Food: Meyer Strikes Back

Dara writes:

Readers of the previous post will know that I found Frank Bruni's three-star review of Danny Meyer's restaurants Eleven Madison Park and The Modern a back-handed compliment at best. Even the title, "Two Upstarts Don Their Elders' Laurels," suggests a kind of karmic balancing: Bruni can feel good about feeling good about Meyer only if Bruni is simultaneously dissing Meyer.

Well, Alan and Michael Stillman, who own the Smith & Wollensky restaurant group that controls such New York establishments as Park Avenue Cafe, Cite, and The Post House, have offered a timely reminder to New York Times' readers that Danny Meyer's restaurants deserve three stars. The Stillmans have taken out an ad in this week's "Dining" section that reads:

"Congratulations on the First Six-Star Review in the History of The New York Times."

Now finally someone can do his math.

Food: Latest Salvos in the Bruni-Meyer War

Dara writes:

Recently, I wrote here about my interest in the latest book on the food business, Setting the Table, by acclaimed New York restaurateur Danny Meyer, he of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack fame. Mr. Meyer is brilliant. I love his medium rare tuna at Union Square as much as I do the cheeseburger at the Shack, even when one hour of waiting outside in a line precedes its arrival. James and I pigged out at Blue Smoke, another of his boites, and I could not get the blue cheese dip with house-made barbecue chips out of my mind.

Enter Frank Bruni, chief restaurant critic for The New York Times. In a city on which Mr. Meyer has had such a positive impact, one would think its chief paper's chief food critic would be hospitable to the man. No such luck. As Meyer admits in his book, he was very frustrated to receive only two stars from Bruni for his most ambitious restaurants yet: Eleven Madison Park, the temple to haute cuisine on 24th Street, and The Modern, a sleek accompaniment to the Picassos in the MOMA.

Basically, Bruni thinks Meyer is more in the business of food than into food. He's no Mario Batali. Bruni feels Meyer's restaurants are formulaic; he thinks there is something weird about the fact that servers and hostesses smile and seem genuinely interested in what you are eating and how you are doing. I have never quite gotten Mr. Bruni's beef, but I was very surprised to read in last week's New York Times' "Dining" section that he was re-reviewing Eleven Madison Park and The Modern, and in fact, giving each three stars. Well this is news, I thought.

No such luck. It appears Herr Bruni still has it out for Monsieur Meyer: Brutus, I mean Bruni, awards Modern and Madison with three stars, only to strip two other of Meyer's restaurants, Union Square and Gramercy, of their lustre! The nerve of this guy! To wit:

Every time I left Eleven Madison Park, it was with at least one dish, and usually several, lingering in my thoughts and prompting me to rave to somebody the next day. That’s not the case with most restaurants, and that hasn’t been my experience in recent years at Gramercy Tavern or Union Square Cafe. They may have the more steadfast retinues of loyal suitors. But the crowns rest uneasily — and perhaps unjustly — on their heads.

That is a back-handed compliment if ever I have heard one.

Speaking of Union Square Cafe, I dined there yesterday on the occasion of a cousin's 40th birthday. It was a girls' lunch: several female relatives, my mother, and I. The servers were as kind as ever, but I dare say the food was a tad undistinguished. For instance, our appetizer of fried calamari was, horrors, mushy, when crispiness is the essential element of this dish. I ordered the yellow-fin tuna burger and it tasted fresh, gingery, and oniony, but I did not swoon--not as I had over a Greenmarket strawberry crumble I devoured at the Cafe over the summer.

Danny Meyer makes a lot in his book about the regrettable layout of USC, how it is below street level, plain, and with airplane cabin-sized restrooms. I typically find the room pleasant, but yesterday I did feel a bit as though I were dining in the cabin of a ship; I kind of kept wanting to peek out the window for air. Yet, if one of Meyer's goals is to sustain the room as a canteen for the publishing industry, he still achieves that, as I ran into an editor with whom I had worked at Talk magazine, back when it still existed.

My lack of a rave for yesterday does not trouble me too much. James and I prefer the bar at night, anyway. Although, the last time we checked it out--a Monday, 9:30pm or so--there was a 45 minute wait...for the bar! Despite Bruni's hemming and hawing, I don't think Meyer has much to fret about.

Food: Uptown

Dara writes:

Because of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday today, I stayed for an abridged schedule at the literary agency where I work in Harlem. Many of the area's stores closed for the holiday, including the Original SoupMan, where I eat. I eat here not because this is a franchise of the shop portrayed in my favorite TV show, "Seinfeld," or because I particularly relish soup. I eat here because it is the only good-looking eatery in the immediate vicinity of 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue. If there is a reader who can correct me, I would love it.

My friend Ruth and I, spurned by our soup craving, shopped in the neighborhood Associated Supermarket for lunch goods. Lunch for two cashed in at under ten dollars, which is roughly what a "combo meal" for one--large soup, grilled panini, and a fountain drink--would have cost at SoupMan. The combo meal is pretty good. I have tried an Italian wedding soup--little pearl noodles, meat dumplings, spinach--which I usually love (especially at P&W's Sandwich Shop near Columbia University) that was grotesquely over-salted. I almost felt I could not drink for three days lest I bloat like a balloon and pop. But SoupMan flavors its butternut squash soup with freshly grated carrots and orange zest, and the grilled cheese panini is passable. Less so the fruit and bread that accompany the meal. The banana might have been sitting by the boiler in a bodega for two weeks, so soft is it, while the bread is so hard I could sign my credit card receipt on it. The woman who owns this franchise is nice but rings customers out at a rather lethargic pace.

So it is not as if I experience Le Bernardin and today had to make do with Blimpie. But Blimpie is just about what I got at the neighborhood Associated Supermarket. I did save money there--on 99 cent whole wheat pitas, flip-top cans of Bumble Bee tuna (because we couldn't ascertain if the agency had a can opener), small jar of Hellmanns, Vlasic dills, and two bananas. My friend keeps kosher, so alas we could not spring for the Oscar Mayer salami.

I have heard that development is happening in many parts of Harlem. I would say that not a ton is going on around 135th Street near Harlem Hospital, although apparently Make My Cake around 139th Street serves a wicked red velvet cake that beats canned tuna any day of the week, especially holidays.