The Final Game at Giants Stadium

Happy Holidays 2009

Review Recap: La Grenouille

If one needed confirmation that Amateur Hour has ended at the Times dining section, it has arrived. With today’s three-star review of La Grenouille, Sam Sifton showed that he understands the restaurant’s place in history, the cuisine it has mastered, and why that is important. He was not, in the least way, demeaning or condescending, as his predecessor surely would have been:

The decline of great French cooking in New York has been a subject of discussion among the food-obsessed for decades, since at least the closing of Le Pavillon in 1971. In the last decade the talk has turned funereal, with the demise of Lutèce, La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, Lespinasse.

Brasserie cooking survives in New York, even flourishes under old mirrors and subway tile. We will always have steak frites.

But the quiet opulence of the traditional haute cuisine that was first brought to New York by Henri Soulé for the World’s Fair in 1939 and which flourished at his Pavillon and other restaurants in the years that followed? The whole marvelous Tom Wolfe scene of it: blanquette de veau and Beaumes-de-Venise, and ladies in finery beside gentlemen in soft cashmere jackets and rolled silk ties? C’est fini!

A series of recent meals at La Grenouille suggests that isn’t so. Not so long as Charles Masson, who has run it since 1975, greets his customers at the door, quiet and French and welcoming. Not so long as people can take a seat on a scarlet banquette at his restaurant, sit beneath a spray of flowers and eat sumptuous food out of Escoffier.

We have no idea if La Grenouille deserves to be a three-star restaurant. What we can say is that this is how a review of such a place ought to be written.

We and Eater both win $3 on our hypothetical one dollar bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$7.00		$6.00
Gain/Loss	+$3.00		+$3.00
Total	$10.00		$9.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	6–3 (66.7%)		5–4 (55.6%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 75–31 (71%).

Review Preview: La Grenouille

Tomorrow, Sam Sifton reviews La Grenouille, the last survivor of the French grandes dames that once defined fine dining in New York City. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows: One Star: 4,000–1; Sift Happens: 4–1; Three Stars: 3–1; Four Stars: 40–1.

As the website notes, La Grenouille opened on a snowy evening, December 19, 1962. That’s 47 years and 4 days ago, as of tomorrow. Sam Sifton wasn’t even born yet. I was two years old.

As you might imagine, a restaurant this old has had plenty of New York Times reviews, ranging from four stars (Mimi Sheraton) to one (Bryan Miller, but later elevated back to three). Its most recent review was from Ruth Reichl, who awarded three stars in 1997. Reichl was much looser with the stars than most recent critics have been, and even she found the place bedeviled with inconsistency:

La Grenouille is the most frustrating restaurant in New York.

This is not because the food is bad or the service unpleasant. Just the opposite, in fact: in its 35th year, the restaurant is displaying such flashes of brilliance that each failure is a deep disappointment. It could so easily be a four-star establishment.

It is inconsistent still, as we found it in 2007. We thought the food alone was worth just two stars, but awarded 2½ stars in total for the atmosphere, which remains beyond compare. For a restaurant that hasn’t changed its menu in decades, all it can offer is to prepare the classics exquisitely, which it has done on occasion, but not reliably.

Frank Bruni admitted (in his Eater “exit interview”) that he had intended re-review the place, but backed off:

I wanted to rereview La Grenouille. And I went and I had a couple of really, really good meals. I put it on the schedule. I thought I would be lovingly refreshing three stars with the explanation that these three stars have a lot to do with the joy of still encountering this idiom of dining. And then, at my last few meals, they just went off a cliff. And it was clear to me—and the reason I’m comfortable talking about this—and if you use this, please include this explanation—is I’m talking about something that happened four years ago. I’m not saying that this is what La Grenouille is like now. It could be totally different now. But my last couple of meals were so disappointing that there was no way I could put my name on anything more than two stars. And you know what? At this point in time, I don’t want to be the one who kills the last of its kind—you know? Then you ask yourself, “Am I cheating readers?” But you know what? Readers weren’t curious about La Grenouille. I can’t remember what we replaced [that review] with, but I remember thinking, “This is something I want to revisit another one or two times,” because I was so determined not to be the one who killed La Grenouille.

That Sifton is now re-reviewing a restaurant that, let’s face it, no one in the food media pays much attention to any more, suggests one of two things: 1) He doesn’t mind being “the one who killed La Grenouille”; or, 2) He loves it, and wants to give a shout-out to the last surviving full-on traditional classic French restaurant.

As we noted in our review, the demise of this kind of dining has long been forecast. Even in 1991, Bryan Miller noted that, “If you listen to some restaurant-industry pundits, La Grenouille is just the type of expensive, opulent institution that is slated for extinction as ineluctably as the dinosaurs.” When a restaurant has been around for five decades, you don’t complain that it’s too expensive for the recession, or that young people don’t dine that way any more. It has already survived multiple recessions and multiple generations of young diners who eventually grew up.

So in our mind, it simply comes down to whether La Grenouille is doing justice by the French classics that define its existence. Pace Eater.com, it has nothing to do with whether “the pricepoint just doesn’t make sense to [Sifton] in this climate.” We think—mind, we say we think—Sifton has a sense of the history he is walking into here. He has the chance to demonstrate that he is not as culinarily clueless as his predecessor was.

With all of that in mind, we acknowledge that this review sits on a knife’s edge. We think that Sifton will award three stars to La Grenouille.

Bar Henry Bistro

Note: Bar Henry Bistro closed in 2012. It became an Austin, Texes-themed place called ZirZamin.

*

Every trend has to begin with one brave establishment trying something for the first time, and having it catch on.

Have you ever visited a place and said, I hope everyone starts doing this? That’s what we said about the wine list at Bar Henry Bistro, which opened in November on one of the few remaining desolate patches of Houston Street.

About that wine list: it’s in two sections: Market and Reserve. On the Market section are 110 bottles, skewing mostly European. For any of these, you can buy half the bottle at exactly half the price. There is a respectable selection of half-bottles, and you can still buy half of those (basically one glass) at exactly half the bottle price.

The half you don’t drink is taken out to the bar, and if no one wants the half-bottle, it’s sold by the glass. Management is betting that there won’t be much waste, and so far it seems to be working. I ordered a glass of 1991 Domaine aux Moines Savennières. Few restaurants would carry that wine by the glass, and at $78 I probably wouldn’t have ordered the full bottle. But it was available to try, because someone had ordered half of it the night before.

There is also a more expensive reserve list (bottle prices mostly in three figures), and these aren’t available by the half-bottle, but as that Domaine aux Moines demonstrates, those who want to explore the market list will find plenty to tempt them. I followed it up with a terrific $7 glass of sherry. (Full disclosure: a second glass of the Domaine and another half-bottle at dinner were comped.)

During the winter, the bar is also serving an obscure cocktail called the Tom and Jerry ($14), recently profiled in the Times, made with eggs, brandy, whisky, warm milk, cinammon, and nutmeg. It’s great for a cold night. The eggs need to be prepped in advance, and even then it’s time-consuming, so they’ll only make a fixed number of them per evening—generally 10 on a weekday, 15 on the weekends. At the beginning of the shift, the numbers from 1 to 10 (or whatever total) are written on the mirror and crossed out as they’re ordered. Once the last one is made, that’s it for the night.

The menu is a bit simplistic, with just five entrées ($16–29), and one of those is a burger. There are about a dozen appetizers and bar snacks—nothing over $14. Indeed, the menu seems to be designed for bar grazers. We enjoyed everything we tried; nevertheless, we had a sense that the food wasn’t as ambitious as the wine list.

At the bar, I snacked on Roasted Almonds ($3) and Marinated Olives($3). A Ceviche special ($9) and Short Rib Tacos ($12; below left) were unmemorable.

We both had the Manhattan Steak ($29; above right), an aged New York strip from Pat LaFreida, the gold standard in beef these days. It was as good as I’ve had outside of a steakhouse, with a recognizable dry-aged tang and a deep exterior char. French fries ($6) were perfect.

We have no idea if the wine program here will catch on, but it strikes us as a fairly low risk for the owners. Most restaurants these days charge out wine bottles at triple the retail price, and of course they don’t pay retail, so they aren’t losing money even if they’re occasionally left with a half-bottle that doesn’t sell. But I don’t get the sense that that’s happening very often, and meanwhile they’re pulling in customers who probably wouldn’t go out of their way for the bistro menu alone.

The dining room is done up in white tablecloths and red velvet chairs supposedly rescued from the Plaza Hotel. Reservations aren’t taken, but we had no trouble getting seated at 7:00 p.m. on a Friday evening. The bar fills up quickly, though. Don’t forget to bring a sweater: the restaurant is in the cellar of an old townhouse, and it gets cold down there.

Bar Henry Bistro (90 W. Houston St. between Thomson St. & LaGuardia Pl., Greenwich Village)

Food: *
Wine: **
Service: *½
Overall: *½

Review Recap: Ed's Chowder House & Tanuki Tavern

Today, Sam Sifton filed the expected two-fer on Ed’s Chowder House and Tanuki Tavern. We were correct that Sifton would uncork his first zero-star review; but wrong about which one would be the victim.

He clearly “gets” what the owner, Jeffrey Chodorow, is about:

For more than two decades he has run counter to restaurateurs interested in rubbed-wood authenticity and locavore cuisine. He has stood, always, for brash showmanship, the belief that in restaurants, the whole and complete point of the business is volume. In the face of recessions and in boom times alike he has accumulated more than 25 restaurants and bars in close to a dozen cities, all of them tied to the idea of dazzling, low-cut, cocktail-fueled good times…

From his first foray, the flashy China Grill, to his latest, Tanuki Tavern in the Hotel Gansevoort and Ed’s Chowder House in the Empire Hotel, he has promised that opportunity: fun, against the customer’s outlay of cash.

To our surprise, he thinks that Tanuki is the one that comes the closest to meeting those modest objectives:

The concept at Tanuki Tavern is that it’s an izakaya, or Japanese-style tapas bar. That is not entirely accurate. Really Tanuki is Ono, the immense Japanese-style restaurant Mr. Chodorow opened five years ago, now in a smaller space with almost the same number of seats. He sublets the rest of the space to the nightclub Provocateur. (Mr. Chodorow isn’t in this racket to spill soup.)

The result is young and exciting, with food from the same larder as Ono’s: respectable, perfectly good quasi-Asian fare. Also like Ono, it is pretty in design and execution: Japanese cabinetry and piped-in ’80s rock, LED candles, paper lanterns and two floors of tables full of men and women in clothing inappropriate to the weather. Tanuki is a fine place to drink sake, eat chicken wings and visit a simulacrum of South Beach, Sunset Boulevard, the timeless thump-thump-thump of Saturday night on the Vegas strip. It provides direct transport, in other words, to Chodorowland.

At Ed’s Chowder House, Sifton wonders if the restaurant’s namesake, Chef Ed Brown, has been watching the kitchen:

There was, one night, something of his style and worth in a terrific dish of smoked Chatham cod cakes with a roasted tomato-chili jam… But none of his delicacy was apparent in other meals — in greasy, overdone fried calamari with saffron aioli, for instance, or in celery-heavy, muddy-hued steamed clams with plonk broth…

Did Mr. Brown personally have something to do with the ammonia taste of a particularly elderly wing of skate served with horseradishy mashed potatoes and left untouched on the plate (to the shrug of a waiter)? It seems somehow unlikely.

We lose $2 on our hypothetical one-dollar bets. Eater wins $2 on Tanuki Tavern, but loses $1 on Ed’s Chowder House, for a net of $1.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$6.00		$8.00
Gain/Loss	+$1.00		–$2.00
Total	$7.00		$6.00
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	5–3 (62.5%)		4–4 (50.0%)

Life-to-date, New York Journal is 74–31 (70%).

Maialino

Among New York restauranteurs, it’s hard to name a more bankable success than Danny Meyer. From Union Square Cafe, to Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, Eleven Madison Park, and The Modern, his restaurants have never failed.

Meyer’s knack for this business can’t be attributed to any one thing. He has a keen sense of “the moment,” he doesn’t do the same thing twice, he puts smart people in charge, and he focuses relentlessly on the customer. At a Meyer restaurant, you’ll never see a bartender who can’t transfer the tab to your table, or a host that refuses to seat incomplete parties. So it was at Meyer’s latest creation, Maialino, where I arrived thirty minutes too early, but they offered to seat me anyway, in a dining room booked solid for the evening.

That was so Danny Meyer.

Maialino, Meyer’s first Italian restaurant, replaces the failed Wakiya in the Gramercy Park Hotel. It’s a perfect location, with panoramic windows facing the park. It’s also perfect for Meyer, whose restaurant empire is all (except for The Modern) in walking distance of Madison Square, allowing him to keep close tabs on his growing brood.

The space is decked out like a modern trattoria, with a design by David Rockwell that seems instantly authentic. We would ditch the checked under-cloths at the tables, which look a bit too Little Italy.

Even Danny Meyer isn’t recession-proof. The antipasti are $9–14, the primi $13–17, the secondi mostly in the twenties. The menu also accommodates grazers, with a wide selection of salumi and formaggi, available individually or on platters serving anywhere from two to six. You’ll spend less here than in most of Meyer’s other restaurants, but we suspect that prices will be $10–20 more per person in a year or two.

The word Maialino refers to suckling pig, which recurs in several dishes. The pièce de resistance is a half-pig for $68. We were tempted to try it, but it feeds two to three people, and would have been wasted on us.

 

Zampina di Maialino, or Suckling Pig’s Foot ($14; above left), offered an ample bounty of smoky pink pork meat. It was served on a bed of heirloom beans that weren’t very good. Malfatti al Maialino, or suckling pig ragu with arugula and hand-torn pasta ($17; above right), was under-seasoned; the flavors barely registered.

 

Coda alla Vaccinara, or oxtails with carrots and celery ($23; above left), were tender from braising, but they were served in a dull sauce. Bistecca, or aged sirloin ($29; above right), was an enjoyable hunk of meat for a non-steakhouse, but the beans that accompanied the pig’s foot made an unwelcome re-appearance.

Service was excellent, as you expect in a Danny Meyer restaurant. Meyer himself was in the house, and stopped by most tables to say thanks, including ours. He said thank you again as we were leaving. Such is his reputation that we had much higher hopes for the food. But at a Danny Meyer restaurant, you can safely assume it will get better.

Maialino (2 Lexington Avenue at 21st Street, Gramercy Park)

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

Review Preview: Ed's Chowder House & Tanuki Tavern

Tomorrow, Sam Sifton files his first double-review, hitting Jeffrey Chodorow’s latest failures restaurants: Ed’s Chowder House and Tanuki Tavern. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows:

Ed’s Chowder House: Goose Egg: 10 - 1; One Star: 3 - 1; SIFT HAPPENS: 5-1; Three Stars: 20 - 1

Tanuki Tavern: Goose Egg: 3 - 1; One Star: 2-1; SIFT HAPPENS: 7 - 1; Three Stars: 25 - 1

Despite my incessant joking at Chodorow’s expense—let’s face it, who doesn’t joke about this guy—I actually liked Ed’s Chowder House when I dropped by in September. I was there for a drink last night, and we’re going again in January. I sampled only a little of the menu on that earlier visit, but it strikes us as a quintessential one-bagger.

Chodorow is the past master of building new restaurants on the smouldering husk of previous failures, and Tanuki Tavern is one of these. We’ve avoided the place like the plague. We have no intel at all, but if Sifton is ready to give his first goose egg, this would be a perfect time for it.

We predict that Sifton will award one star to Ed’s Chowder House and zilch to Tanuki Tavern.

Rhong-Tiam

Note: Rhong-Tiam moved to 87 Second Avenue, in the former Kurve location, after the space reviewed here was shut down by the Department of Health.

*

The annual Michelin ratings are always good for a surprise or two. For the most part, I’ve been a supporter, even if I disagreed with some of the choices. What’s the point of ratings that just echo what everyone else has already said? The status quo can survive some shaking-up. Most of the Michelin ratings are defensible; many are more accurate than those the Times critics issue, and then fail to keep up-to-date.

But Rhong-Tiam, awarded a star for the first time in the 2010 Michelin ratings, isn’t just a surprising choice. It is utterly baffling. It’s the first Michelin-starred restaurant I’ve visited, where I could not imagine where the rating came from.

Let us be clear: Rhong-Tiam, which opened in March 2008, is a respectable addition to the Greenwich Village dining scene. Drop by if you’re in the neighborhood; you’ll probably like the place, as we did. But it is not destination cuisine, and it isn’t the best Thai food in New York. The tire men haven’t honored any other Thai restaurants, and they should not have honored Rhong-Tiam.

With that out of the way, understand that the food at Rhong-Tiam is good, and we liked most of what we we ordered.

 

Duck buns ($7; above left), made with duck confit and hoi-sin sauce, had a nice, bright flavor. Thai Sausages ($6; above right) would have been fine, if they hadn’t been dried out from over-cooking.

 

Moo-Na-Rok, or Pork on Fire ($13; above left), is the dish the Times loved. The intense heat chili heat catches up with you slowly. By the time you’re finished, your gums are burning, though I am not sure you can detect the pork by that point. Duck Chu Chee ($14; above right) with house-made curry gravy was a more balanced dish: plenty of heat there too, but you could actually taste the duck.

The drinks menu is non-alcoholic, and at first I assumed there was no liquor license. When I asked, the server mentioned two beers and four wines, along the lines of, “Cabernet, Malbec, umm,…hmm, Merlot, and I think Pinot Noir.” That didn’t give us much confidence, so we had a couple of Thai beers at $6 each.

Rhong-Tiam’s reservation system is a bit strange. You fill out a form on their website and receive an email a few minutes later. But the email is not a confirmation, just a promise that they’ll call you later, which they never did. So I called them, though it wouldn’t have mattered. On a Saturday evening, the restaurant was only about half full. Most of the patrons seemed to be the right age to be NYU students. The décor isn’t much more memorable than a dorm room, but the space is quiet and comfortable.

Rhong-Tiam offers an excellent value: our meal was just $64 before tax and tip. You are much better off ignoring its undeserved Michelin rating and appreciating Rhong-Tiam for what it is.

Rhong-Tiam (541 LaGuardia Place between Bleecker & W. 3rd Streets, Greenwich Village)

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

Harbour Sinks

As first noted Wednesday in the Feed, and confirmed today on Eater, West Soho’s Harbour has closed.

We enjoyed our meal there in June, but noted at the time that this restaurant could be in for stormy sailing. Fine dining has consistently struggled in this part of town, which is ill-served by mass transit, lacks a large residential community, and has no major attractions to lure pedestrians.

As I’ve noted in review after review, there is no reason why destination restaurants couldn’t succeed here, but there would need to be a game-changer—the kind of restaurant that makes people want to go out of their way. Harbour did not turn out to be that restaurant.

We were on Harbour’s mailing list, and in recent months received one “special offer” after another. Many of these started to seem like desperation, and we figured the end was near.

We feel for the owners, who dropped major coin on the build-out: reportedly $4 million. The curse of Hudson Square has struck again.