Bern's Steakhouse

 

The words “fine dining” and “Tampa, Florida” seldom occur in the same sentence. For a recent family celebration, only one restaurant came to mind: Bern’s Steakhouse. It is the one Tampa restaurant with an international reputation, founded largely on its 700,000-bottle wine cellar, believed to be the largest privately-held wine collection in the world.

That collection is so large that about 80% of it is not even stored at the restaurant, but in a warehouse across the street. The 212-page novel-length wine list is a massive tome, including bottles hundreds of years old. The list of wines available by the glass (around 150) is more than most restaurants offer by the bottle.

The restaurant, named for Bern Laxer, has been at this site since 1956. Laxer’s son, David, is now in charge.

The building, not originally a restaurant, is unimpressive from the outside. But once you get in, the rest of Bern’s is as overwhelming as its wine list. Its eight dining rooms, each with a different theme, seat up to 350. Our party of eight was in a room featuring enormous photographic mural of the Rhone valley.

Bern’s doesn’t do anything small. The menu goes on for eighteen pages, several of which are long essays explaining how—in the restaurant’s favorite phrase—“We do things differently here.” Want to start with caviar? There are twenty-one selections, priced from $20–220 per ounce. Want steak tartare? Bern’s offers it four different ways.

The steak portion of the menu goes on for four pages, because Bern’s can do nothing without lecturing you. There are fifty-one ordering options—a function of the cut of meat and the desired thickness—priced anywhere from $29.10 for a six-ounce filet mignon, to $233.12 a sixty-ounce strip sirloin that feeds six. You’d think they could round the cents on a $233 steak.

Bern’s serves USDA prime beef, aged 5–8 weeks. They are aggressive about trimming fat and bone before cooking, so their eight-ounce steak has more edible content than it would at other steakhouses. The menu claims that they buy about 3–4 pounds of beef for every pound they serve.

Most of the steaks are around $35–40 per person, but Bern’s doesn’t follow the typical steakhouse à la carte model. Every entrée also includes French onion soup, a house salad, a baked potato, onion rings, and vegetables. Dinner for six adults and two children was $419 before tax and tip, and that figure included the wine—more on that below—and cocktails. The same dinner in New York would cost at least double that.

  

As I studied the wine list, I could hardly contain myself as I saw one bargain after another. I settled on a magnum of 1967 Julien Devèze Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which was around $140. The sommelier tried to upsell me to a bottle that was $100 more, but after I declined, he brought back the 1971, which he insisted was better, and at $126 was less expensive than the bottle I’d asked for.

To put that in perspective, at the New York wine-themed restaurant Veritas, the cheapest magnum of Châteauneuf-du-Pape costs $175, and it’s a 1999, twenty-eight years younger than the one we had. Veritas has only a handful of choices older than 1990, and only one older than 1980, whereas Bern’s has a long list of bottles going back to at least the 1960s.

The wine was superb, though I don’t have much to compare it to. In New York, a bottle that old, if you could find it, would cost the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment.

 

Everyone loved the French onion soup (above left), but a plate of “cheese toast” (above right)—basically melted cheese on saltine crackers—wasn’t much good at all.

 

The house salad (above left) was just fine, while my son ordered the caesar salad (above right) for $9.95 extra, which our waiter prepared tableside, in a multi-step process that seemed to take fifteen minutes.

My girlfriend and I shared the 16 oz. Delmonico ($69.34), which the restaurant recommends as a portion for two. It doesn’t look that big, but we filled up quickly, given all of the other food included. The steak itself was just about perfect, with a nice exterior char, marbling, and the nutty, tangy flavor that comes from long aging.

Vegetables were a mixed bag. The onion rings were stringy and greasy, and the other vegetables on the plate were rather dull, but the baked potato was wonderful. Most restaurants would leave it to each guest to apply the fixin’s, but our waiter split each potato at tableside and applied sour cream, bacon, and chives according to each diner’s preference.

Service in the main dining room was excellent. All of Bern’s waiters train for a full year before they’re permitted to serve customers on their own. Garnishes and sauces are all applied tableside, and the waiter himself serves and clears every dish.

 

Be sure to ask for a kitchen and wine cellar tour, normally given between dinner and dessert. It takes about fifteen minutes, and is well worth it.

Dessert is such an unusual experience that you should order something even if you’re not hungry. It’s served upstairs in the Harry Waugh Dessert Room (named for a famous wine collector). It’s actually not a room, but a rabbit’s warren of many rooms: to be exact, forty-eight separate alcoves of varying sizes, each shaped like a wine cask, that can accommodate between two and twelve guests.

No one will be surprised that dessert here, like everything else, is over the top. The menu is four pages long, and has about 60 selections. It comes with yet another wine list, this one 42 pages long, with another 1,800 selections (armagnacs, cognacs, scotches, brandies, ports, etc.)

 
Left: Dulce de Leche Liquid Center Cake ($10.95); Right: Tiramisu ($9.95)

 
Left: Chocolate-Chocolate-Chocolate ($10.95); Right: Macadamia Nut Sundae ($10.00)

We were mildly disappointed with a Macadamia Nut Sundae, if only because its billing on the menu (“best sundae in the world”) would have been tough for any dessert to live up to. I don’t think anyone finished their desserts (how could they?) but there were vague nods of satisfaction around the table.

Service in the dessert room was nowhere near as polished as in the main dining room. The waiter’s recommendations weren’t quite as good as they were cracked up to be, and on two occasions it took a major hunting expedition to find him.

The overall dessert room bill, including drinks, was $75.60 before tax and tip.

*

After you get past the steaks, there is some unevenness at Bern’s. Any restaurant with such a long menu is bound to have some soft spots. But the overall experience is incomparable, and the wine list ranks with the great pyramids as one of the wonders of the world.

Bern’s Steakhouse (1208 South Howard Avenue, Tampa, Florida)

Food: ***
Wine & Spirits: ****
Service: ***
Ambiance: ***
Overall: ***

Wildwood Barbecue

Note: Widwood Barbecue closed in January 2014. Shelly Fireman (owner of Redeye Grill and Trattoria Dell’Arte) will turn it into an Italian restaurant (yawn!) called Floriana.

*

The restauranteur Stephen Hanson generally sticks to tried and true formulas. So it’s no surprise that he has now opened Wildwood Barbecue, a few years after the barbecue revolution arrived in New York.

Hanson is known for commercializing cuisines without really mastering them: think Ruby Foo’s. Except for three-star Fiamma, Hanson’s eateries invariably seem flashy but mass-produced. As Grub Street wryly noted, it was telling that Hanson hired his interior designer (David Rockwell) before he’d hired a pitmaster.

Hanson quieted the skeptics when he hired Big Lou Elrose, formerly the deputy pitmaster at New York’s best barbecue restaurant, Hill Country. But Wildwood has a lot to prove, as great barbecue inNew York is no longer the rarity it once was. Hill Country, Blue Smoke, and R.U.B. are all short distances away.

 

Stephen Hanson tries to be funny: “Get Sauced”Ironically, Wildwood is located on the site of one of the few Stephen Hanson failures, Barça 18, a tapas place that even Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert, as consulting chef, couldn’t save. With Wildwood, Hanson has reverted to the kind of corporate restaurant he does best. If Outback Steakhouse had a barbecue chain, it would probably look like this.

The barbecue here isn’t beholden to any particular region or style. Though respectable, it isn’t as good as the better places in town. Prices are modest, with appetizers $5.25–8.95, sandwiches and salads $10.95–14.95, entrées $9.95–23.95, tasting platters $21.50–28.95, and side dishes $4.95–6.95.

We got a good sample of the menu by ordering two tasting platters, which came with two side dishes apiece. This was a lot of food for two people. We brought home part of the chicken and several ribs, and the sides were left half-finished.

The Rib Sampler ($28.95) included both the longer pork ribs and Memphis-style baby back ribs. The pork ribs were meatier and more tender. The baby backs seemed a bit dried out.

The “Best of the Best” ($23.95) included a half-chicken, three slices of brisket, and a scoop of pulled pork. The chicken was the star of the meal: pink, tender, flavorful. Elrose serves it with an apricot barbecue glaze. My girlfriend thought this was superior to the chicken she’d had at Hill Country.

The brisket, on the other hand, was disappointing. It was too thin, too lean, and too dry. This was surprising from a pitmaster who’d worked at Hill Country, where the brisket is one of the best things on the menu. The pulled pork seemed merely competent.

We loved the side dishes: Crusty Cheddar Macaroni, Kettle-Cooked Burnt Ends & Bacon Baked Beans, Sweet Potato Fries, and Baked Cornbread. The first two were especially good.

The sides dishes served with the tasting platters are smaller than the sides ordered separately. A couple at the table next to us thought our cornbread looked good to share, but theirs came in a cast-iron skillet, and was about twice the size of our portion.

There are wine and cocktail lists, but the highlight is a broad selection of beers and bourbons. A pitcher of Cold Ass — not a brand we’d heard of — was $22.

Service at Wildwood is better than most barbecue restaurants. Reservations are accepted for dinner. There is a coat check girl (who refused a tip), and there was even an employee outside to flag a taxi for us on a rainy night. But the space is too cramped, with hardly an inch to spare between tables. It’s neither as comfortable nor as authentic as Hill Country.

We had no trouble getting a table when we walked in at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday night, but the place was full by the time we left. Though there’s better ’cue in the city, we suspect that Stephen Hanson will figure out a way to keep the customers pouring in. He usually does.

Wildwood Barbecue (225 Park Avenue South between 18th & 19th Streets, Flatiron District)

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

Bar Masa

When Masayoshi Takayama sold his famed Los Angeles sushi restaurant and moved into the Time-Warner Center, most of the attention was lavished on his famously expensive four-star gem, Masa. There, you pay anywhere between $400–500 per person for whatever omakase menu Chef Masa wants to serve that day.

I’ve not been to Masa, as the appropriate occasion to blow $1,000 (for two) on sushi hasn’t yet presented itself. There’s an adjoining restaurant called Bar Masa, and I gave it a try the other night. Reservations aren’t taken, but the bar was only about half full, and only a couple of tables were unoccupied.

Bar Masa has garnered scant critical attention, perhaps because it’s considered an annex of Masa. But Bar Masa is really a separate concept. Here, the menu is à la carte. If you’re in the chef’s hands at Masa, at the place next door you’re totally on your own.

Given that it’s run by a sushi chef, I thought that Bar Masa referred to a sushi bar. Silly me. It’s an alcohol bar that also offers food. Whatever you order, even if it’s sushi, is prepared behind the scenes, thereby depriving you of one of the great joys of sushi dining: the interaction with the chef.

The first two facing pages of the menu are dedicated to prepared foods. There are about 90 choices. That’s not a misprint. They’re priced anywhere from $8–68, but mostly $18 and higher. They’re in ten different categories, like “Chilled,” “Salad,” “Hibachi Grilled,” “Braised,” “Fried,” etc. I had trouble getting clear guidance from the confused servers, but it seems that the vast majority are appetizer-sized, meaning you’d probably need to order a good three or four of them, maybe five or six if you’re hungry, to make up a full meal.

The next couple of pages are the sushi menu, with rolls $18–120 (most $25 or less) and sushi/sashimi $6–65 (most $10 or less), or $98 for the omakase.

This being a bar, there is a drinks menu, which takes the price of dining at Bar Masa to ludicrous levels. The house cocktails are $18–35, including $20 for an “Ocean Bloody Mary” (tomato and clam juice with pepper celery ice cubes). Sakes, sold by the caraffe, are $19 and up; wines by the glass $16 and up; by the bottle $60 and up.

I confess some curiosity as to what a $20 Bloody Mary would be like, but I didn’t feel lucky, and I felt totally adrift in the sprawling menu. I only wanted a snack, so I ordered the cheapest caraffe of sake ($19) and two of the prepared dishes.

The caraffe of sake came in a stone bowl, wrapped in ice; the ceramic cup was pre-chilled, too. You pay through the nose here, but at least the presentation is first-class.

Peking duck with foie gras in mooshu skin ($24) was a miniature version of the Chinatown classic. The preparation was lovely, but the food was not really that much better than you get elsewhere. And those pancakes were awfully small—about two bites apiece—making the dish $3 a bite.

The server asked that I discontinue taking photographs, so I can’t show the more striking dish, the Crispy Snapper Head ($28). There was no mistaking the poor snapper when the plate arrived: a fish head split in two, with a vacant eye socket staring at me. The eyes themselves, the brains, and indeed all of the fleshy parts were excavated before the head was breaded and tossed in the deep fryer.

Once I got past the gross-out factor, the dish was a disappointment. With the soft parts gone, all that remained were a bread crust and dessicated bones. Think Southern-fried chicken without the chicken. Either they wasted a perfectly good snapper, or someone else got the tasty parts.

Desserts was the only bargain: I finished with a perfectly respectable cheesecake: $9. 

There are probably many gems, along with some duds, on the menu at Bar Masa. But two small appetizers, the cheapest caraffe of sake, and a small dessert set me back $100 (including tax and tip). At that price, I’m not rushing back.

Bar Masa (10 Columbus Circle, Time–Warner Center, 4th floor)

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

The Payoff: Momofuku Ko

Today, Frank Bruni concludes the early review cycle for Momofuku Ko with a strangely mixed three-star review:

You don’t get start-to-finish enchantment, but that’s not a function of insufficient coddling. It’s a function of where you set the bar for a restaurant that must master only a cluster of dishes on a given night, and that compels you to surrender so fully to its authority.

Under those terms there’s a promise of unwavering transcendence, and Ko in its early months serves a few dishes that merely intrigue along with others that utterly enrapture. It also falls prey to some inconsistency.

At least half the review was about matters other than the food: the newfangled reservation system; the minimalist aesthetic; the pared-down service. When he does discuss the food, he finds it surprisingly uneven.

In a sense, this was a “review by subtraction.” Bruni started with the unwritten presumption that Momofuku Ko was gunning for four stars — a presumption certainly bolstered by Adam Platt’s review in New York — and proceeded to explain why “Deification may have come prematurely to Mr. Chang.”

Bruni was also hemmed in by his two-star reviews of Momofuku Ssäm Bar and Degustation, the most similar non-Chang restaurant in Manhattan. Ko is better than both.

It seems that there’s a “bonus star” available for any restaurant that confirms Bruni’s wholly unwarranted assumptions about what the younger generation of diners is purportedly seeking in a restaurant:

Ko pares down stuffy atmospherics in a particularly thorough way. It wagers that for a younger generation more focused on food than on frippery, a scruffy setting, small discomforts and little tyrannies are acceptable — preferable, even — if they’re reflected in the price.

Bruni’s reviews have improved markedly over the years. We could almost become a fan if these tiresome rants were sent to the cutting-room floor, where they belong.

We and Eater both took the obvious three-star bet, paying just even money. We both win $1 on our hypothetical bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$87.50		$98.67
Gain/Loss	+1.00		+1.00
Total	$88.50		$99.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	39–16		39–16

Rolling the Dice: Momofuku Ko

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 delivers his most anticipated verdict in quite a long while. The beneficiary, or victim, is Momofuku Ko. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 15-1
One Star: 6-1
Two Stars: 3-1
Three Stars: EVEN √√
Four Stars: 12-1

A Bit of Trivia: On August 3, 1990, Bryan Miller of the Times upgraded Bouley to four stars. The next new member of that exclusive club was not named until December 10, 1993, when Ruth Reichl upgraded Chanterelle. That 175-week drought is the longest in the 45-year history of the New York Times star system.

Do you know how long it has been since Frank Bruni named a new four-star restaurant? Remarkably enough, the last new entrant to the club was Masa, reviewed on December 29, 2004 — exactly 175 weeks ago.

Tomorrow, regardless of what he does, Bruni will match a record of futility not seen since the 1990s; and he will set a new record if he awards anything less than four stars to Momofuku Ko.

We do not suggest that Bruni is aware of the record that he is about to reach. But he must be aware that he is grading on a four-star scale, and it has been three years and four months since a new restaurant earned the top grade. He must, in a sense, be itching to pull the trigger, while also being aware that four stars mustn’t be doled out lightly.

It’s an open question whether Bruni has called his past shots correctly. We think he under-rated several promising candidates, though we cannot say for sure that any of them deserved four stars. The atrophied state of high-end dining is in any case newsworthy—and something he must be thinking about—regardless of whether it’s Bruni’s own fault, the market’s fault, or some combination of the two.

The Skinny: Frank Bruni’s rating of Momofuku Ko will depend on his interpretation of this little blurb, which appears at the bottom of every New York Times review:

Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. (emphasis supplied)

Bruni has frequently awarded two stars, and occasionally even three stars, to objectively middle-brow restaurants that he regarded as “good values for the price.” But to the best of our knowledge, no Times critic, including Bruni, has ever taken price into consideration at the four-star level. A top-rated restaurant has to be extraordinary in the absolute sense, not merely “good for the price.”

We think Bruni has dined at enough four-star restaurants to recognize that Ko is not one of them. It is a remarkable restaurant in many ways, and we have come (quite reluctantly) to the view that David Chang deserves most of the laurels that have been tossed his way. But let’s get real. Ignoring price, the experience at Momofuku Ko is a quantum leap below every four-star restaurant in town. Indeed, it’s probably a mid-tier three-star place.

Yes, it is very good for $85 prix fixe. But at that level, Ko is squarely in the price range of many three-star restaurants. For instance, the prix fixe at Eleven Madison Park is $82; Granted, it’s not a long tasting menu (which would be $145), but rather three courses with some amuses-bouches and petits-fours thrown in. But those three courses have considerably more culinary craftsmanship than most of the menu at Momofuku Ko, and they’re served in a room 10 times as lovely, by a staff 10 times as polished.

To be sure, a four-star rating for Momofuku Ko would give Bruni the chance to put the heel of his boot on the Times star system in a way that none of his previous ratings have done. It’s an opportunity that must have occurred to him. But we think he cares enough about his craft to recognize a real four-star restaurant from a mere imitator.

The Bet: We agree with Eater that Frank Bruni will award three stars to Momofuku Ko.

Update: Just anticipating some potential comments here: The 175-week drought is the gap between new entrants to the four-star level. Bruni has had other four-star reviews, but they were re-affirmations of ratings given by his predecessors.

Bar Q

 

Note: As of February 17, 2009, Bar Q has closed. The space is now the Chesapeake Bay-themed restaurant, Choptank.

*

Anita Lo, co-owner of the beloved (and Michelin-starred) Annisa, has lately followed the path of many a celebrity chef who was trained in French kitchens: she’s gone downmarket and pan-Asian. First came the Rickshaw Dumpling Bar in 2005, where she consults; and now, Bar Q.

Bar Q is just a few minutes’ walk from Annisa, so she won’t have trouble keeping tabs on the place. But the upscale comfort-food menu looks like it was designed for dependable replication in her absence.

There are a lot of dishes that are braised, smoked, roasted and fried, including plenty of pork. “Tea-smoked” recurs in the description of three different items. There are odd combinations, like “tuna ribs” and “pork wings.” Who knew pigs could fly? A “Trio of Tartares” makes the obligatory appearance.

The space has been beautiully done in blonde woods and white walls. One of the servers said, with a grin, “I painted all the artwork.” There is no artwork; just hard, bare walls. I am a bit concerned that the space could become oppressively loud when full, but that is mere speculation, as the restaurant was nearly empty when I visited at around 6:00 p.m. on a Monday evening. There’s a lovely outdoor garden, which is scheduled to open sometime in May.

The menu is not inexpensive, with raw bar selections at $2–7 per piece, appetizers $11–16, entrées $18–29, and side dishes at $7.

There’s also a tendency to upsell. My server said, “We recommend starting with a raw bar selection, followed by an appetizer and a main course.”

I thought to myself, “Well, yeah, of course you recommend that.”

Once I had nixed that idea, the server helped me narrow down my order to the better appetizer and entrée choices, describing each as a “signature dish.” You have to wonder how that’s possible for a place that has been open three weeks.

There are house cocktails, but when I told the server I don’t like excessive syruppy sweetness, he suggested I give them all a pass. I heeded his advice in favor of an Old Fashioned.

 
Grilled Squid Salad (left); Stuffed Spareribs (right)

I started with the Grilled Squid Salad ($10), which had a wonderful smoky flavor. I asked the server if the squid had been smoked, and he cheekily replied that this was a “secret”. The accompanying Hijiki salad (seaweed) was unmemorable.

A dish called Stuffed Spareribs ($23) might lead you astray. It’s a solid brick of pork, served off the bone: pork stuffed with pork. The sauce is described as “Lemongrass BBQ, Peanut and Thai basil.” Peanut is what stands out. Is it good? The execution was superb, so it comes down to whether you like your spareribs to taste like peanuts. Hours later, I was still a bit haunted by the porky-peanutty taste. But I’m not sure I want my spareribs like that.

Bar Q offers a little bit of fun, but it strikes me as overpriced for a neighborhood place, yet not quite enthralling enough to become a destination.

Bar Q (308–310 Bleecker Street between Grove & Barrow Streets, West Village)

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