Great post, Fred, and I could not agree more. Historically, the American restaurant scene has been marked by keen competition and constant flux. Many of the restaurants you mention should be gone or at least reinvented by now, but are being kept alive by noveau riche with more money than taste. (Old money does not plonk down that kind of money for dinner. That is how it got to be old money.) The food in Keller’s restaurants (which is apparently no longer the same thing as “Keller’s food” at either Per Se or French Laundry) is cutesy, busy and without soul. The highlighted agnolotti dish, despite Wells’s praise, is a symptom of the disease. Agnolotti or ravioli stuffed with squash and marscapone or another cheese is a local, everyday dish in northern Italy that picks up fresh at one’s pasta shop on the way home from work, and one that some chefs will add to their menus as specials in season. It does not need to be composed (on a plate resembling nothing so much as collected table scraps) with baroque garbage like peeled Concord grapes. It needs nothing, or a small dollop of butter at most. Anything more is overkill, and Per Se diners are paying somebody in the kitchen to peel those grapes!
At that price, a zero-tolerance policy of service faux pas should be in effect, but apparently is not. (Restaurants dispensing attitude are better left to the French, who have had centuries more experience and a genuine aptitude for them as well!) While Italy has been touched by Adria’s “turn it all to foam” cuisine and other trendy stuff, one can still find an endless array of ristoranti, trattorie and osterie where five-to-seven-course meals comprised of fresh, simple, seasonal ingredients, dishes that never heap on extra and irrelevant ingredients, dishes that highlight one or two non-competing flavors rather than partially obscuring five, can be had for 25-100 euros. The same is possible anywhere on earth, and America stands alone in not insisting upon it. Here is hoping that you are right about Fort Sumter. Too often, what starts as fresh and innovative is ending up as ugly and greedy. The excess and surcharging reminds me of Barry Wine’s expense-account restaurant of yesteryear, The Quilted Giraffe. White truffles shaved on your black truffles shaved on your caviar, for a price. It takes balls to charge $325 for a meal and then start surcharging. Keller’s food has never been good enough to command that…
There is a group in Houston that owns several restaurants that sell wine at retail prices. Their food is good and their wine lists are pretty legit. A few years ago they had bottles of Dom for 140. They are always jammed as well. It is a very refreshing change from our local king of the steakhouses, pappas bros where a bottle of spottswoode is like $400.
It can be quite infuriating to plan a special evening and have it turn out this way. My recent dinner at Jean-Georges, and the next night at Marea, was completely different. But this past weekend my wife and I joined another couple at our favorite restaurant in Orlando, a fairly high-end place that generally delivers. It failed on so many levels as to defy logic, fortunately we were with very close friends and enjoyed our time together and chuckled over the restaurant’s issues on that evening. Waiter looked disheveled and had spotty facial hair. Slow service. Poor wine service on a mature Bordeaux that I brought. Had to ask for bread. Dinners came out while appetizers were still being consumed. And the desserts were pretty bad. When you are paying that kind of money, the restaurant needs to over-perform even over what might be high expectations.
I see that, now that you point it out, Tom. Sorry for posting before the first cup of coffee. Is there room for two complimentary backlash discussions?
I would love to be a fly on the wall at the restaurant. Pete Wells is among the least respected NYT restaurant reviewers, maybe the least respected, in a long line of Times reviewers that contains some real superstars. This piece seems to me to be one of the better things that he has written, but I am sure that it is subject to differing opinions. The real question is whether the downgrade will have any impact on Per Se’s client base, and thus, on Keller. I could well imagine the clients rallying around Keller and encouraging him to refute Wells. That should not happen in the real world, of course, and ideally, Ian has it right, but given the heat that Keller has taken for food prices, wine prices, corkage fees and reservation practices, among other beefs, that seem to have gone unheeded, I wonder if the Wells frontal assault will not be rationalized away as well…
Regarding your Bay area question, I had an amazing experience at Saison. Really inventive and interesting and delicious food. Cool atmosphere. Great wine service. Pricey but really awesome.
Regarding Per Se, I’ve never really felt the love. Something about the supplements on a meal like that always irked me. And I’ve always felt the service was cold. My last experience there was a few years back. We had the private room for my friends 50th birthday. He brought 2 bottles in accordance with their corkage policy. We also bought several bottles off the list. Not knowing their two bottle limit, I had also “foolishly” brought a birth year 50 year old port to drink with dessert. They gave us such a hard time about opening it, that it nearly ruined the whole experience. Good service at a 4 start restaurant means going with the flow and making sure everyone has a great time. That to me is the difference I’ve always found between Per Se and EMP. At EMP they make you feel like the most special person in the room no matter what the occasion. I’m really interested to see how it goes as they are completely flipping the script on their menu next week.
the ship has largely sailed on this type of dining, and maybe emp’s current metamorphosis will prove to be a step in the right direction for the industry
Ugh. So I can get ripped off at the other end of the spectrum? “share” plates priced like main dishes, overpriced cocktails and BTG lists, a bottle list that was put together without enough capital or connections to include anything interesting, uncomfortable seating, tables too close together, cheap ingredients masquerading as high-end food (yay, fluke! yay, vegetarian menus!)? No reservations or long waits even with reservations, getting rushed, in and out in 80 minutes?
Man, I’ll take spending too much at a “fine dining” restaurant over that kind of experience any day of the week. And I’m not alone - the trend is for more fine dining, not less. We hit the bottom last year but the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. Good food without a good setting and good pacing is like Joshua Bell in a DC Metro station.
I agree with this to an extent. On the one hand, no one needs “temples of cuisine” with needless pomp and circumstance, married with heavy-handed nouvelle cuisine. But on the other hand, I do think we’ll see a return to the median for the high-end/innovative/progressive places. And I think you’re already seeing evidence of this. I think you’ll see fewer 37-courses-of-one-bite-amuses type meals, fewer parlor tricks, etc. – and more of a return to 8-10-course meals, with the same innovation, but with a little more comfort. EMP’s latest evolution may be evidence of this. I also suspect you’ll see places take the best parts of the progressive/hipster places–more casual service, fun atmosphere, non-stuffiness–but also start to adopt some of the genuine “hospitality,” spaced out tables, legit wine lists, etc. of the traditional high-end standard bearers.
One thing that’s interesting to me about the Per Se 2 stars (and I reserve judgment on whether that’s warranted, given that it’s been ~3 years since my last visit, when it was clearly 4 stars), is that it for the first time in a decade leaves open the question of which is the by-acclimation standard for ultra-high-end dining in NY — i.e., the place where you take the foreign CEO visiting NY who wants to experience the best of what NY has, but without trying to conduct business at a counter with old school hip hop playing. Maybe it’s back to Bernardin and JG – what’s old is new again – although it seems to me that this is actually a space that could use a new entrant, especially given that Bernardin/Per Se still seem to be bursting at the seams nightly, notwithstanding any “trends” toward more casual dining.
david
i must have really missed what i was trying to say here. you really think you will find the “new” iteration of emp
" “share” plates priced like main dishes, overpriced cocktails and BTG lists, a bottle list that was put together without enough capital or connections to include anything interesting, uncomfortable seating, tables too close together, cheap ingredients masquerading as high-end food" ???
in the case of emp, no more history lessons from your waiter.
in the case of per se, possibly losing a touch of the formality which many find uncomfortable, and wine pricing to merely astronomical levels, and the upselling of the foie and the caviar
there’s room for restaurants of all levels. with openings like g kreuther and vaucluse et al it would seem there’s plenty of what you are looking for. plus, you’ll have robuchon back pretty soon, although you’ll have to get yourself way downtown!
Yeah, I think we’re saying the same thing. My point is that the auxiliary aspects of the restaurant experience - the setting, the service, the pacing, are just as essential to how you experience food as the food itself. Warner LeRoy was, in a sense, right - if you get everything but the food right, that counts for a lot, because that so deeply influences how you experience the food when you eat it. Like label bias for an expensive wine. So to really hit the highest of highs, a restaurant needs to both have great food AND a great everything else - setting, service, etc - that “primes the pump”, as it were, for the experience of the food.
This doesn’t mean that every restaurant needs to have the décor of Bouley, just as you can have a great concert hall that doesn’t look like the Palais Garnier. I’m speaking of something that’s functional, not decorative.
For a while, there were a lot of folks pushing the theory that all that matters was the food - that the customer experience was either expensive frippery (see e.g. David Chang) or an unnecessary indulgence that detracted from the chef’s vision (EMP and all the other extreme tasting menu temples). That’s FINALLY changing. As much as I hate the LeRoy-ian Major Food Group places, I think they probably stemmed the tide. But you still have an overhang of places like Wildair which might as well be serving chicken fingers. And I think the food press hasn’t caught on to a change in sentiment, largely because in the last decade its skewed younger and less experienced and includes more people who simply don’t have the money to eat well when its not on the company dime. If you live in Bushwick and only go a proper fine dining restaurant twice a year, what do you know about what food can be.
I work in FiDi, so I eat down here almost as much as I do uptown (though down here, I’m generally eating solo at the bar, and uptown is with my wife on weekends). It blows my mind what restaurants can get away with down here.
