The Four Seasons

Note: Click here for a more recent review of the Four Seasons.

*

The Four Seasons is an iconic restaurant. Located in the Seagram Building at 52nd & Park, it opened in 1959 to immediate acclaim. Architect Philip Johnson designed the interior, which cost $4.5 million to build. Even today, that would be a large sum to invest in a restaurant. The space is landmarked—the only Manhattan restaurant to be so designated. (There are other restaurants in landmarked buildings, but no other restaurants that are landmarks themselves.)

Reviewing for The New York Times on October 2, 1959, Craig Claiborne wrote:

There has never been a restaurant better keyed to the tempo of Manhattan than the Four Seasons, which opened recently at 99 East Fifty-second Street.

Both in décor and in menu, it is spectacular, modern and audaceous. It is expensive and opulent and it is perhaps the most exciting restaurant to open in new York within the last two decades. On the whole, the cuisine is exquisite in the sense that la grande cuisine française is exquisite.

The Pool RoomThese days, the Four Seasons is mostly known as a power lunch destination. In the famous grill room, one may rub noses with Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mike Bloomberg, or Sandy Weill. The serene pool room is one of the city’s most romantic dining spots. Celebrities have flocked there from the beginning. John F. Kennedy had his 45th birthday party at the Four Seasons, of which the restaurant doesn’t fail to remind you: a copy of the menu for that occasion is bound into the wine list.

For many years, the kitchen at the Four Seasons turned out food that justified all that attention. eGullet historian Leonard Kim found numerous Times reviews from 1971 onward—generally three stars, although in 1979, its twentieth anniversary year, Mimi Sheraton demoted it to two. Her successor, Bryan Miller, restored it to three stars in 1985. He re-affirmed that rating in 1990, as did Ruth Reichl in 1995.

The BarIn recent times, no one has suggested that the Four Seasons is a hotbed of culinary invention. Earlier this year, Frank Bruni demoted the Four Seasons to two stars, where it is likely to remain for a very long time. Christian Albin has been in charge of the kitchen for the last seventeen years, and though the menu does change with the seasons, Albin is not a risk-taker. He dutifully turns out the continental classics that the restaurant’s conservative clientele demands. Bruni found, and I concur, that the cooking can be terrific, but it can be boring and sloppy too.

Though I expected no pyrotechnic fireworks on the plate, I nevertheless craved a visit to the legendary Four Seasons, and my friend Kelly’s 37th birthday provided the occasion. Frank Bruni warned that this is “a restaurant that runs on two tracks — one for the anonymous, another for the anointed.” As Kelly and I are clearly in the former category, I wondered how we’d be treated.

I needn’t have worried on that score. I requested a Pool Room table, and we were indeed seated there, close to the famous pool. The serving staff at the Four Seasons seem mildly bored with their lot in life, but they provided classic, efficient service. When I arrived a bit wet (it was raining, and I’d forgotten my umbrella), the host handed me a napkin to dry off with. I started the evening with a drink at the bar, and the tab was transferred to my dinner bill, as it should be at any fine restaurant. At no point were we made to feel anything less than special.

The prices are eye-popping, with most appetizers $18–42 (not counting caviar at $140), and most entrées $37–56 (with lobster $75 and Kobe beef $125). Of sixteen entrées, eight are over $50, and only three are under $40. As far as I know, it is the most expensive à la carte menu in town. While we enjoyed almost everything we had, it was one of those celebratory occasions when price is really beside the point. Viewed in the cold light of day, very little that the kitchen produces can justify these prices.

To start, I had the Beef Tartare with Osetra Caviar ($38; above right), an assembly-line dish that had none of the tangy, spicy seasoning I was longing for. Kelly started with an assortment of oysters and clams ($25; below), with which she seemed satisfied.

I was keen to have the duck, which was one of the few dishes Frank Bruni really loved. Fortunately, Kelly was of the same mind, since it’s served only for two ($55 per person). As Bruni put it, the duck, carved tableside, “emerges from a Peking-style sequence of many days and steps, is as astonishing as ever, a knockout of crunchy skin and succulent meat.” Have I ever had duck better than this? Not that I recall.

Kelly loves soufflés ($15), so we ordered them for dessert: strawberry for her, Grand Marnier for me. We both thought the strawberry was a little better, though neither one matched the absurdly decadent chocolate soufflé we had at Town.

I alerted the management in advance that this was Kelly’s birthday, and they brought one of the odder birthday cakes I’ve seen: a large ball of cotton candy with a candle on top. It was probably the most creative idea they had, but after a few bites the cotton candy quickly became cloying. There was an attractive selection of petits-fours, and we finished nearly all of them.

For a restaurant of this calibre, I was surprised to find that the wine list was rather unimpressive. Indeed, more pages of the little book are devoted to photos from the restaurant’s past than to wines. However, I was happy to find a wonderful 1999 Gewurtztraminer from Alsace for $76. At the restaurant’s overall price level, I considered it a bargain. It arrived at our table before we were done with our champagne, and the server was astute enough not to pour it right away—a nice touch that many restaurants wouldn’t get right.

While I wouldn’t visit the Four Seasons for the food alone, the whole package is certainly impressive. For the right special occasion, I’d be happy to dine there again.

The Four Seasons (99 East 52nd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues, East Midtown)

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

The Payoff: Anthos

As expected, Frank Bruni awarded the deuce to Anthos. It was as enthusiastic as Frank gets at the two-star level, and he implied that the restaurant fell only a whisker short of three:

[Anthos is] the restaurant you might get if you triangulated between Onera and Dona. It has the former’s resoundingly Greek soul. It has the latter’s fussy tics and more sophisticated wine list, with sommeliers who can guide you through the impressive advances of Greek winemaking.

It’s better than its predecessors, although it doesn’t come together quite smoothly or sharply enough to loft Mr. Psilakis and Ms. Arpaia to the level they clearly aspire to and will almost certainly reach.

The review marks the return of Fussy Frank. As we’ve often remarked, Frank does not like fine dining—a peculiar deficiency in a critic assigned to cover high-end restaurants. And “fussy” is his favorite word when he feels he’s been pampered too much.

The precise reasons for the two-star rating border on incoherent. He says, “Much of the cooking is inspired, and much of it is excellent.” What’s the Venn Diagram for that statement? Is some of the food inspired, but not excellent? Excellent, but not inspired? Later on, the servers’ exuberance “communicates a self-consciousness that only a few of the dishes are transcendent enough to justify,” and “not everything that arrives is worth the wait.”

Later still, “the ratio of hits to misses is better at Anthos than at Dona” (a restaurant he loved), but he wishes “the kitchen’s efforts” were “just a little more selective and straightforward.” Good luck making any sense of that smorgasbord of “almost…but not quite” sentences. The one thing he makes clear is that he likes this restaurant better than any Arpaia/Psilakis production to date, but in the end, lands at the same two-star rating given to the rest of them.

Eater and I both placed identical $1 winning bets on Anthos at 2–1 odds, so each of us wins a hypothetical $2.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$28.00		$30.67
Gain/Loss	+$2.00		+$2.00
Total	$30.00		$32.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	12–2		11–3

Rolling the Dice: Anthos

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 the haute Greek restaurant Anthos, the latest collaboration of chef Michael Psilakis with the comely restauranteur Donatella Arpaia. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 7-1
One Star: 4-1
Two Stars: 2-1 √√
Three Stars: 7-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1

The Skinny: All indications point to two stars. Frank Bruni has already awarded that rating to two other Psilakis restaurants, Onera and Dona, and he seems hopelessly besotted with Arpaia.

At one point, we thought Anthos could be headed for a trifecta, which was no doubt Psilakis’s intention when he closed Onera, and announced he was going for something more upscale. But no critic so far has been wowed by Anthos, and Bruni isn’t the type who says a restaurant is better than everyone else says it is.

We agree with the Eater oddsmakers that one star is more likely than three, but that would be a very significant slapdown. Bruni’s affinity for Everything Arpaia will save the day.

The Bet: We agree with Eater that Frank Bruni will award two stars to Anthos.

Brasserie Ruhlmann

Brasserie Ruhlmann got on my “ought-to-try” list after I heard that Laurent Tourondel had taken over the kitchen. Perhaps I ought to have been suspicious.

Laurent Tourondel has spread himself thinner than goose liver pâté. He has four other Manhattan restaurants in his BLT franchise (BLT Steak, BLT Prime, BLT Fish, and BLT Burger), a fifth opening this summer (BLT Market), and BLT Steak outposts in two other cities. He’s built up that empire in just a shade over three years, so he can’t be spending much time in any of his kitchens.

Brasserie Ruhlmann was a quick rescue job. The restaurant opened in January 2006 with another executive chef, and Tourondel was named to the post just three months later. I assume Tourondel got a tidy consultant’s fee to design a standard-issue French brasserie menu that he could hand over to a chef de cuisine, and never think about again. His name is on the menu and his cookbook prominently displayed, but there’s none of the inspiration that make the BLT restaurants so impressive. (Update: Tourondel has yet another offspring: BLT Steak in the Westchester Ritz-Carlton.)

Brasserie Ruhlmann is named for the art deco furniture designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Owner Jean Denoyer is a Ruhlmann collector himself, and he spent $5 million building out the spectacular space on Rockefeller Plaza, where the art deco theme is always at home. Denoyer knows a little something about restaurants too, as he also owns the Michelin-starred La Goulue on the Upper East Side (among other places).

Alas, the kitchen just goes through the motions. You’ll have a satisfactory meal at Brasserie Ruhlmann, but nothing you can’t have at many other French brasseries around town, or indeed at La Goulue, where the food is better, and the atmosphere feels far less like a tourist trap.

We arrived at around 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, with the restaurant nearly deserted. It seemed like a nice evening, so we decided to sit outdoors. Drinks—a sidecar for me, a whiskey sour for my girlfriend—took twenty minutes to arrive. The manager explained that they’d never heard of a sidecar, and had to look it up. After all that time, they served my girlfriend whiskey straight-up, rather than a whiskey sour. We sent it back.

By now, it was 8:25. Though we had only just started sipping our cocktails, naturally they were keen to take our wine and food order instantly, but we were having none of that. When we finally did order, the wine came promptly, but the waiter struggled to uncork it. After a minor skirmish, he managed to push the cork into the bottle. With a sheepish look, he disappeared.

Meanwhile, the rains had come, so we headed inside. A short while later (it was now 9:00), he returned to our new table with the wine in a decanter—“very well filtered,” he assured us.

Complain all you want about Laurent Tourondel, but the bread service is always superb at his restaurants. Gougères (above, right) were perhaps the most original item we had at Brasserie Ruhlmann.

Country Pâté (left); Beef Shortribs Bourguignonne (right)

Country Pâté ($12) was competently prepared, although fairly ordinary. Beef Shortribs Bourguignonne ($28) were served in a generous portion, though the sauce was a bit heavy. (The photo doesn’t do it justice—beef seldom photographs well.)

After the comic mishaps with the drinks, the rest of the evening’s service was just fine. On principle, we thought that the drinks should have been comped—but they weren’t. The restaurant was nearly empty while we were there. It is probably busier and livelier at lunch, as at dinner time there’s usually no reason to be in the area. So far, it doesn’t look like Brasserie Ruhlmann will change that.

Brasserie Ruhlmann (45 Rockefeller Plaza, 50th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, Rockefeller Center, West Midtown)

Food: Satisfactory
Service: Mediocre
Ambiance: Good
Overall: Satisfactory

Wild Salmon

Note: Wild Salmon closed at the end of 2007, yet another failure for Jeffrey Chodorow. The space became Richard Sandoval’s Zengo.

*

Wild Salmon is the latest offering from restauranteur Jeffrey Chodorow. His China Grill Management empire now spans twenty-five restaurants in ten cities—several of them mini-chains, such as Asia de Cuba and China Grill, both in five cities. The first opened in 1987, so it’s clear he turns them out in a hurry.

He’s also a prolific failure. Just three months ago, Kobe Club received zero stars from Frank Bruni of the Times. It was a replacement for another failure, Mix in New York. Wild Salmon replaces the failed English is Italian, which replaced the failed Tuscan, which replaced the failed Tuscan Steak. Across town, there was the failed Rocco’s (made famous in the TV series The Restaurant) and its successor, the failed Brasserio Caviar and Banana. All gone.

The Upstairs Bar

Wild Salmon, described as “A Pacific N. W. Brasserie,” looks to have a brighter future. A solid and moderately priced seafood restaurant, it should have no trouble drawing on an East Midtown corporate audience looking to eat well, if unadventurously.

Chef Charles Ramsayer, who moved to New York from Seattle, flies in everything he serves from the Pacific Northwest. The menu offers the usual raw bar items, including several varieties of salmon, prepared every conceivable way. Or you can have anything from Penn Cove Mussels ($7) to a huge platter costing $160. Other starters are $11–26.

 
Bread service (left); Smoked scallops cocktail (right)

I started with the Smoked Scallops ($13), served with sour cream & chives and cocktail sauce—a happy riff on the more commonplace shrimp cocktail (also available). The bread was mightily addictive.

The entrée menu offers a range of composed dishes ($21–38), along with an à la carte section where you choose a protein, a cooking method, and a sauce. Just considering the à la carte seafood options (there’s beef too), there are seven fish, five cooking methods, and eight sauces, making for a dizzying array of 280 combinations, before side dishes are considered.

Cedar Planked King Salmon with Meyer Lemon Orange Hollandaise Sauce

The server recommended the Cedar Planked King Salmon with the Meyer Lemon Orange Hollandaise sauce. At $37, it was $10 more than the next most expensive à la carte fish. It certainly was a solid choice, but there are 279 more options, and it could take a decade to try them all. If Wild Salmon lasts that long.

Among the composed entrées, more than one server recommended the Black Cod ($28), but I doubted that Nobu’s version of it could be improved upon, so I took a pass.

Cheesecake

I had cheesecake for dessert ($9), which wasn’t particularly memorable.

The restaurant is still in its first few weeks of business. It was not full at 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday evening. Nevertheless, as one would expect at a Chodorow restaurant, I was firmly commanded to retire to the bar until my girlfriend arrived. At least it is a comfortable bar that one doesn’t mind retiring to.

Everyone working at Wild Salmon is excited to be there, or they’re putting on a damned good act. Bloomberg reviewer Alan Richman complained that they were too talkative, and I suspect other visitors will too, but we were merely amused. Lines like “We have a plethora of side dishes” or “We have tons of appetizers” aren’t all that helpful.

The wine list is reasonably priced in relation to the rest of the menu. A sommelier came over unbidden and steered us to a terrific pinot noir ($52), and probably not one I would have thought to choose.

The space is attractive and comfortable. Built on two levels, the dining room is downstairs, the bar upstairs. Hundreds of little sculpted salmons hang above the dining room (they reminded Richman of sperm), reminiscent of Kobe Club’s dangling samurai swords. But here, one needn’t worry of imminent death should one of them fall.

We enjoyed our meal, but wouldn’t rush back. We suspect that’ll be Frank Bruni’s verdict, too. The bartender told us that, as far as they knew, Bruni hadn’t been in yet. I suggest they simplify the menu. Frank doesn’t like to have quite so many choices. Neither did we.

Wild Salmon (622 Third Avenue at 40th Street, East Midtown)

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

Spice Market

Note: Spice Market closed in September 2016. The restaurant remained successful; the landlord simply wanted them out, to make way for a more lucrative retail tenant. Jean-Georges Vongerichten says that he hopes to re-open at another New York location. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with clones in Punta de Mita, Mexico, and Doha, Qatar.

Amanda Hesser of The New York Times comically over-rated Spice Market when it opened in 2004, awarding three stars. It was probably a solid two, but suffered the inevitable decline that plagues almost all of the Vongerichten restaurants. In 2009, Frank Bruni demoted it to one star, which was probably about right. By the end, it was basically a party restaurant for tourists, but as tourist restaurants go, you could do a lot worse.

*

A little over three years ago, Spice Market’s arrival signaled a milestone for the Meatpacking District. For the first time, a serious restauranteur (Jean-Georges Vongerichten) was staking claim to an area that used to be a wholesale meat market and prostitution haunt.

Indeed, in a much-ridiculed three-star review, Amanda Hesser of the Times advised Vongerichten to pump ginger aroma into the street, to overcome “the stench of blood and offal from the surrounding meatpacking district.” She added, “It’s hardly an olfactory amuse-bouche.”

Nowadays, your tender nostrils needn’t worry about the stench of blood: the original meatpackers are long gone, and the area is a maze of clubs and mostly second-tier restaurants. Whether it has any restaurants worth your while is open to debate. I am probably in the minority, when I tell you that there are actually a few Meatpacking restaurants I like.

Until yesterday, I’d never been to Spice Market, except for drinks. In the early days, it was one of the city’s toughest tables to book, and I never bothered. However, when a friend suggested it, I was happy to accept the invitation, as it was the only one of Vongerichten’s Manhattan restaurants I’d never been to. Things have settled down a bit, although Spice Market still does brisk business. On a Tuesday night, most tables were taken, and I noted that all of the luxurious private rooms downstairs were fully booked.

The pan-Asian menu is divided into appetizers ($9.00–14.50), salads ($7.50–14.00), soups ($7.50–8.50), seafood entrées ($18–30), meat entrées ($16–36), and noodles/rice ($2.00–14.50). At the bottom comes the ominous warning, “All dishes are served family style.” That means they come out of the kitchen, and onto the middle of the table, when the kitchen is ready to serve them—not necessarily when you’re ready to eat them.

We weren’t sure how much food we needed, and “small plate” restaurants like Spice Market tend to encourage over-ordering. For appetizers, we tried the Black Pepper Shrimp ($14.50), which was nicely balanced in true Vongerichten fashion with sun dried pineapples. Mushroom Egg Rolls ($9.50 for four) with a galangal dipping sauce were also excellent.

We moved on to the Ginger Fried Rice ($7), which came topped with a fried egg, sunny side up, with ginger and garlic. This was so irresistible that we practically inhaled it, and didn’t wait for any of the entrées to arrive. The kitchen also did well by a tangy Cod with Malaysian Chili Sauce ($19), which the waiter divided and served tableside.

Both meat entrées disappointed. Pork Vindaloo ($19) and Red Curried Duck ($19) both tasted like they could have been simmering for a week, with generic sauces that could have come from any curry house on any back street. Amanda Hesser loved both, but they’ve lost whatever appeal they once had.

In the end, we probably ordered one dish more than we needed, but I was glad to be able to sample a broader swath of the menu. Most dishes were spicy, but not particularly so. The server was about right, when he said that the heat of the Pork Vindaloo was “5 on a scale of 1 to 10.”

I had recalled that Thai Jewels were the best of the desserts, and though we were quite full, we had to give it a try. Here we agreed with Amanda Hesser, so I’ll let her tell it:

Tiny bits of sweet water chestnut are glazed with tapioca, dyed candy colors like cherry red and lime green. These jewels are blended with palm seeds and slivers of jackfruit and papaya, then heaped onto a nest of coconut ice. It is fruity, nutty, cold and slushy, a wonderful mess of flavors, not unlike Lucky Charms.

The wine list isn’t long or complex, with reds and whites listed in each of three categories: smooth, bold, spicy. I chose a spicy red wine for $48, and we were quite pleased with it.

Servers were well versed in the menu and gave reasonable ordering advice. The choreography of waiters and runners sometimes got a bit discombobulated. At the table next to us, they managed to spill a whole bottle of water. Nothing so alarming happened to us, but there were minor glitches. Yet, at other times the service was more polished than you’d expect for a restaurant in Spice Market’s price range.

Despite the “family style” menu, the pace was quite reasonable, and we spent around 2½ hours there. I don’t know if we lucked out, or if they actually try to time the courses intelligently. Anyhow, it’s a good thing we were never served more than one dish at a time, as our small two-top wouldn’t have accommodated any more.

What can you say about the Disney-meets-Thailand décor, and serving staff in orange pajamas? You’ll love it or hate it, but it has no peer in Manhattan. I would guess that Jean-Georges Vongerichten spends no more than 15 seconds a month thinking about Spice Market. It runs on reputation. But there’s just enough left that you can see what all the excitement was about.

Spice Market (403 West 13th Street at Ninth Avenue, Meatpacking District)

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

The Payoff: Craftbar and Craftsteak

Today’s review is a bit of a snoozer, confirming our hypothesis that Frank Bruni is bored. He arrives at the correct ratings for Craftbar and Craftsteak (one and two stars, respectively), but he doesn’t have much passion for either restaurant. Maybe he banged it out on his laptop in between naps on his long flight back from Los Angeles, where he recently traveled to review a pizzeria. With apparently no NYC restaurants remaining that interest him, perhaps we can persuade Frank to take his discerning palate to the opposite coast, where no doubt they are hungering for a parade of Italian restaurant and steakhouse reviews.

Eater and I both placed identical $1 winning bets on Craftbar (2–1 odds) and Craftsteak (3–1 odds), netting each of us a total of $5 for the week.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$23.00		$25.67
Gain/Loss	+$5.00		+$5.00
Total	$28.00		$30.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	11–2		10–3

Rolling the Dice: Craftbar and Craftsteak

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: After last week’s gross dereliction of duty, Frank Bruni is back in action tomorrow with reviews of two real restaurants: Craftbar and Craftsteak. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Craftbar
Zero Stars: 3-1
One Star: 2-1 √√
Two Stars: 5-1
Three Stars: 20-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1

Craftsteak
Zero Stars: 7-2
One Star: 4-1
Two Stars: 3-1 √√
Three Stars: 12-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1

The Skinny: All the critics in town pummeled Craftsteak after it opened last year, with Herr Bruni awarding just a measley star in July 2006. Tom Colicchio’s steakhouse did everything right except the one thing at which it had to excel: steaks. I visited twice, and wasn’t wowed either time. Colicchio publicly admitted that he had goofed, fired the chef de cuisine, and bought new cooking equipment—including a broiler, inexplicably not part of the original plan.

In three years on the job, Bruni has just one self-re-review to his credit (Eleven Madison Park). I don’t know what would possess him to re-review a steakhouse just ten months later, but the improvement must surely be significant. I suspect that in Colicchio’s mind, Craftsteak is a three-star restaurant, and if he’s finally got the steaks right, it’s not an unreasonable aspiration. After all, it is built on a similar model to Craft, which has three stars. But two stars is the most that Bruni has given any steakhouse, and after a two-week losing streak, we aren’t prepared to dare the Eater oddsmakers.

Craftbar is getting its first rated review, after receiving the $25 and Under treatment from Eric Asimov in 2002 and a Diner’s Journal piece from Sam Sifton in 2004. Since then Chef Akhtar Nawab has moved on to The E.U., and according to FloFab in the Times, the new menu is “less elaborate and expensive.”

It’s not unusual for restaurants promoted from $25 and Under to get two stars, and casual places like Craftbar are right up Frank’s street. When train wrecks like Morandi and Cafe Cluny get one star, it almost seems like there’s no longer any such thing as a “good” one-star restaurant, leaving two-stars as the minimum rating that represents any kind of compliment. But with Craftbar lurking pretty much under the foodie radar these days, we have to agree with the oddsmakers that a deuce is unlikely here.

The Bet: Tomorrow could be a wild day, but we aren’t taking any chances. We agree with Eater that Frank Bruni will award one star to Craftbar and two stars to Craftsteak.

Restaurant Pet Peeves

Over at the Bruni Blog, Marian Burros has a post about “annoying restaurant practices.” She leads off with paper tablecloth tops:

If restaurants cannot afford fresh tablecloths made of fabric — and I know it costs money to clean them — it would be far better to have a bare table.

I agree with that, but I have a few more pressing ones:

1. “You can have a seat at the bar until your full party arrives….” I realize there are some legitimate economic reasons for this policy. But I’ve been shooed over to the bar even at restaurants that weren’t full. It comes across as a cynical attempt to generate bar income, rather than a legitimate way to manage the reservations book. Needless to say, if you do begin your meal at the bar, any good restaurant should offer to transfer the tab automatically to your dinner check.


2. “Would you like still or sparkling water?” This is a subtle trick by which the restaurant hopes you won’t realize there’s a third option: tap water. Bottled still water is the biggest rip-off in the industry.


3. “Would you like to start with a cocktail?” There’s nothing wrong with this question. But if you order pre-dinner cocktails, then the server should give you time to drink them. You shouldn’t be asked for your wine order when full cocktail glasses have been dropped off just moments ago.


4. “Let me tell you about our specials…” Any decent restaurant ought to be able to produce a written list of specials. If they’re recited, rather than written, it should be no more than two or three items—otherwise, you can’t keep them all in your head. Most annoying is when the server comes by to recite the specials after you’ve already had menus for 10–15 minutes. By then, you’ve already chosen something. The time to announce the specials is before the diner has decided what to order.


5. Side dishes. Many restaurants offer separately priced side dishes. I don’t object to the steakhouse pricing model, where everything is à la carte, but many restaurant menus fail to make this clear. The server should say something if you order a side dish, and your entrée already comes with a substantial vegetable. This is especially annoying if the side dish and the included vegetable are similar—e.g., you order a side of mashed potatoes, and your entrée comes with fries.


6. Tapas-style dining. I’ve nothing against tapas, of course. But nowadays, “tapas-style” is a shorthand that means, “The kitchen will send out the food as it’s ready.” Inevitably, this means that a pile of food is going to arrive all at once, since the kitchen is working according to their convenience, rather than yours.


7. Butter knives. Any respectable restaurant should have them. And the butter should be soft and warm, not hard as a hockey puck.


8. Replacement silverware. Any restaurant above the level of Chinese take-out should replace the used silverware after each course, without being asked.


9. “Can I tempt you with dessert?” By all means offer a dessert menu, but servers shouldn’t call it a temptation, nor should they try to change the diner’s mind after a firm “No, thank you” has been delivered. (Of course, this pet peeve applies to all forms of up-selling, but for some reason it’s most prevalent at dessert.)


10. Depositing the bill too soon. No fancy restaurant should present a bill till you’ve asked for it. At other restaurants, I don’t mind this practice. But the bill should never be presented when you’re obviously still eating. When you’re done, or very nearly so, the server may ask if you’ll be having any more to eat or drink, and if the answer is no, I’ve no objection if the bill presented shortly thereafter.

Today's Dumb Stat: Most NYC Drivers Oppose Congestion Pricing

Today, Reuters reports that “most” NYC drivers oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to implement congestion pricing for vehicles entering Manhattan (below 96th Street) during prime times. The polling margin was actually 51% opposed, which means that 49% of drivers either favor the proposal, or aren’t sure.

Well, duh! Obviously drivers don’t favor paying an extra $8 for their daily commute. What the article didn’t say, is that only about 10% of those employed in Manhattan drive to work. A poll showing a bare majority opposed, when the other 90% of the population is left out of the survey, doesn’t mean much.

Probably half of the 10% who drive to work in Manhattan would use mass transit, if it were available and convenient to the area where they live. And that’s the whole point of Bloomberg’s proposal — to use the congestion pricing fee to invest in mass transit. It’s a needed corrective to almost 70 years of neglect.

Since 1940, many new expressways, bridges, and tunnels have been built. But the city’s mass transit capacity actually shrank, because many elevated lines were demolished, and the subways that were supposed to replace them — such as the Second Avenue Line — were never built. Many of the lines that do exist aren’t in a state of good repair. And most lines could run more trains, were it not for antiquated signalling systems that are long overdue for replacement.

Manhattan can’t accommodate any more cars. But it can accommodate more transit lines. Building mass transit is the only way to get more people into Manhattan. It would also help the existing population, since transit is nearly always faster than driving, provided the starting and ending points of the journey are reasonably close to one’s home and office.

But Bloomberg’s proposal is still going to be a heavy lift, as many politicians in the outer boroughs oppose it. The trouble is that congestion pricing would take effect almost immediately, but building new transit capacity takes years. Politicians are loath to vote for short-term pain, when the long-term gain probably won’t materialize until after they’re out of office.

It will take plenty of political strong-arming to get congestion pricing approved. We simply must.