[Pigging by Wilfrid: December 28, 2007]
Best of New York 2007: L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon - Craft -Hakata Tonton - Hill Country. Honorable mentions: The Monday Room - Grayz - Blue Hill - Ssam Bar.
Forgive me for repeating the obvious, but this has been the year of grazing. Grazing...
...both in the sense of moving informally through a disorganized series of - well, snacks - and in the sense of getting as close to the experience of pulling ingredients from the soil with your teeth as restaurateurs have been able to devise. Snacks. Yes, tapas, small plates, intercourses, whatever you please - "Oh, the menu isn't really divided into appetizers and mains, some of the dishes are quite small, some are for sharing." Right, randomly organized snacks.
This is hardly revelatory. Peeling open the sticky pages of his notebook, Captain Bruni of the Times scribbles about the way in which "low-key charm usurped flashy drama, small was big, and idiosyncratic shrines replaced haute temples as go-to destinations for gastronomes in the know." Learned citation.
One person's charm, of course, is another person's perfunctory chaos. There are no reservations, no table cloths, perhaps a seat at the bar after an hour, and no we don't offer knives and forks, and if the music is too loud, we can turn it up for you.
The year 2007 in Manhattan sent us all to hipsterdom in a handbasket. Midtown aspires to the condition of Williamsburg: indeed, the best theater district/midtown opening this year was Grayz, serving delicious food but in such wilfully gauche fashion that Times laid accusations of "befuddlement" and threw it a cursory one star.
Bar snacks? Cocktail titbits? Gray Kunz's famous short ribs? Whatever, just don't think Grayz is just another restaurant. "Restaurant" itself is a dirty word. If it's new, it's a tapas bar - probably Basque or Catalunyan at that - or a lounge, or a gastropub, or a bierkeller, or a farm-house. At Back Forty, a relaxed neighborhood retreat on Avenue B, there is no list of entrees - rather a "core" of the menu.
It's as if the very idea of a "restaurant" serving starters, mains and dessert, threatens us by forcing us to sit up straight, brush our hair, wear clothes without noticeable holes, concentrate long enough to make a choice from the menu. "Talk to the hand", we say instead, and sprawl on couches or slump over bars, picking snacks of unpredictable size and quality for the kitchen to send out all at once or in any order it likes. And we can keep our little hats firmly pulled down to our ears, or pull our hoods over our heads, keep our earbuds plugged in, prod our cellphones and raspberries, and chug beer from a bottle.
Now, while Cap'n Bruni recognizes the symptoms, he doesn't offer the diagnosis.
First: demographics. The actual age-group to which new restaurants appeal is getting younger every year. More importantly, the virtual age-group is also expanding - being the group of people who regard themselves, whatever their real age, as forever twenty-seven. Second: economics. That actual age-group rejects not only the trappings of upscale dining, but also the notion of a fifty dollar entree. At the same time, leases and other overheads continue to climb. The solution? Easy - sell someone three snacks at $16 each, and you've practically sold them a fifty dollar plate without them even noticing. However louche these new joints, I don't notice checks dipping below three figures too often.
Decline Of The Best
What's more, this nostalgie de la boue , this urge to slum while eating fancy, has consequences. It can be no coincidence that the standard of upscale dining in Manhattan, which has been declining since the late 1990s, is now almost in freefall. I had optimistically hoped, around 2005/2006, that the talented work of Daniel Humm at Eleven Madison Park - a proper restaurant in every sense, but one of real, fresh appeal - together with the stunning reappearance of Paul Liebrandt at Gilt - maybe the most ambitious and exciting restaurant to open here in ten years - signalled a return to sophisticated dining values.
Then Frankula of the Times, convinced that Liebrandt's cuisine was a smoke-and-mirrors of foams and soils, sunk his fangs deep into Gilt's young neck, and Liebrandt moved on. The biggest question of 2008 is where he'll resurface.
Meantime, along with Humm, the upscale banner contiunued to be hoisted by an increasingly over-familiar and over-stretched old guard: Boulud and Bouley, Vongerichten and Ripert (oh, and the phantom of Keller at Per Se, I suppose). I continue to avoid Restaurant Daniel, where the cheerful facsimile of fine dining is best experienced on someone else's dollar. Bouley was a regular retreat for several years, but not in 2007: it offers the somewhat dispirited choice of ordering from a carte so familiar one could sing it to the tune of "After the Ball is Over" (return from Chiang Mai again?) or the chef's surprise tasting, which can take four to five hours to consume.
But I did eat at Le Bernardin this year, Jean-Georges too - very recently - and it requires the rosiest of rose-colored glasses to believe that these are still terrific restaurants. Good, yes, and the Jean-Georges lunch is still a bargain, but not consistent, amuses to digestif, top-level dining experiences. The closest I came to that in 2007 was at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, where at least the less animated offerings were prepared with skill, and the best dishes were truly outstanding.
L'Atelier's crispy tête de veau remains my dish of the year.
Another restaurant where you can put together something resembling a superb meal, in a kind of farm-house meets ocean liner ambience, is the veteran Craft. Better than ever under chef Damon Wise, if you can tolerate the affectation of family-style dining, the serve-yourself approach to plating, and chirpy service, there are many high spots. I think the egg'n'snails (the menu description is less blunt) was my favorite dish of 2006, and it's still good.
Also pretending to be a farm-house, although the farm itself is a few hours away, Blue Hill in Greenwich Village has not suffered from the loss of chef-de-cuisine Juan Cuevas: former sous chef Trevor Kunk turned out one of my most memorable multi-course tastings of the year, so good it even took my mind off being told at every turn that what I was putting in my mouth had been dug up (or laid or slaughtered) only that very morning.
An honorable mention for two long dinners at Aquavit, a restaurant with a well-established proposition still executed well. Otherwise, perhaps nothing is more suggestive of the grim future than Daniel Boulud busying himself with a wine-charcuterie bar uptown and a burger joint on the Bowery, and Alain Ducasse threatening a replica of his Paris bistro Benoit in the old LCB Brasserie Rachou space, and a wine bar of his own, Adour. So much for water sommeliers, $200 menus and a choice of heirloom pens to sign the check.
Disappointments
While WD-50 continued to steer a confident course between experiment and satisfaction, the biggest disappointment of the year must have been Tailor, the curiosity unveiled by former WD-50 pastry chef Sam Mason - and not least because of the breathless pre-publicity somehow engendered during the restaurant's seemingly endless construction. Desperate to be loungy, sexy and cool, the food somehow got left by the wayside - the opening proffer was a startlingly short and bewilderingly priced selection of cloyingly sweet "salty" dishes and bitterly challenging "sweets".
I have already mentioned the expensive disappointment of dinner at Jean-Georges. To the list, I'd add the unsurprising let down of Wild Salmon, already consigned to the dustbin of gastronomy - a restaurant where concept trumped anything resembling successful execution; Telepan, which fell short of high expectations; and Ditch Plains, which on a recent visit was deeply mediocre.
Delightful Depths
It really only remains to call the "casual-quirky" roll: those joints which, while desperately avoiding being cast as restaurants-proper, were providing reliably the best dining in this city this year.
Hakata Tonton: a recent opening and in many ways the most lovable. Delicious pig's feet cooked some thirty ways and served in a small bare Greenwich Village former sushi bar.
Hill Country: for all its ersatz Texan gimmickry, New York's outstanding barbecue.
Momofuku Ssam Bar: Not that Mouthfuls member in good standing David Chang needs any more praise, but despite the crowds and the waits and the occasional weirdness, credit for an ever-changing menu of great interest. And the current "front-of-house" (or in-the-scrimmage) team make getting seated less painful than it might be.
Grayz: Currently getting Gray Kunz's devoted attention, so execution is exceptional. I hope ambition grows and the menu expands.
Graffiti: Tiny, cramped, uncomfortable but caring, with food which is sometimes truly odd - seaweed pizza - but improbably comforting. Exemplary level wine-pricing too.
The Monday Room: Public's talented chef Brad Farmerie manages to sneak out small portions of imaginative, classy food - often offal - to this hidden back room with a really notable wine selection.
Pamplona: Where Alex Ureña has added tapas and bocadillos and a brilliantly rich hamburger to his formal repertoire.
Maze: Another incomprehensible dining proffer - a Gordon Ramsey operation squatting in part of the bar at The London - but you get food from the Gordon Ramsey kitchen, laden with truffles and foie, for prices which would (and should) embarrass 'wichcraft.
And A Toast
Midway through this grey inter-holiday week, when life can seem especially meaningless (and this is turning out to be a particularly grim and bloody holiday season), let us scratch our heads and try to remember the derivation of "Wassail!" as we raise a flute to old friends, the stayers, the survivors, those we can't in all conscience re-review every two months.
The guys at Tides, that LES seafood gem - and especial thanks to Steven and Allen who encouraged this Pink Pig project.
Hemant and Suvir re-inventing Devi. The great Ali at the Kabab Café on Steinway Street. Marco Canora, maintaining Hearth with one hand and nurturing Insieme with the other. Mouthfuls member Sarma Melngailis, defying the doubters at Pure Food And Wine. And the fine people at Birdie's, at Pedro's by the Manhattan Bridge, Sugiyama himself, the denizens of the Ball Fields, the owners and pourers at Jimmy's Corner and Manitoba's and Duke's and Lava Gina and everyone, readers and Mouthfuls members too.
Look out, here comes '08.
