited, I was surprised to find just four reds and four whites by the glass, a curious choice for a restaurant focused on wine. That has now been rectified: there are more like ten of each ($10–22).

Wines by the bottle are focused on Burgundy and the Rhone Valley, plus “cousin wines” made elsewhere from similar grapes. Each section of the list is divided into “Discoveries” (less expensive), “Classics” (more) and “Legends” (most). Among the “Discoveries” are numerous bottles below $50, and even one as low as $29. We were happy with a Rhone that the server recommended at just $40. It has been a very long time since I saw a decent bottle in a restaurant at that price.

We are fans of Bar Boulud, but there are some definite drawbacks. There is just a small waiting area at the front, where patrons scrum to announce themselves to the hostess, check and retrieve coats, wait to be seated, and order drinks. Several tables adjoin that area, including the one where we were seated. It has all the ambiance of a train station.

Tables are quite close together, and the staff seem to be over-taxed. I ordered a martini; it took fifteen minutes to arrive. I heard one patron say, “We’ve been waiting twenty minutes for our coats. Can we just go downstairs and look for them ourselves?” I wasn’t given a claim-check for mine, and I feared the worst, but miraculously the attendant quickly found it.

Boulud had his own china made for Bar Boulud, but they’re stingy about using it. We had to eat the charcuterie on our bread plates, and the server didn’t replace the knives we’d used to spread the butter. We couldn’t tell if this was a considered choice, or just one of the many service lapses the restaurant is quickly becoming famous for.

Despite the occasional miscue, Bar Boulud is probably the second-best Lincoln Center restaurant (after Picholine). For its charcuterie menu alone, it’s a worthy destination even if you don’t have a show to go see afterwards. My girlfriend remarked, “It’s a good thing this isn’t in our neighborhood, or I’d be eating here every day.”

Bar Boulud (1900 Broadway near 63rd Street, Upper West Side)

Food: **
Service: *
Ambiance: *
Overall: *½

First Look: Ago

Note: Click here for a later visit to Ago.

The long-anticipated restauarant Ago opened this week in Robert DeNiro’s Greenwich Hotel. I work across the street, so I thought I’d drop in for a drink before heading uptown for dinner. There were plenty of empty tables at 6:30 p.m., but the bar was packed. I didn’t care to stand around, so I just picked up a menu and left.

The name, pronounced “Ah-go,” comes from the chef Agostino Sciandri, who heads up the original restaurant in West Hollywood. Since it opened a decade ago, branches have sprouted in Las Vegas and South Beach. The New York outpost, which feels like it has been under construction forever, has garnered tons of coverage on Eater and Grub Street.

It’s hard to comprehend all that excitement for a chain of trattorias serving standard Italian food. I didn’t see any pathbreaking items on the menu, but by today’s standards it’s inexpensive, with only one entrée north of $30 (the ribeye steak). Salads and antipasti are $10–21, pizzas and panini $14–16, primi $12–21, secondi $25–34.

Ago (379 Greenwich Street at N. Moore Street, TriBeCa)

Ko Envy: He Scores!

This is my final post about the reservations adventure at Momofuku Ko, because I finally have one. It’s next Friday at exactly 6:05 p.m.

Frank Bruni had several funny posts this week explaining how it works. The puns and sexual imagery were out in full force:

Assuming the Ko computer system is working properly — and you really have to take it on faith, and your faith wobbles as you try and try without success to reserve — you are in competition for a reservation if, at 10 a.m. precisely, or better yet at 9:58 a.m., you begin submitting a reservation request and then submitting it again, essentially refreshing and re-refreshing your browser as you try to thread the electronic needle and have the Ko system register your electronic request at the precise moment it’s freeing up a new night’s worth of reservations, before all the other electronic requests, like sperms swimming furiously to be first to the egg, beat yours to the punch.

The screenshot above is what you see when you finally get through. You’ve got exactly one minute to click “Accept.” Then, there’s another screen where you enter any dietary restrictions. Finally, you get the screen on the right, and a confirming e-mail arrives moments later.

Poor Frank Bruni still hasn’t gotten through, even though he has a friend “B.” and “a small posse of other gourmands who’d love to have me buy them a meal at Ko” working on his behalf. I had to do it all by myself.

Just yesterday I learned one of the secrets: there are fewer people trying on weekends. Sure enough, that worked. (Today is Saturday.)

Another trick is to synchronize your watch to the Ko computer. Sometimes, you get a message that there are no reservations available, and you see the exact time (to the second) on your screen. If you try that at 9:59:26, then you should wait exactly 34 seconds before trying again, so that your next attempt will be at exactly 10:00:00.

When you get the screen with a green check mark (signifying an available reservation slot), you can’t linger over it. There are a thousand other sets of eyes looking at that check mark. You’d better know what times are acceptable to you, so that you can click instantly. He who hesitates is lost.

Is it worth all this trouble? Obviously I can’t answer that definitively until Friday.

But it’s not really much trouble at all. For a reservation at Per Se, I had to call at 10:00 a. m. exactly two months ahead. I had to hit re-dial about a dozen times, then wait on hold for about twenty minutes before getting through to a human being. The ritual at Babbo is even worse, and that restaurant is at least a decade old.

At Momofuku Ko, the process takes only two minutes. By 10:01, either you have a reservation or you don’t. It’s certainly not the restaurant’s fault that so many people want to eat there.

I realize that some people are frustrated by a new technology. But some people were probably frustrated when the telephone was invented, too. 

The Payoff: Mia Dona

Today, Frank Bruni awards two stars to Mia Dona. It was a predictable outcome, given Bruni’s love of hearty Italian comfort food at economy prices, sans tablecloths. And if any chef knows how to push all of Bruni’s buttons, it’s Michael Psilakis:

At the big-hearted new restaurant Mia Dona you’ll find pasta dishes so forcefully flavored and generously portioned they could play as well at Carmine’s as at Del Posto. You’ll find a deep-fried rabbit appetizer that owes less to the grand commanders of haute cuisine than to Colonel Sanders. You’ll find meatloaf.

And if you step back to survey all of what you’re eating and all of what it’s costing — which, in the context of the restaurant’s East Side neighborhood, isn’t very much — you’ll find something else: a portrait of a rising young chef with more practicality than vanity, even though the acclaim that’s rushed his way over the last few years has given him ample reason to preen…

We win $4 on our hypothetical bet, while Eater loses $1.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$81.50		$87.67
Gain/Loss	–1.00		+4.00
Total	$80.50		$91.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	35–15		35–15

Scarlatto

My son and I dropped in on Scarlatto the other night. It was an unplanned visit: we were in the area and were hungry.

The space used to be Pierre au Tunnel. I believe I dined there once. It closed in 2005 after a remarkable 55-year run. I remember it as a somewhat drab and faded space, as those old French bistros tend to be. The Scarlatto team spruced it up nicely, with comfortable chairs, exposed brick, and black-and-white photos of movie stars on the walls.

Alas, those movie-star photos are just one of the many theater-district clichés that Scarlatto fails to avoid. There’s the slightly grimy menu with multiple inserts that look like they’ve passed through too many hands, and the gruff service by staff conditioned to get patrons to their shows by 8:00 p.m. You get that same service, even if you tell them (as we did) that you have no deadline.

But the food is considerably better than it needs to be, in a neighborhood where most of the Italian restaurants follow a standard playbook. Chef Roberto Passon doesn’t take many chances here, though a few items (stewed rabbit, sautéed chicken livers) go beyond the Little Italy classics.

We went for old standards and were pleasantly surprised. Veal Osso Buco ($36) was as good a rendition of that dish as I have ever had. My son, who is not easily pleased, gave Veal Scaloppine ($16) the thumbs-up.

Aside from the Osso Buco, which was a daily special, prices are quite reasonable. Appetizers are $8–14, salads $7–10, soups $8, pastas $10–19, entrees $15–21, side dishes $5–7. The pre-theater three-course prix fixe is $29. I didn’t order wine, but I noticed that the wine list, too, had plenty of inexpensive options.

The critics all ignored Scarlatto, as they do most theater district restaurants. Had the identical restaurant opened in the Meatpacking District, it would have warranted at least a mention. For pre-show Italian that is a cut above most of the neighborhood, Scarlatto is worth a look. If you’re not going to the theater, I’d recommend waiting until 8:00 p.m., after the crowds have departed.

My son, who just turned 13, is already getting the hang of how the stars work. He said, “My guess is one star, because even though it’s good, there are lots of other places doing it.” True enough—though not in the theater district.

Scarlatto (250 W. 47th Street between Broadway & Eighth Avenue, Theater District)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: *
Overall: *

Rolling the Dice: Mia Dona

Every week, we take our turn with Lady Luck on the BruniBetting odds as posted by Eater. Just for kicks, we track Eater’s bet too, and see who is better at guessing what the unpredictable Bruni will do. We track our sins with an imaginary $1 bet every week.

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Mia Dona, the latest production of chef Michael Psilakis and restauranteur Donatella Arpaia. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 8-1
One Star: 3-1 √√
Two Stars: 4-1
Three Stars: 8-1
Four Stars: 15,000-1

The Skinny: Frank Bruni hearts Michael Psilakis. He has awarded two stars to every one of Psilakis’s New York restaurants to date (Onera, Dona, Anthos). He also adores Kefi—he devoted two blog posts to the mere fact that it was moving—although he delegated its review to $25-and-under columnist Peeter Meehan.

Eater thinks that two stars for Mia Dona is a “hard sell,” given that Mia Dona’s casual vibe and super-low prices put it practically in Meehan’s territory. But that has never stopped Bruni before. He holds the New York Times record for two-star ratings given to $25-and-under restaurants.

Perhaps the most relevant precedent is Ureña, which won two stars from Bruni. It re-opened (after a slight make-over) as Pamplona, with food not quite as good, but prices much gentler on the pocket book. Bruni, once again, awarded two stars.

That’s precisely the situation we have here: Dona was forced to close when Psilakis and Arpaia lost their lease. They moved six blocks away, changed the name, and installed a simpler menu at much humbler prices.

All the pieces are in place for a two-star review. The only question is whether Bruni likes it as much as we did.

The Bet: Given Bruni’s obvious affection for Psilakis’s cooking, the Ureña/Pamplona precedent, and our own high opinion of the place, we are betting that Frank Bruni will award two stars to Mia Dona.