Review Recap: The Redhead

With today’s one-star review of The Redhead, Frank Bruni’s tenure as restaurant critic is finally over. Why did he end with a one-star place, when he could have reviewed anything? I can only guess that this is the kind of restaurant where Bruni will be eating for fun, once he’s no longer paid to do it. Reviewing the three- and four-star places always seemed like a duty to him, not a joy.

Now more than ever, diners find principled, distinctive cooking in places where they wouldn’t have expected it before: dessert trucks, baseball stadiums, postage-stamp storefronts, wine bars, taverns and cocktail lounges. In fact the Redhead was mostly a tavern and cocktail lounge during that span of Thursday-only dinners, which exemplified the possibility of terrific eating with untraditional trappings and captured the sense of gastronomic serendipity that defines this culinary moment.

With its first-come-first-served seating policy and its televisions showing sporting events behind the bar, the Redhead speaks to the moment’s casual ethos. And it underscores the extent to which the East Village has become a center of gravity for young chefs intent on bold flavors. They clearly feed off of one another, a loose network of validation and motivation.

This was one of the most positive one-star reviews that Bruni has ever filed, but it does underscore one of the worst failures of his tenure. Most of his one-star reviews were insults. His last three one-star reviews — Spice Market, Bar Artisanal, and Monkey Bar — were negative. Those reviews create the perception that one-star restaurants are bad. I’ll bet the owners of The Redhead are getting condolence calls today, which is clearly not what Bruni intended.

Review Preview: The Redhead

Record to date: 9–3.

Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews The Redhead in the East Village, bringing his five-year tenure to a close.

The Skinny: First, we have a little catching up to do. Before we went on vacation, we took a guess at Bruni’s last three reviews. We were right about just one of them: four stars for Eleven Madison Park. We missed the chance to issue our prediction on Union Square Cafe—a pity, as we knew it had to be two stars the instant we heard about it.

He didn’t review DBGB, and it turns out he’s skipping Marea, as well. That last one’s strange: Bruni taking a pass on an upscale Italian place? Is there a story waiting to be told?

So we come to The Redhead, a fine neighborhood place, but hardly an impressive choice for the final review. The one time we visited, it struck us as the quinessential one-star place—in a good way. When Frank Bruni takes pen in hand, two stars can never be ruled out, but we have trouble imagining how he would make the case for it.

The Prediction: We predict that lame-duck Frank will award one star to The Redhead.

The Best of Bruni

As we count down the days to Frank Bruni’s exit, it’s time to look back on the best and worst of his tenure. This post will focus on his greatest hits. Another, dedicated to his failures, is available here.

Bruni’s best reviews were his smackdowns. It’s easy to write an entertaining bad review, but describing excellence requires a depth of knowledge that Bruni didn’t have. He couldn’t really explain persuasively why things were great; he came alive when they were awful. His other successes came when he broke the mold of the conventional review format, and I’ve selected a few of those examples, too.

Here, then, are Bruni’s 10 greatest hits:

Click to read more ...

Review Previews: DBGB, Marea, Eleven Madison Park

Record to date: 8–3

We’ll be away for the next two weeks, and most likely will not be able to post our Review Previews in real time, so we’re posting them now.

Bruni has three reviews remaining. What will they be?

1. Marea is a definite: there’s no way Bruni would pass up an upscale Italian place that opened on his watch.
2. Eater.com reported that Bruni has been spoted three times recently at Eleven Madison Park. He wouldn’t be there so often in the twilight of his tenure unless he’s working up a re-review.
3. The last one’s something of a wild card, but among places that must be reviewed (and a Boulud restaurant clearly fits this description), we are fairly certain that DBGB is the oldest outstanding.

Bruni has already reviewed Eleven Madison Park twice (two stars; 2/23/2005 and three stars; 1/10/2007). A promotion to four is the only conceivable reason to review it again. He has not named a new four-star restaurant since Masa in December 2004. The 4½-year gap is the longest in Times history, a record he set in the middle of last year. We and others believe that he’s itching to crown one more.

Unfortunately, that will leave poor Marea with three stars, as Bruni isn’t going to canonize two restaurants in under a month, when in almost five years he found none at all. We don’t think Marea is a four-star restaurant in any event, but given Bruni’s love-affair with Italian cuisine we thought he just might pull the trigger until we heard he was taking another hard look at Eleven Madison. (If the 11MP review doesn’t come through, then Mike White and Chris Cannon could still have a chance.)

Finally, DBGB: Most reviews we’ve seen (including our own) have been slightly less enthusiastic about this place than Bar Boulud at Lincoln Center, where Bruni awarded two stars. We therefore believe that DBGB will be rated a notch lower, at one star.

In summary, our predictions are: one star for DBGB, three stars for Marea, and four stars for Eleven Madison Park. Obviously, it’s possible that Bruni’s final reviews will include one or two other places, but we’re positive that Marea will be among the three.

Corton

Note: Corton closed in July 2013, after the chef, Paul Liebrandt, opened a competing (and less expensive) restaurant, The Elm, in Williamsburg. Liebrandt’s partner, Drew Nieportent, said that Corton could not survive while the chef was selling the same food at half the price across the river.

*

We’ve been big fans of Corton since the day it opened, but our enthusiasm was tinged with regret that Chef Paul Liebrandt wasn’t turning out the same eye-popping cuisine that wowed us at Gilt. But given the reviews at Gilt (not favorable), Liebrandt and owner Drew Nieporent clearly had to do something different here.

Now that Frank Bruni is out of the way, and three stars secured, the real Paul Liebrandt is coming into full bloom. Corton was a great restaurant when we visited last November, an even better one in February, and it is better still today. On Saturday night, we saw dishes that started to remind us of the best at Gilt, though the cooking here is more disciplined, the judgments more refined than they were at the earlier restaurant.

On a Saturday evening in mid-summer, Nieporent wasn’t in the house (not that he should be), and our favorite sommelier seemed to have departed, but we recognized most of the service staff, and Liebrandt was of course in the kitchen. We ordered the three-course prix fixe, which has edged up to $85 from $77 last year, but with amuse courses included it felt like a tasting menu.

Time is short today (I am getting ready to go away for two weeks), so I’ll present the photos with minimal descriptions.

Canapés included quail eggs with caviar (above left) and variations on the usual duo that we’ve seen in the past (above right). The technical precision of the quail eggs especially impressed us.

We had a quartet of amuse-bouches, all astonishing, with the highlight a foie gras mousse (bottom right in the above photos).

“From the Garden” (above left) has been a menu fixture from the beginning, a salad that could double as a still life. The foie gras with beets (above right) has become a sphere, rather than the sliced terrine it was before.

Cod was a beautifully-conceived dish, with three separate sides, but it had rested in the kitchen too long and had cooled by the time it reached us. We sent back a risotto (ice cold) for reheating, but accepted the fish as-is (it would have had to be re-made).

I also felt that Madai (below), a Japanese Sea Bream, was not quite warm enough, though it certainly wasn’t cold, as the cod had been. The plating was a work of art, and I almost wonder if the fish was left sitting while the artists in Liebrandt’s kitchen painted this masterpiece.

The Madai came with two sides, a preparation of the tail (above left) that I cannot begin to surprise, and gnocchi (above right), both excellent.

After a pre-dessert (above left), we shared the cheese course (above right), a terrific brioche (below left), and the usual blizzard of petits-fours (below right).

The wine list remains recession-priced, with plenty of good options in the 40s and 50s, though you can spend a lot more, if you choose. Service was wonderful, and meal was served at a steady pace from beginning to end—an improvement over our past visits.

It’s a pity the main course wasn’t served warm enough, but as Corton continues to improve we have no doubt that this, too, will be solved. We went home deeply satisfied.

Corton (239 West Broadway between Walker & White Streets, TriBeCa)

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

Gordon Ramsay's Maze at the London

Soothsayers have been predicting the demise of Gordon Ramsay at the London, but for now it is alive and well. We visited Maze, the casual front room, on Friday night, and it was reasonably close to full. The main dining room appeared to be better than half full—not bad for a summer weekend.

None of this changes the fact that Gordon Ramsay is completely off the radar in New York. The restaurant took a critical drubbing when it opened 2½ years ago, and I suspect it is surviving on visitor traffic alone. I cannot remember the last local review, blog entry or message board post. It probably wasn’t within the last year.

We’ve visited the main dining room twice (here, here), finding it on both occasions better than the critics did. The Michelin inspectors agreed too, awarding two stars. Like many upscale restaurants, Gordon Ramsay has an informal front room, here dubbed “Maze,” which is meant to offer slightly less formal cuisine a more accessible à la carte price point.

Maze is a somewhat ill-defined concept. There are about a dozen small plates priced from $13–20, plus four “market specials” (essentially entrées) $20–38. The server advised that three of the small plates would make a suitable meal, but they come in widely varying sizes, and it’s tough to tell what you’re getting. We decided to share two of those and two entrées.

The atmosphere is tough to decipher. There are no tablecloths, tables are close together, and the restaurant shares space with the bar, where cocktails are $17. Yet, service is rather formal, with a flotilla of sauces and broths applied tableside, and a wine list where you’ll struggle to find much below $60. At least the wine comes properly chilled.

If dinner had ended with the appetizers, I might have been tempted to award three stars. A terrine of tête de veau (above left) with caramelized sweetbreads and green bean salad was superb. So was a silken filet of fluke (above right), in a portion that could very well have been an entrée.

But duck breast (above left) was rubbery and a pork chop (above right) was over-cooked. Both dishes were fine in their conception, but the same heavy hand at the meat station had ruined them.

We got plenty of attention when we sat down, and the food came out reasonably promptly, but after the restaurant filled up we felt a bit neglected. The space is pleasant, and if the rest of the food were as good as our appetizers we would feel more confident about returning.

Maze at the London Hotel (151 W. 54th St. between Sixth & Seventh Avenues)

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

Review Recap: Table 8

I haven’t been Frank Bruni’s biggest fan, but I have to give credit where it’s due: the man knows how to deliver a smackdown!

Today, Frank uncorked the final zero-star review of his tenure, giving the bagel to Govind Armstrong’s Table 8 in the Cooper Square Hotel. (Frank has only three reviews left, and as goose eggs are a rarity, it’s safe to assume there won’t be any more of them.)

For Frank, as always, restrooms are the index to a restaurant’s success:

In its opening weeks, [Table 8] rewarded anyone who went to the bathroom with a glass of sparkling wine.

At least that’s what happened the first time I dined there, when my companions and I noticed bubbly for the taking in a chamber beside the sinks.

What to make of this? Freud surely would have had one answer. We had another: diners were being congratulated for actually managing to reach this remote, ill-marked destination, a Herculean feat involving an instinctive left here, a speculative right there, a hunch, a leap of faith, a descent into the underworld and a fearless crossing of the river Styx.

That tortuous journey — only the final phrase amounts to exaggeration — isn’t just a mood killer; it’s a metaphor, too. The people behind Table 8 have given too little thought to logistics and comfort. They were inattentive when they put the place together, and they’re inattentive still. The acoustics are insane, the absurdly narrow lanes of foot traffic clog, the bread isn’t reliably fresh and the filet mignon on a recent night had the stringy texture and stew-y taste of something that would only barely pass muster on a tray table in coach.

A hard-to-find bathroom might be forgiven if the food were better, but alas it’s not:

I was struck by how overworked and overdressed many dishes were. A deep puddle of excess liquid was left behind once the grilled octopus with celery heart salad, tomato and Moroccan olives was gone, and a similar puddle outlasted duck sausage with grilled radicchio, pine nuts, grilled peaches and a watercress salad. I would have traded all those accessories for more sausage with more of a crisp-soft contrast than this one had.

On a subsequent night, the torn pasta that served as a bed for pan-fried sweetbreads was mushy. Another pasta was even worse: a gluey clump of linguine with a combination of ricotta and lemon that might as well have been Elmer’s and Pledge.

With such condemnations as those, why does the review end with “SATISFACTORY”? Did Frank seem satisfied?

*

We’ll be traveling the next two weeks, and most likely won’t have the opportunity to post our usual “Review Preview.” I know, I know, don’t all cry at once.

We’ll be out with speculative predictions early next week.

Review Preview: Table 8

Record to date: 7–3

Just four reviews to go! Tomorrow, Frank Fantastic reviews Table 8 in the Cooper Square Hotel. We do not expect this one to be pretty. No critic yet has been smitten with this place, so the only question is: one or zero? Does Bruni have one more delicious smackdown left in him? The hour is late, so we’ll once again spare you the analysis, and take the bet on zero stars.

Southern Spice

Today’s review comes with a huge caveat: I couldn’t tell Southern and Northern Indian cuisines apart if my life depended on it. I’ve eaten plenty of Indian food, but to tell different regions apart requires a palate more discerning than mine.

If that doesn’t disqualify me, the next disclosure surely will: before last Saturday, I had never been to Flushing, unless you count the airport or a Mets game. The city’s widely-acknowledged center of ethnic food was completely unknown to me.

Two Flushing neophytes were drawn there by a rave review of Southern Spice’s biriyani in the Times $25 & Under column. In the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema (review, photos) was smitten:

Sometimes a restaurant makes such an impression that it changes your way of thinking about an entire cuisine. Southern Spice is just such a place. While we’ve been conditioned to think of South Indian cooking as one giant collection of dosas, iddlies, and utthampams, Southern Spice flings open the doors on a half-dozen regional micro-cuisines.

That’s high praise indeed from Sietsema. Serious Eats loved it too.

We were less enthralled. We enjoyed the sights and sounds of Flushing, and we also enjoyed our food, especially as a full meal was just $35 before tip. But it wasn’t markedly better than our neighborhood Indian restaurant, which is ten minutes’ walk from our apartment.

We liked our first dish best: Chicken 65 ($6; above left), a house specialty. The chicken was tender, but with plenty of fire.

The Hyderbadi-style Dhum Biriyani comes in four varieties: chicken, mutton, shrimp, and vegetable. We had the Mutton Biriyani ($11; above right). We loved the rice, which had none of the clumpyness that often mars this dish, but we didn’t like having to pick inedible lamb bones out of the mix.

In Chicken Vindaloo ($9; above left), the seasoning seemed to be off. It was so mild that I wondered if Southern India had a different vidaloo recipe than I’m used to, but the menu describes it as “extremely hot.” It was less spicy than even the secondary curry dish served at most Indian restaurants (i.e. the level below vindaloo, often called “Madras”).

A comped dessert, sweet carrots with almonds (above right) was a nice treat. It would have set us back all of $3.

The restaurant has been open since last November, but as yet it has no liquor license. The décor is spare, but service was surprisingly good. I figured that a place with $6 appetizers and $11 entrées would leave us with one set of silverware for the whole meal, but they delivered a fresh place setting for every course.

We had a decent enough meal and would love to sample more. We’re just not prepared to travel two hours to get there.

*

This isn’t related to the restaurant, but I have to share the experience of walking into a Chinese market near the Flushing–Main Street LIRR station. The place was filthy, with rotting clams sitting around in unrefrigerated crates, and fish packed so tightly into their tanks that they couldn’t move. All kinds of unmentionables were for sale: pig snouts, feet and intestines, chicken feet, duck hearts, and black chickens, to name a few. Probably the nastiest offering was “miscellaneous meat,” sold for about $1 a pound and wrapped in large frozen bags.

I know there are some terrific restaurants in Flushing, but it’s one neighborhood where I wouldn’t just wander in without a prior recommendation.

Southern Spice (143–06 45th Avenue nr. Bowne Street, Flushing, Queens)

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

Perbacco

Perbacco was a routine East Village trattoria until last year, when Simone Bonelli took over as chef, and immediately started turning out creative riffs on Italian specialties. Frank Bruni awarded two stars, as he so often does. We wound up there on Friday evening after another reservation fell through. Business was brisk, but you no longer need to book a week in advance. Our 7:15 p.m. table was available on OpenTable the same afternoon.

I was seated promptly before my girlfriend arrived, but couldn’t flag down a server to order a cocktail. I couldn’t figure out why they assigned us to a tall bar table with backless stools, when many seats in the more comfortable dining room were still empty. I didn’t say anything, but after we’d ordered, they decided it was a mistake and moved us to a better table.

The menu goes on for several pages and is heavy on the antipasti and salads ($9–15). There are about half-a-dozen pastas ($13–18) and an equal number of secondi ($21–25). These prices are reasonable for the quality of the food.

After pondering our choices for a while, we decided to start with the deep-fried olives stuffed with minced meats ($9). Oops! The menu is in transition, and a couple of dishes, including that one, aren’t available yet. In lieu of that, we had the mixed antipasti ($15; below left), all excellent, of which the best was a quartet of onion gelatin ravioli served in a jar of balsamic vinegar. These delicate, quivering globules are swallowed whole, exploding in the mouth with an astonishing burst of flavor. I’d pay $15 again just for those.

The Rosette alla Speck e Bufala ($18; above right) was another remarkable creation—an orb of pasta noodles that collapses to the touch, revealing a cheesy stew of speck and bufala mozzarella.

The aged porterhouse for two ($60; above) won’t put Peter Luger out of business, but it was excellent for a non-steakhouse. Perbacco charges considerably less for it than a steakhouse would, and throws in the sides for nothing.

The service, especially early on, wasn’t quite up to the quality of Chef Bonelli’s kitchen, but it improved as the evening went on. The faux rustic space is easy on the eyes, and the food is surprisingly good.

Perbacco (234 E. 4th Street between Avenues A & B, East Village)

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