The Payoff: Daniel

Today, Frank Bruni re-affirms four stars for Daniel. A new Adam Tihany décor sealed the deal:

Daniel was always fancy; now it’s genuinely gorgeous, too. And that’s almost reason enough to reaffirm the four stars the restaurant was awarded by William Grimes in The New York Times in 2001.

But the contemporary French menu and the service make their own contributions, usually measuring up to the extremely high standards the restaurant has established.

All in all Daniel remains one of New York’s most sumptuous dining experiences. And while it yields fewer transcendent moments than its four-star brethren and falls prey to more inconsistency, it has a distinctive and important niche in that brood, a special reason to be treasured.

Among the handful of elegant restaurants that maintain the rituals once synonymous with superior cuisine and cling to an haute French style, Daniel is the most straightforward, the one with the fewest tics or tweaks. It’s the truest link to the past.

The review invites at least two meta-critical questions. First, should a restaurant that is “prey to…inconsistency” be rewarded with four stars? And second, is this consistent with what Bruni has done in the past?

To the first, there is no clear answer. I gave Daniel four stars myself, so I certainly cannot disagree with Bruni’s conclusion. Even at the highest level, in a forced ranking some restaurant would be the least wonderful four-star place, just as some restaurant would be at the top of the three-star heap. Bruni has put Daniel on the better side of that line, and I won’t argue with him.

But if Bruni’s oeuvre has a consistent theme, it’s that classic luxury doesn’t matter. Even when luxurious places got good reviews, one always sensed that Bruni would rather be elsewhere—that he believed fine dining was only for old fogies. In almost five years on the job, I cannot think of another review in which he actually celebrated luxury as something worthwhile, as he does here:

In fact there are moments during a meal at Daniel when you may well wonder why it isn’t more expensive, given how much staff is required for service like this…how much plotting goes into the ceremony.

At restaurants considered much less exclusive, you could spend only $30 less on a similar amount of food, and you wouldn’t get anything approaching Daniel’s bells and whistles. These flourishes make you feel that you’ve slipped into a monarch’s robes, if only for a night, and turn an evening into an event.

Take note of the dotted circles, a visual motif woven into the restaurant’s new design. They’re on the welcome mat outside. And on the carpeting inside. And on the china, the cotton damask napkins and even the plush, thick paper hand towels in the restrooms…

It’s for coddling this thorough that lovers of fine dining turn to restaurants like Daniel, which safeguards a graciousness that deserves to survive any change in fashions and fortunes.

Where did this Frank Bruni come from?

Eater correctly predicted that Bruni would award four stars to Daniel, and wins $2 on a hypothetical one dollar bet. We thought that Bruni would demote Daniel to three stars, and lose a dollar.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$106.50		$129.67
Gain/Loss	+2.00		–1.00
Total	$108.50		$128.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	49–23		51–21

Rolling the Dice: Daniel

The Line: Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews one of the few remaining grandes dames of French cuisine, Daniel. The Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 500-1
One Star: 499-1
Two Stars: 498-1
Three Stars: 4-1
Four Stars: 2-1 √√

The Skinny: Daniel currently carries four New York Times stars, courtesy of Mr. William Grimes. It is the last remaining four-star restaurant that Bruni has never reviewed. He has, however, written obliquely about the restaurant on several occasions, and it has never been positive.

Here he is in December 2004:

I dropped by Cafe Boulud the other night. I went because I had recently visited the chef Daniel Boulud’s other two Manhattan restaurants but not this one, which happens to be many of my acquaintances’ hands-down favorite of the three. I can see why. It doesn’t have the starched self-consciousness of Daniel or the cheeky swagger of DB Bistro Moderne.

And then in August 2007:

Under Mr. Carmellini Café Boulud had thrived: for many diners, it was the most consistently enjoyable of the restaurants owned by Daniel Boulud, more relaxed than Daniel, less scattershot than DB Bistro Moderne.

And here he was in October 2007, commenting on the Michelin Guide’s two-star rating for Daniel in relation to the three stars given to Jean Georges:

Putting the restaurant Jean Georges ahead of Daniel — giving it three stars to Daniel’s two — is a more defensible judgment call, consistent with the appetites and appraisals of many of the city’s most discerning diners.

In all of these comments, Bruni’s enthusiasm falls well short of the rapture one expects at a four-star restaurant. Unless Bruni has been wowed lately to a degree he wasn’t before, I cannot see how Daniel can remain a four-star restaurant. Bruni’s well known abhorrence of classic French luxury dining is another factor not in Daniel’s favor.

We’ve long believed that Daniel’s days in the four-star club were numbered, as soon as Bruni could find a replacement. There are currently just five such restaurants, and that total has remained remarkably stable over the years. When Bruni demoted Alain Ducasse and Bouley from four stars to three, other restaurants replaced them.

What would be Daniel’s replacement? I had once thought that either Eleven Madison Park or Del Posto could be the lucky winner, but in a blog post on New Year’s Eve, Bruni strongly suggested that neither one was ready. Among Bruni’s known favorites, that leaves only Momofuku Ko as a potential promotion candidate—a review that would put Bruni on the map like no other. Among traditional restaurants, the newly relocated Bouley is the best candidate, though we don’t see it happening.

We don’t discount entirely the possibility of four stars tomorrow: Boulud could have upped his game since Bruni’s earlier visits, or maybe the Brunz just feels itchy because he hasn’t given four stars to anybody in almost two years. But given Bruni’s long-standing disdain, both for Daniel itself and the style of dining it stands for, we just don’t see it.

The Bet: We believe that Frank Bruni will award three stars to Daniel.

Bar Boulud

I dropped into Bar Boulud last night for a pre-opera snack. The tables were all full at around 7:00 p.m., but there were a few seats available at the communal table (far left in the above photo).

The menu offered at the communal table seems to be abbreviated, but I quickly settled on one of the warm charcuterie specialties, the Saucisse Fumée Façon “Morteau” ($16), or smoked cumin-spiced sausage on a lentil stew. For what it was, this dish was about perfect. I could eat like this every day.

As I observed last time, service can be helter-skelter, although they fared better at two recent lunch visits. Servers do a first-class job when you have their attention, but getting it isn’t so easy, as there aren’t enough of them to go around, especially in the frantic pre-theater hour.

But the kitchen still seems to have its act together, which is more than you can say for many a Lincoln Center restaurant. Despite its faults, we are lucky to have Bar Boulud in our midst.

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

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

Café Boulud

[Kalina via Eater]

Unlike the professional critics, I don’t have the time, the inclination, or the pocketbook to pay multiple visits to a restaurant before venturing an opinion. My posts are snapshots of individual meals. I can’t help it if my impressions are either much better, or much worse, than the prevailing “conventional wisdom.” I may have caught the restaurant on an unusually good or bad day. I might, by dumb luck, just happen to have ordered the best couple of dishes on an uneven menu, or the worst ones on a very good menu.

Sometimes, though, I have the distinct impression that a restaurant deserves a second chance. And that was what I thought after a friend and I had an exceedingly dull meal at Café Boulud two years ago. It’s not that we had anything bad, but that, for the price point, the food struck us as uninspired. There were also some service miscues.

In its ten-year history, Café Boulud has probably had some ups and downs. It seems to be a proving ground for chefs, who benefit from Daniel Boulud’s mentorship and move on to better things. The opening chef, Alex Lee, was around just long enough to win three stars in the Times from Ruth Reichl. Andrew Carmellini had a six-year run (1999–2005) before leaving to open A Voce. Boulud then promoted Carmellini’s sous chef, Bertrand Chemel, who won three stars from Frank Bruni and promptly departed for Falls Church, Virginia.

Gavin Kaysen has been running the kitchen since December 2007, though presumably with plenty of input from Boulud. The menu, as it has always been, is divided into four sections: La Tradition (French classics), Le Voyage (world cuisine), La Saison (seasonal items) and Le Potager (vegetarian choices). The pattern persists through dessert and even the cocktail menu.

Prices are about par for a three-star restaurant, with appetizers $16–28 (most in the high teens), entrées $27–55 (most in the $30s), and desserts $10–24 (most $14).

 
“Red Snapper” cocktail (left); Amuse-bouche (right)

My girlfriend and I tried a couple of the seasonal cocktails. The terrific, labor-intensive “Red Snapper” was made with jalapeño-infused gin, celery ice cubes, and tomato juice poured tableside from a glass caraffe. My girlfriend had a Rhubarb Mojito. They were both $12, which is extremely reasonable in a town where cocktails north of $15 are increasingly common.

 
Spring Risotto (left); English Pea Raviolini (right)

Our appetizers, chosen from the potager section of the menu, were full of bright flavors of the season: Spring Risotto ($19) with ramps and watercress; English Pea Ravioli ($18) with bacon, pea leaves, and a sherry-shallot jus.

 
Butter Poached Halibut (left); Greek Lamb Trio (right)

I loved the soft, buttery Poached Halibut ($36) from the Saison section of the menu, which featured an excellent supporting cast of whole grain mustard sausage, tiny potato gnocchi, English peas, and tomato fondue.

The Greek Lamb Trio ($41), from the Voyage section, wasn’t as exciting as the other items we had. The roasted loin was lovely, but as girlfriend noted, “This isn’t really very Greek.” Oddly enough, both Times critics (Reichl and Bruni) found Le Voyage the weakest portion of the menu here; this has been true both times I visited.

 
Rhubarb & Almond Tart (left); Madeleines (right)

We shared a Rhubarb & Almond Tart ($14), and to finish, the server dropped off a folded napkin full of warm , delicious sugar-coated madeleines.

The wine list has a section dedicated to bottles $60 and under. This part of the list seems to have shrunk since my last visit, but there are still some wonderful finds. The sommelier suggested the 2004 Stéphane Tissot Singulier ($60), made from the seldom encountered Trousseau grape from the Arbois region of France. We were struck by its light, fruity texture, resembling a pinot noir. We appreciated the recommendation, as we’d have never have found it on our own.

I wouldn’t choose Café Boulud for a special occasion, but rather, for food that is reliably excellent. The dining room is lovely and fairly quiet, though it also has the feel of an Upper East Side neighborhood place. One family was there with a two-year-old, and the staff dutifully produced a high chair. Fortunately, he was well behaved.

The service is polished and elegant, with a high ratio of staff to diners. Sometimes they get a bit confused, as when one asked us for our cocktail order after another had already taken it. Our cocktail order took a bit too long to be filled. It was a good thing I delayed our order, as otherwise the appetizers would have arrived before the wine was poured. These are minor complaints, and didn’t at all detract from our excellent meal.

There aren’t enough days in the week to give every restaurant a second chance, but Café Boulud is one that deserved it. With Gavin Kaysen in the kitchen, Café Boulud is in good hands.

Café Boulud (20 E. 76th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, Upper East Side)

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

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

The Payoff: Bar Boulud

Yesterday, Frank Bruni awarded a slightly generous two stars to Bar Boulud, even though “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.” He actually preferred the lunch sandwiches to anything offered at dinner.

Frank has never cared much for classic French food, but the charcuterie won him over:

Bar Boulud is a terrine machine, a pâté-a-palooza, dedicated to the proposition that discerning New Yorkers aren’t getting nearly enough concentrated, sculptured, gelatinous animal fat, at least not of a superior caliber.

I’ll buy that, and I’ll buy it on the basis of the restaurant’s smooth pâté grand-mère (chicken liver, pork, Cognac) and coarse pâté grand-père (foie gras, pork, port), both of which are such pure joy to eat — on their own, on toasted bread, with mustard, without — that they sent me on a search across the menu not only for close relatives but also for distant cousins. I was ready to ingest the entire extended family.

And it gave Frank an opening to write another meta-review, to meditate on the micro-trends that fascinate him so:

Much of what you need to know about the direction of fine dining these days is distilled in Bar Boulud, where one of the most accomplished French traditionalists on this side of the Atlantic stages a production whose weakest facet is the conventional three-course dinner.

It’s not just white tablecloths that have fallen by the wayside at Bar Boulud, which extends the chef Daniel Boulud’s trajectory toward ever-more-casual restaurants, mirroring the culture around him. Gone, too, is the notion that sitting at a proper table and ordering a proper sequence of dishes is the way you want to eat.

You can certainly take that route, which in fact has rewards enough for anyone who does elect it. But unlike Mr. Boulud’s other New York restaurants — Daniel, Café Boulud and DB Bistro Moderne, in their order of birth and descending degrees of formality — Bar Boulud doesn’t press that path on you.

Many of its roughly 100 seats are stools at a high, long counter or chairs at a circular communal table. The fraction of menu real estate claimed by entrees is only about a quarter.

You get the sense that if Boulud had installed white tablecloths, Frank would have deducted a star.

We took the one-star odds, and lose $1 on our hypothetical bet. Eater took the two-star odds, and wins $4.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$70.50		$86.67
Gain/Loss	+4.00		–1.00
Total	$74.50		$85.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	33–14		33–14

Rolling the Dice: Bar Boulud

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 Daniel Boulud’s Lincoln Center charcuterie palace, Bar Boulud. 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: 5,000-1

The Skinny: This week’s bet is a tough one, with the BruniTrends^® balanced on a razor’s edge. Though early reviews haven’t been rapturous, you’ve got to figure that if anyone can right the ship, it would be Daniel Boulud, whose restaurants already carry nine New York Times stars. Charcuterie takes center stage here, and Bruni is a confirmed meathead. Lastly, the restaurant is on his beloved Upper West Side, where the grading is always easy.

But was Boulud able to correct things quickly enough? Reports of bumbling service still come across the transom fairly regularly, and aside from the charcuterie no one has really loved Bar Boulud—not counting celebrities who go there to “see and be seen.” Great charcuterie, on its own, is probably a one-star deal, and Bruni loves to take down celebrity haunts. Bruni has been awfully lenient lately, with five positive reviews in a row. If this keeps up, people might almost start to think he’s gone flaccid. Frank wouldn’t want that to happen, would he?

Alas, we can’t bring any personal experience to the decision: our own first look at Bar Boulud was on opening night, and we tasted too small a sample to get a good idea of the restaurant’s capabilities.

The Bet: Our reasons, we admit, are soft. But we feel that Bruni is overdue to bring someone crashing down to earth. We are betting that he’ll award one star to Bar Boulud, with strong praise for the charcuterie, but too many other things wrong to justify the second star.

First Look: Bar Boulud

Kalina via Eater

In today’s Diner’s Journal, Frank Bruni reports that it’s not easy to make a reservation at Daniel Boulud’s latest restaurant, Bar Boulud. Not since Per Se, almost four years ago, has poor Frank had so much trouble reaching a human being. In Per Se’s case, he waited. In Bar Boulud’s case, he hung up in frustration after 15 minutes. [Update: The next day, he finally got through.]

He should have tried just walking in, which a friend and I did yesterday. At 6:00 p.m., we were seated at the bar without a wait. Three doors down, Josephina was full. Go figure.

Like most Michelin-starred chefs, Daniel Boulud isn’t content to have just one restaurant, but he hasn’t opened them as promiscuously as Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Alain Ducasse. Bar Boulud is his first New York opening in at least four years. The location across Broadway from Lincoln Center has long needed some more serious restaurants. I yawned when I heard that Bar Boulud was going to be focused on wine—who needs another wine bar? It turns out the real star is Sylvain Gasdon’s charcuterie menu.

Though yesterday was the official opening to the public, Boulud has been serving friends and family for a few weeks now. Grub Street responded with “dumbstruck awe,” adding that “this kind of charcuterie has almost never been available in this profusion and variety in the United States.” Ed Levine gushed, “Simply put, Gasdon is making the best charcuterie Americans have ever seen and tasted on these shores.” But he wondered, “are Americans ready for this kind of food?”

If you sit at the bar, as we did, you’ll have the massive terrines, pâtés and sausages right in front of you, a gorgeous sight incomparable to anything else in New York. If charcuterie isn’t your cup of espresso, Bar Boulud also has a more conventional bistro menu that takes its cues from Boulud’s native Lyon.

We had actually come in only for drinks, but there was no way I could leave without tasting the charcuterie that refined meatheads like Cutlets and Levine are raving about. So I tried the Pâté Grand-mère ($8), made with chicken liver, pork and cognac. It was a nice hunk, half an inch thick, and about 3 inches by 5, with a dollop of spiced mustard on the side and two bowls of bread (with soft butter). I ignored the bread and just ate the pâté with my fork. It had a luscious buttery taste, the liver pungent but not overwhelming. There’s much more where that came from, and I can’t wait to return.

The wine selection was disappointing. There were just four reds and four whites by the glass, far less than one expects at a purportedly wine-themed restaurant. Bar Boulud needs to do better—far better—than that. Servers were gracious, and the mise en place everything you’d expect in a Boulud restaurant, but the staff was too busy to pay us sufficient attention. We had trouble flagging down a server to order a second glass of wine, and we were there for about 45 minutes before they came with water glasses.

It is too soon to the judge the service, as this was only Bar Boulud’s first night. It will also take more than one pâté to reach a judgment on the food, but Bar Boulud certainly looks promising.

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

The Payoff: Café Boulud

Today, as expected, Frank Bruni awarded three stars to Café Boulud.

As I predicted, Bruni included a backhanded slap at Boulud’s flagship, the four-star Daniel, saying that Café Boulud is “the most consistently enjoyable” of the chef’s restaurants. Daniel is the only four-star restaurant in New York that Bruni has not yet reviewed. The comment certainly suggests that it might not retain its lofty perch when Bruni finally gets around to it. Indeed, I suspect the only reason he hasn’t done so is that he has no other restaurant to replace it with, and he doesn’t want the four-star club to dwindle below its current five members.

The review was one of the few times Bruni has been able to visit this type of restaurant without bitching about the elegant service that top-tier restaurants offer. Unlike most people, Frank is actually offended when you pamper him. But the best he could say, was that Café Boulud is “no less fun to visit in this informal dining era.” Though that’s a compliment coming from Frank, I doubt the Boulud empire will be pulling it as a teaser quote.

And isn’t it just typical that it was a pasta dish that sealed Frank’s opinion that Café Boulud still deserved the three stars it earned from Ruth Reichl?

Both Eater and NYJ win $3 on our hypothetical $1 bets.

	Eater		NYJ
Bankroll	$36.60		$33.67
Gain/Loss	+3.00		+3.00
Total	$39.50		$36.67
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Won–Lost	15–4		13–6

Rolling the Dice: Café Boulud

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 sharpens his knives at Café Boulud. Eater’s official odds are as follows (√√ denotes the Eater bet):

Zero Stars: 8-1
One Star: 7-1
Two Stars: 4-1
Three Stars: 3-1 √√
Four Stars: 5,000-1

The Skinny: “Rolling the Dice” returns this week after a two-month hiatus. Sorry to say, we don’t have much by way of original analysis. As Eater noted, Frank Bruni is already on record with the view that Café Boulud is the most enjoyable of Daniel Boulud’s three New York restaurants. I wasn’t enraptured when I visited last year, but a friend whose opinion I respect assured me it must have been an off-night.

I also agree with Eater that CB has flown under the radar in recent years, and there’s really no reliable way of telling whether the new chef, Bertrand Chemel, has his act together. And there is always Bruni’s well known aversion to French cooking. But I have to agree that three stars is the most likely outcome, given Bruni’s already-documented affection for the place.

The Bet: We agree with Eater that Frank Bruni will award three stars to Café Boulud. Regardless of the rating, look for Bruni to include a back-handed slap at Daniel, the only one of the four-star restaurants he has yet to review.