Dear Bill Keller (in re: Bruni)

Dear Bill,

Today, you announced that Frank Bruni, the Times restaurant critic, will be leaving his post in August, when his memoir is published.

I have to ask: Do you seriously believe that Frank Bruni was an “inspired” choice? I can only hope that, despite your praise for his “ambitious feats of criticism,” you recognize that the Bruni experiment was not altogether successful.

Bruni, to be sure, is a very good writer (not quite “exquisite”), a top-notch journalist, and a smart guy. Like anyone with those attributes, he naturally had some successes. Over time, he nearly mastered the job. He also had a long, painful, unacknowledged apprenticeship, during which much of his criticism was just plain embarrassing.

The fact is, the best critics are normally those who bring a lifetime of experience to the subject matter—something it was simply not possible for Frank Bruni to have had. That’s not the only requirement, but it is an essential one. There is no substitute for it.

When we read The New York Times, we expect not just exquisite writers, but writers who have deep background in the beat they are covering. Although Frank Bruni is a better writer than I am, I never thought that he knew more about restaurants than I did. That’s because his background for the job was the same as mine: he had none.

However, I am an amateur. Frank Bruni’s work was marketed as a professional product, and it wasn’t, because he lacked one crucial attribute: expertise.

Of course, there were other problems with Frank’s work. He consistently overrated Italian restaurants (the one cuisine in which he was arguably an expert). And you always got the sense that high-end restaurants—the kinds that get 3 and 4 stars—held little joy for him. Even when he rated them highly, these restaurants seldom brought out his passion the way a great pizzeria did.

It’s awfully telling that you cite his nationwide tour of fast-food restaurants as a highlight of his tenure. That piece is emblematic of everything that was wrong with Frank Bruni as a fine dining critic.

So Bill, I wish you luck in your search for Frank Bruni’s replacement. But this time, please choose someone with a solid track record in the field. Is that too much to ask?

Very truly yours,
Marc Shepherd
New York Journal

The Year of the One-Star Restaurant

Is this the year of the one-star restaurant? Frank Bruni has reviewed nine new restaurants so far this year, and only one, The John Dory, got two stars. None received three or four, except the re-reviewed Daniel. This is the critic who once gave the deuce so often that Eater’s Ben Leventhal dubbed him “Frankie two-stars.”

Here’s the list of Bruni’s reviews this year—all one star, except for Daniel and The John Dory:

Rouge Tomate (January 7)
The West Branch & Bar Bao (January 14)
Daniel (January 21)
Cabrito (January 28)
The Oak Room (February 4)
The John Dory (February 11)
Shang (February 18)
Buttermilk Channel (February 25)
L’Artusi (March 4)

The Year in Bruni

Another year of Frank Bruni’s Times restaurant reviews has come and gone. It could be his last, as he’s rumored to be stepping down next year to write his memoirs. As of June 2009, he’ll reach his 5-year anniversary, a point when a critic might want to move on.

For the second consecutive year, no restaurants earned 4 stars. Corton was the year’s best new restaurant, but I suspect even Drew Nieporent (owner) and Paul Liebrandt (chef) would tell you they were not aiming for 4 stars. Bruni gave it 3 stars, which was the correct rating. Momofuku Ko was the only other conceivable candidate, but Bruni made a compelling argument for awarding three.

In case you’re wondering, it has now been 209 weeks since Bruni elevated a restaurant to 4 stars (Masa on December 29, 2004). That’s by far the longest such gap in New York Times history. There have been a couple of 4-star re-reviews since then, but no new members of the club.

Daniel is the only remaining 4-star restaurant that Bruni has not reviewed, and it’s fairly apparent he does not love the place. I suspect he is itching to find another 4-star restaurant, after which Daniel will be promptly demoted. I don’t know of any new restaurants coming along that are 4-star candidates, so Bruni will need to promote somebody.

At the 3-star level, there were happy pills in the water at Times HQ. Bruni doled out eleven 3-star reviews in 2008. He has given just 33 of them in 4½ years, so it is remarkable that a third of them came in 2009. Bruni’s smackdowns are the stuff of legend, but he did not demote any 3-star places this year, and there was not a single new restaurant that was clearly aiming for a 3-star review that failed to get it.

To some extent, we are seeing the effects of Bruni’s grade inflation. At least three of Bruni’s 3-star awards seemed awfully dubious to me (Dovetail, Matsugen, and Momofuku Ssäm Bar), and I have my doubts about one other (Scarpetta). But even if you subtract a star from those reviews, it was still a very good year for new restaurants.

Bruni continued his pattern of awarding two stars to very marginal candidates, such as Double Crown, Bar Q, Bar Blanc, Bar Milano, Mia Dona, Market Table, Perbacco and Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill. This, in turn, put pressure on him to elevate borderline places to 3 stars. It should be obvious that if Momofuku Ko is a 3-star restaurant, the less ambitious Ssäm Bar is no better than two. Yet, when he awards 2 stars to Double Crown the preceding week, all Ssäm Bar’s 3-star review means is “better than Double Crown.” That is not a tough bar to clear.

Bruni’s obvious bias in favor of Italian restaurants continued. About 20% of his reviews were Italian (broadly construed), and he gave those restaurants 2 or 3 stars 60 percent of the time. Even his 1-star Italian reviews were generally enthusiastic, which is not always the case with Bruni.

In other genres, there were missed opportunities. Allegretti and Eighty One, to which he gave 2 stars each, were better than several of his 3-star places. Eighty One was probably the most unjustly treated, given the 3-stars awarded to the inferior Dovetail nearby. Persimmon and Elettaria deserved better than the 1 star Bruni gave them.

For the first time that I can recall, Bruni visited a French restaurant by choice. He awarded 1 star to La Sirène, which was a perfectly reasonable rating. Had it been Italian, it would have received two.

Every year, Bruni picks a couple of places no one writes about any more, just to point out that they’re not as good as they were. This year’s victims were Mesa Grill (1 star) and Michael’s (no stars). Among new restaurants, Ago and Secession received his most entertaining and richly deserved takedowns, both receiving no stars.

A number of Frank’s reviews were about a ‘scene’, conveying practically no important culinary content. Among these were Kurve, Delicatessen, Chop Suey, Elizabeth, and Second Avenue Deli. It seems almost a travesty when Elizabeth is allotted the same number of column-inches as Corton. If it was worth writing about at all, couldn’t it have shared the review with some other place?

Bruni doled out several well deserved promotions, including WD~50 (2 to 3), Le Cirque (2 to 3) and Mas (1 to 2). But the largest errors of his tenure—The Modern, Gilt, and Gordon Ramsay—remain uncorrected, with all three restaurants still undeservedly mired in Bruni’s two-star scrum.

Despite some mistakes, Bruni did not commit as many howlers in 2008 as he did in past years. For the most part, where there was excellence he found it. Where restaurants let us down, he called them on it.

As Bruni notes in his year-end retrospective, most of the important restaurants that opened in 2008 were planned in much happier times. That means that we won’t be seeing anywhere near as many ambitious restaurants in 2009. Bruni will be spending his time in more casual places, which is probably the way he likes it.

A Chef's Plea for Half-Stars at the Times

Frank Bruni delivered a shock this week — deliberately, I am sure — by awarding three stars to Corton just seven days after awarding three stars to Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Three-star reviews are pretty rare. There have been just 32 of them in Bruni’s 4½ years on the job. So to give out two of them in a row is unusual. He has never done that before.

Now, the Ssäm Bar review was totally discretionary. No particular event compelled him to write it. By doing so when he knew Corton was coming the following Wednesday, he was clearly trying to make a meta-statement about the very different paths to excellence that these two restaurants have followed.

But the Ssäm Bar review upsets many in the industry, not just because David Chang is ridiculously over-exposed, but because it makes nonsense of the rating system. The same chef’s Momofuku Ko, which is clearly more ambitious and accomplished by any measure, also carries three stars from Frank Bruni. What is the point of a rating system, if it fails to distinguish different levels of excellence and accomplishment?

Over at the Feedbag, an anonymous chef suggests that the Times should add half-stars to its system, to better distinguish between different levels:

The grading of restaurants lately does not make sense. How can a restaurant as refined as Eleven Madison Park, Picholine and Corton fit on the same level as restaurants as casual as A Voce, Scarpetta and the very baffling Momofuku Ssam? I am not saying they aren’t all great restaurants in their own right, but they are not equals. By installing a half star, one could differentiate between them. In my opinion, Blue Hill, Scarpetta and Craft should be 3 stars, Corton, Picholine, and Eleven Madison, 3 and a half, and Momofuku Ssam, 2 and a half. By grouping all of these establishments under the same 3 stars, they are misleading patrons. Isn’t that supposed to be the idea of these reviews? By awarding three stars to restaurants so disparate, they’re making the Times review system meaningless, and that hurts everybody.

We agree that half-stars allow the critic to discriminate better between different types of restaurants. That’s why reviews published on this blog use half-stars.

But ultimately, whether your rating system has 4 grading levels or 100, it can be no better than the person assigning them. I have no idea what ratings Bruni would have given out if his system allowed for half-stars. However, it is poor judgment that has created this mess in the first place, and poor judgment is not rectified by adding levels to the system.

Bruni seems to be applying a bizarre “quality divided by price” formula to assign stars. On that line of reasoning, Ko and Ssäm Bar are rated identically, for although Ko is better, it also costs more. In his defense, Bruni can point out that the Times rating system expressly states that prices are “taken into consideration,” though no past critic has done it quite the way he does.

The same perverted logic allows Bruni to justify awarding three stars to the Bar Room at the Modern, when the obviously superior dining room at the same establishment has just two. We strongly suspect that if the Times had half-stars in its rating system, Bruni would nevertheless have made the same error.

Our own view is that ratings should reflect excellence, period. The fact that excellence costs more is utterly irrelevant to the rating. It may be that some diners either cannot afford the best restaurants, or that they prefer to spend their time and money in other ways. But if Momofuku Ssäm Bar is inferior to Momofuku Ko—as it clearly is—the fact that one is cheaper does not make them equal.

Frank Bruni, Failed Food Blogger

Frank Bruni’s New York Times blog, Diner’s Journal, has been with us a bit less than three years. It is a failure.

In February 2006, his inaugural post promised:

I spend an insane, glorious amount of time in restaurants. And of course I see and taste more than I get to recount within the confines of weekly Dining section reviews, each based on multiple visits to a given restaurant, each boiled down to about 1,000 words from hours and hours of observation and tens of thousands of calories.

This new blog is an attempt to capture and share more of my notes from the field. To provide, in something closer to real time, a sense of what’s being served in the city’s newest, oldest, most delightful and most frustrating restaurants and of how those restaurants are serving it. To flag trends and, less often and more selectively, flog underachievers. To report moments of real significance and incidents that just happened to be interesting. To keep a journal, and to keep the tone of that journal light, casual, accessible.

Just as the “Diner’s Journal” in the Friday newspaper did, this “Diner’s Journal” on the web will offer quick, early peeks at restaurants that have just opened but aren’t yet ready to be reviewed. In the spirit of that weekly feature, it will also present critical perspectives on restaurants that probably won’t be reviewed, given the limitations of space in the newspaper and the limits of those restaurants’ charms.

But it will be more frequent and more flexible. I’ll post new entries several times a week.

What is the reality? Bruni seldom uses the blog to write about food. In the last six months, there have been just nine posts about food. I’m being generous by including his Nov. 24 post about Waterfront Ale House, which is mainly about his craving for chicken wings. If Frank was auditioning for the “$25 & Under” job, let me be the first to congratulate him: he passed.

The promises to “share more notes from the field” in “something close to real time,” to “flag trends,” “report moments of real significance,” “flog underachievers,” and offer “early peeks,” have largely not been kept.

Bruni does post a couple of times a week, on average, but usually not about food. He writes about Top Chef, getting reservations at inaccessible spots, allegations of poor service, Chef Q&A’s, industry news, and so forth. But he seldom writes about the thing he presumably spends most of his time on: restaurant meals.

Bruni has vitiated the whole point of having a blog—the ability to report in real time, rather than saving up his thoughts for one big weekly review. What’s more, the restaurants he reviews are just a small fraction of his meals out. The typical review requires three visits to the restaurant, but he probably dines out 10 times a week. That means about 70% of his meals aren’t explicitly reported on.

Now, if the Times is willing to pay Bruni to report on just 30% of his meals, that’s their business, not mine. But if the reason for starting the blog was to provide “more frequent and more flexible” coverage of restaurants, then he ought to do it.

More importantly, isn’t the Times overdue for a re-think of the long-form review? With only one review per week, many very good restaurants go years without any comment from the Paper of Record. Bruni’s crazily premature re-review of Momofuku Ssäm Bar last week—even though the restaurant’s many charms are basically the same as they were two years ago—deprived plenty of more worthy places that haven’t been reviewed in years, or perhaps not at all, a chance at exposure. Yet, in the review, Bruni said:

In the last year and a half, I’ve found myself returning to Ssam again and again…because eating at Ssam feels so unencumbered, honest and joyful, and because I can’t stop reflecting on the daring and importance of Mr. Chang’s work there.

If Bruni had used his blog to report on even a fraction of those visits—and as far as I can recall, he never did—then perhaps the newspaper review last week could have been used to direct attention to someone other than the ridiculously over-exposed Mr. Chang.

The Times should overhaul its reviewing system, so that ratings and recommendations can evolve gradually as the critic makes his rounds over the course of his tenure. There are plenty of restaurants that Bruni has visited but never reviewed, because he hasn’t paid the minimum of three visits that the paper requires. But a running journal of those visits could, over time, provide valuable perspective—perhaps even more so than the Wednesday reviews, which offer, at best, point-in-time snapshots.

As print reviews continue their slide into irrelevance, Bruni or his successor ought to consider how his online journal could become the primary medium for reporting on restaurants, instead of the very distant afterthought it is today.

Top Restaurants of 2007

In the last couple of weeks, Frank Bruni, Adam Platt, and Moira Hodgson have all filed their “Best of 2007” restaurant lists. The three didn’t quite follow the same rules, but still it is useful to compare what they came up with:

Bruni	Platt	Hodgson
1. Momofuku Ssäm Bar 2. Soto 3. (tie) Anthos 4. Insieme 5. Park Avenue _____ 6. Resto 7. 15 East 8. Allen & Delancey 9. Pamplona 10. Mai House.	Insieme Anthos Soto Park Avenue _____ BLT Market Hill Country Resto 15 East Allen & Delancey Market Table	Park Avenue _____ Soto 15 East Insieme Alto L’Impero Fiamma Allen & Delancey Pamplona Anthos Ilili Tailor The Monday Room Morandi Cafe Cluny The Waverly Inn

A couple of Bruni’s choices actually opened the prior year. We’ll allow an exception for 15 East (which is on all three lists), as it didn’t open until December 2006, clearly too late for consideration last year. But Momofuku Ssäm Bar was a 2006 restaurant by any definition, even if its current menu bears no resemblance to the original one. Eater summarized the situation perfectly:

Bruni’s bigger, less explicitly stated, point is that 2007 was dull. Ssäm Bar is 2007-eligible on a technicality: the menu overhaul heard ’round the world happened days into 2007, a full three months after the restaurant opened… With all due respect to sweet goodness that is Ssäm Bar, if better restaurants had opened in 2007, and a Best crutch was not needed, it would have been relegated to the ranks of 2006.

Dull indeed. Bruni rates on a four-star system, but no restaurant on his top-10 list was rated higher than two stars. Bruni issued no four-star ratings last year, and his only three-star ratings were re-reviews of older restaurants. Platt was even worse: he issued three stars to nobody, and indeed, I cannot recall his last three-star review. That’s despite the fact that Platt rates on a five-star scale.

Though I often disagree with Bruni’s ratings, I do agree with the core conclusion: 2007 wasn’t a great year. Anthos was the only truly new-in-’07 restaurant that won three stars on this blog. Insieme and Soto barely missed, and I don’t think there were any other reasonable candidates.

Bruni and Platt both suffer from the same disease: they are hostile to luxury restaurants. That explains why neither of them awarded three stars to the new restaurant I would rate as the year’s best, Anthos. Ironically, though they much prefer casual restaurants, neither critic has loosened the criteria for three stars. Thus, you have the paradox that they don’t award three stars to the places they truly like, but they seldom award three stars to the restaurants that truly deserve them.

A case can be made for Gordon Ramsay, which like 15 East opened too late in 2006 to be counted in last year’s roundup. I had a considerably more favorable impression of it than the mainstream critics. The fact that Ramsay had to fire the chef de cuisine is clearly not a factor in its favor, but if you count it as an ’07 restaurant, then it was the best new place that opened.

I would also award an honorable mention to Rosanjin, which also opened in late 2006, but did not start serving its exquisite sit-down Kaiseki until December. Frank Bruni awarded it two stars, but perhaps he felt that Soto and 15 East (also two stars, according to him) had used up his quota of Japanese restaurants. I can’t comment on 15 East, but I would rate Rosanjin higher than Soto, by a nose.

The only restaurant listed that’s in serious disagreement with my own experience is Park Avenue ______, to which I awarded no stars. But as all three critics included it, I have to assume we caught it on an off-night. It’s now on my “return-to” list. I haven’t yet made it to 15 East or Resto, but I am now eager to try both. (Resto remains awfully tough to get into, which is the main reason I haven’t gone yet.)

Bruni’s other unusual choice is Mai House, which no other critic included. But based on my four visits, I agree with Bruni that it deserves a spot in the top 10.

Platt had three choices listed by no other critic: BLT Market, Hill Country, and Market Table. I can’t comment on the latter, but BLT Market and Hill Country were two of my favorites in 2007. Bruni relegated BLT Market to the “Dining Briefs” treatment, once again showing that he often under-appreciates the best places. And as Hill Country was covered in the “$25 and Under” beat, Bruni never reviewed it.

Hodgson had some of the oddest choices, listing restaurants that no other critic was especially excited about, like Tailor, Cafe Cluny, and Morandi. Hodgson didn’t limit herself to ten choices, and she said they were in “no particular order.” She also included restaurants with new chefs, even if they weren’t new in ’07. (Bruni and Platt considered “transformed” restaurants, but not in their “top-10” lists.)

In his year-end retrospective, Bruni once again sounded the themes that have defined his tenure: as he sees it, the younger diners—“food adventurers,” he calls them—have rejected the traditional trappings of luxury dining:

The restrained size (along with the tight focus) of so many of these ventures speaks in part to the desire of young chefs to call their own shots and do their own thing, even if it means downsizing the settings in which they work.

It speaks to economic factors as well: high rents, exorbitant start-up costs, a local economy with less swagger than in the past.

But I suspect it also taps into wider cultural dynamics, into the anxieties of a country, overextended abroad and self-doubting at home, that has lost some of its appetite for grand plans and grand gestures, that would prefer to play things safe.

Bruni, as always, misjudges the market for high-end dining. Just try getting a last-minute prime-time table at Alto, Aureole, Babbo, Country, Cru, Daniel, Del Posto, Eleven Madison Park, Felidia, the Four Seasons, Gramercy Tavern, Gordon Ramsay, Gotham Bar & Grill, Jean Georges, La Grenouille, Le Bernardin, the Modern, Per Se, Union Square Cafe or Veritas—to name a few. These places are generally full, which suggests that the market for the luxury experience is not truly on the wane.

Now, you’re probably not going to find young foodies dominating these restaurants’ clientele, but these are expensive places. They don’t cater to young people on tight budgets, except perhaps as an occasional splurge. These diners naturally will gravitate to places like Allen & Delancey or Resto, where you won’t find three-star food, but where you can eat well without breaking the bank. A restaurant that’s relatively good is not “best” in the absolute sense.

Bruni needs to distinguish between reporting on trends and influencing them. Anyone considering a new luxury restaurant will be aware that it’s tough to get a fair shake from him, unless the cuisine is Italian. Gordon Ramsay made it over the hump, but others might not be so fortunate. So far, 2008 once again shapes up as a year of humbler ambitions, pending the arrival—or not—of Paul Liebrandt’s mysterious four-star wannabe.

Frank Bruni and the Fine Dining Deathwatch, Part 2

Six months ago, I wrote about the Fine Dining Deathwatch since Frank Bruni became the New York Times restaurant critic. I noted Bruni’s overwhelming bias against traditional “fine dining” restaurants, unless they happen to be Italian or Italian-influenced. Over and over again, you find in his reviews that he is actually offended by restaurants that pamper him. He not only doesn’t give credit for high-end service; he actually penalizes it.

Later on, I posted about Frank’s repeated use of the word “fussy” in his reviews to describe traditional formal service. He never means it as a compliment. This must weigh on restauranteurs and investors as they plan new openings. The presence of tablecloths, all by itself, costs you half-a-star before Frank even walks in the door. Some restaurants can overcome that handicap, but it is difficult.

As we approach another fall season, it’s worth taking a look at the year just past. Between September 2006 and August 2007, Frank Bruni awarded three stars to the following restaurants:

Felidia
L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon
Picholine
Eleven Madison Park
Bar Room at the Modern
Esca
Gramercy Tavern
Café Boulud

All but L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon were re-reviews. Hence, in the last year, only one new restaurant in New York City earned three stars. (None earned four.) Leonard Kim, the star-system historian over at eGullet, confirmed that this has not happened since 1995–96, when Ruth Reichl handed out eleven three-star reviews, ten of which were re-reviews.

In Bruni’s defense, I cannot think of another restaurant that opened in the last year that clearly deserved the third star. It so happens that I awarded three stars to Gordon Ramsay at the London and Anthos, but I can’t definitively say that Bruni got them wrong. There were plenty of critics that disliked Gordon Ramsay, and my visit to Anthos came after it had been open a while, and perhaps some of the early flubs had been worked out. So, it may simply be that this was an unusually lean year for high-end restaurants.

There’s no question that dining has become much more informal than it used to be. Frank Bruni never misses an opportunity to remind us of the fact. But many of the city’s high-end restaurants are regularly booked full, which suggests there remains untapped demand for that kind of luxury. Restauranteurs may be leery of making a big commitment, knowing that as the size of the investment goes up, the room for error goes down. Are they giving the people what they want? Or, do they feel that the city’s two main critics (Bruni and New York’s Adam Platt) are not going to give that kind of restaurant a fair shake—even when it’s done well.

But ironically, even among the casual restaurants that Bruni loves, the only new restaurant that merited three stars was a chain restaurant imported from France.

Fussy Frank

The March 6th Village Voice carried an interview with Frank Bruni, in which he was asked what he would choose to eat for his last meal. His choices should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Times restaurant critic’s predilections: a porterhouse steak, toro-stuffed maki rolls like the ones they serve at Masa; and “some buttery taglierini with heart-of-season white truffles shaved over it. Just like you’d get in the Piedmont region of Italy, which is one of my favorite areas in the world for eating.”

Steak? Check. Sushi? Check. Italian food? Check. Those are the foods Frank loves.

But another phrase in the interview caught my eye: “my final meal wouldn’t be a fussy labor of extraordinary technique.”

Frank uses that word “fussy” a lot. I’ve found the word, in its various forms, in at least a dozen of his restaurant reviews. (He has also used it in articles about other subjects.) I thought this was a little remarkable, because “fussy” isn’t all that common a word.

“Fussy” is never a compliment: no one aspires to be “fussy.” And Bruni virtually always uses it to describe high-end luxury dining, a niche of the restaurant industry for which he has very little use. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bruni associates “extraordinary technique” with “fussy labor.” Perhaps there is extraordinary technique that Bruni doesn’t consider fussy, but judging from his reviews you’d be hard pressed to identify it. Fussy, starchy, stuffy, effete, highfalutin’ — those are the words Frank usually uses for fine food presented in luxurious surroundings.

For those who wish to keep track, here are all the Bruni uses of fussy (and its variants) in restaurant reviews:

Review of Anthos (16 May 2007):

And with Ms. Arpaia he opened Anthos, 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.

Review of Momofuku Ssam Bar (21 February 2007):

By bringing sophisticated, inventive cooking and a few high-end grace notes to a setting that discourages even the slightest sense of ceremony, Ssam Bar answers the desires of a generation of savvy, adventurous diners with little appetite for starchy rituals and stratospheric prices.

They want great food, but they want it to feel more accessible, less effete. They’ll gladly take some style along with it, but not if the tax is too punishing. And that’s what they get at Ssam Bar, sleek, softly lighted and decidedly unfussy.

Double-review of Bar Room at The Modern and Eleven Madison Park (10 Jan 2007):

The Modern is divided into a fussy dining room and a more freewheeling bar area, where the food is less expensive, though not really and truly cheap.

Review of Freemans (20 September 2006):

[The server] said we needed to give our whole order at once, so our meal could be properly paced and we could have “a much more pleasant experience.” Of course that prohibition had nothing to do with our enjoyment and everything to do with the kitchen’s convenience. It also had no place in a restaurant as studiously unfussy as Freemans, but it exemplified the real attitude here.

Review of A Voce (10 May 2006):

It was just a matter of time before the right financial backers beckoned and Mr. Carmellini struck out on his own. The only real question was what shape that venture would take.

Would it be French and somewhat fussy? Mr. Carmellini had as much of that as of anything else in his background. Before Café Boulud, he worked at Lespinasse and Le Cirque.

Review of Del Posto (1 March 2006):

The ceremony surrounding main courses can indeed be fussy, with glistening slabs of flesh exhibited in their cooking vessels for adoration before being taken away and plated.

Diner’s Journal write-up of BLT Prime (24 June 2005):

The L and T mean Laurent Tourondel, whose manifest destiny is to attach his monogram to a great many B’s. The B means bistro, which none of the BLT restaurants really are. The word, or rather letter, serves to signal that an unfussy format accompanies Mr. Tourondel’s very fine food.

Review of Cookshop (30 November 2005):

The food is amply portioned, fairly priced and completely sophisticated but not remotely fussy.

Critic’s Notebook, “The Contemporary Dining Scene, Est. 1985” (12 October 2005)

About the same time [1985], a graduate of hotel and restaurant management school named Drew Nieporent and an emerging chef named David Bouley began their own experiment. Their goal was to recast the first-rate, fussy, uptown French restaurant as an affordable, approachable refuge with a downtown address, wines from California as well as France, and prices within reach of people who were not rich.

Review of Café Gray (15 December 2004):

The ambience doesn’t really suit the food, much of which is more ambitious and fussier than cafe or brasserie fare.

Review of En Japanese Brasserie (24 November 2004):

Even En’s identification as a Japanese brasserie suggests a have-it-all, connect-the-dots sensibility: it wants both the healthful allure of an ethnic cuisine in continued ascendance and the timeless appeal of an unfussy, teeming environment in which you can pass many a merry hour with copious drink as well as food.

Diner’s Journal write-up of The View (29 October 2004)

Both were more successful than an oyster and clam plate and a goat cheese terrine, the fussy presentations of which were undercut by the humdrum reality of how they tasted.

Review of Mas (7 July 2004)

Mas is the kind of earnest, tasteful restaurant that this city — that any city — can always use. It nicely splits the difference between fussy and unfussy.

The review of Mas, which contains his first known use of the word after becoming chief restaurant critic, is also the only time that he used the word “fussy” while making a compliment.

Critiquing the Critic: Pera and Dennis Foy

Today, New York Journal adds a new weekly feature. In “Critiquing the Critic,” we’ll deconstruct Frank Bruni’s latest performance in the Times dining section.

Sadly, Jules Langbein’s hilarious Bruni Digest has gone dark— she has posted only one of her patented Bruni-skewerings in the last three months. I can’t possibly replicate what Jules did, and I won’t even try. I’m afraid I’m going to sound much more sanctimoniously serious than the situation calls for.

To business: This week, Frank Bruni files a double-review of Pera and Dennis Foy, granting one star to both.

The frequency of double-reviews has gone up, and that’s a good thing. There are far too many restaurants that never get a Times review, and far too many others that go years before a re-review. If Bruni is right about Pera and Dennis Foy—and I’m not saying he is—neither one is important enough to deserve a column to itself.

Bruni reminds us, “Dennis Foy occupies the elegant, creamy space that belonged to the excessively self-conscious restaurant Lo Scalco.” That restaurant, I might add, won a Michelin star, but Bruni never got around to reviewing it. Whatever you thought of Lo Scalco, restaurants at that level shouldn’t go un-reviewed.

Today’s headline, “Knowing Their Place and Aiming to Fill It,” has an “Aw, shucks!” attitude. It is never a compliment to tell someone they “know their place.” It’s a bit like the massa telling the slave to be happy about picking the cotton. I don’t know about Pera, but I’m sure Dennis Foy thought he was opening a two-star restaurant. I’m not saying it is two stars, but it’s patronizing to give him one, and then congratulate him for “knowing his place.”

Bruni says that Foy is “an ‘if you happen to be’ as opposed to a ‘you have to try’ restaurant.” The trouble is that almost no one “happens to be” on Church Street between Walker and Lispenard Streets. It’s not a “happen to be” block.

I suspect Pera will be just fine with Bruni’s one-star review. As he notes, “Its jazzy look and feel are unmitigated delights, and jazzy isn’t so easy to come by on its patch of Manhattan, in the shadow of Grand Central Terminal.”

Overall, we are left with a sense that Frank was slumming it this week. Both restaurants slightly bored him.

Frank Bruni and the Fine Dining Deathwatch

Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant critic, has launched an all-out assault on fine dining. Bruni’s influence is difficult to measure. But there is no doubt that the city’s most influential critic has his knives sharpened against restaurants that offer classic, traditional luxury. Anyone planning such a restaurant must assume that the likelihood of recognition from the Times is close to nil.

By “fine dining,” I mean the traditional trappings of excellent restaurants: white tablecloths, a first-rate wine program, fine china and stemware, elegant service, and of course a serious chef with a top-notch kitchen brigade. In so defining it, I am not suggesting there is anything wrong with restaurants that serve great food without some or all of these trappings. Indeed, like most people, the vast majority of my meals are not consumed at luxury restaurants.

But there is a place in our city for traditional fine dining — the kinds of restaurants normally associated with three or four New York Times stars. During Frank Bruni’s tenure, proper recognition for these types of restaurants has all but disappeared.

In roughly 32 months on the job, Frank Bruni has issued 17 three-star reviews. Taken on its own, this is a reasonable pace. When you look at the characteristics of those restaurants, the results are sobering.

One restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, isn’t even in New York City. As far as I know, it’s the only NYT starred restaurant that is not in the five boroughs. It is an anomaly.

Another seven restaurants were previously reviewed by other critics, including:

• Two restaurants demoted from four stars (Alain Ducasse, Bouley)
• Three restaurants held at three stars (Babbo, Felidia, Picholine)
• Two restaurants promoted from two stars (Blue Hill, Eleven Madison Park)

Nobu 57 is a strange case, as it was technically a new restaurant, but it is a virtual clone of the original Nobu, which was already a three-star restaurant. Bruni could hardly have rated Nobu 57 anything other than three stars, unless he was going to re-rate the flagship restaurant, to which it is largely identical.

Hence, of the sixteen NYC restaurants that have received three-star reviews from Bruni, eight of them were either pure re-reviews, or in the case of Nobu 57, the clone of one. That leaves just eight truly new NYC restaurants that have received three stars from Frank Bruni.

Of the remaining eight restaurants, five of them are notable for their comparative informality: A Voce, Bar Room at the Modern, BLT Fish, Perry St., and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon.

That leaves just three traditional “fine dining” restaurants that have earned three stars on Frank Bruni’s watch: Country, Cru, and Del Posto. Two out of the three are Italian or Italian-influenced (Cru and Del Posto). This leaves Country as the only new fine dining non-Italian restaurant that has won three stars from Bruni over a 32-month period.

Against this is a much longer list of fine dining restaurants that clearly were designed for and expected three stars, but received less: Alto, Cafe Gray, Gilt, Le Cirque, The Modern, and most recently, Gordon Ramsay. The message is clear: If you are opening a non-Italian fine dining restaurant in New York, the odds of a three-star review from Frank Bruni are slim. If the restaurant is French or French-influenced, the odds go down to near zero.

The odds against earning four stars are even worse. Frank Bruni has awarded four stars to no restaurants that opened during his tenure. He did review one four-star restaurant that was not a re-review: Per Se, which opened before Bruni started, but which no other Times critic had yet reviewed. With Per Se’s clone, The French Laundry, regularly appearing on lists of the world’s greatest restaurants, the decision was practically made for him. To have awarded anything less than four stars to Per Se would have taken Bruni’s credibility to the breaking point.

Even at Per Se, Bruni’s award of four stars seemed almost regretful. What finally persuaded him? Of all things, the vegetable tasting—surely Per Se’s least often ordered menu option. He also complained of ostentation, and a menu “too intent on culinary adventure or too highfalutin in its presentation and descriptions of dishes.” Where, if not here, would culinary adventure be expected? Where, if not here, would “highfalutin” presntation be acceptable, if not indeed demanded?

Bruni’s reviews of fine dining restaurants are full of comments suggesting he is hostile to the genre. The food at Cafe Gray is “fussy”; at The Modern, “over-thought and overwrought”; at Alto, “something too restrained”; at Gilt, the chef “sometimes doesn’t know when to pull back, pipe down and let superior food speak for itself”; at Gordon Ramsay, “low-key loveliness…in place of big excitement.”

His brutal demotions of Alain Ducasse and Bouley are especially telling. Ducasse was done in by an out-of-order toilet and a slightly snooty sommelier. The Bouley review dragged in a bunch of unrelated gossip about David Bouley’s other activities, and wondered whether his heart was still in it—that, notwithstanding a comment about “serious talent in the kitchen.”

The after-effects of Bruni’s smackdowns have ranged from devastating to irrelevant. At Ducasse and Gilt, chefs were fired, and Ducasse closed altogether. The Modern and Bouley still seem to be doing just fine. But to the extent Frank Bruni’s reviews have any influence, anyone who dares open a serious non-Italian fine dining restaurant is taking an almost unacceptable risk. The city’s principal restaurant critic will probably not acknowledge excellence even if he trips over it.