Re: Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar

Last week was so much fun, you guys! We all had a good laugh over Pete Wells' super-harsh all-Qs-no-As review of Guy Fieri's new Times Square restaurant in The New York Times.

But here's the thing: We all know the food sucks. You don't need to go sacrifice your lunch hour in order to give us another review of how terrible the food is! Unless you are coming from an original position (is the food better than expected?), then we don't need another rehashing of the deep fried crap that almost-passes for edible.

For aren't there far worse places to eat, when you think about it? Applebee's? That T.G.I.F. near Madison Square Garden? The Chinese take-out spot that gave you food poisoning? Let us move on to other atrocities instead of kicking a Fieri when its down.

That being said, enjoy this un-aired clip from Saturday Night Live this week, featuring the infamous chef. And then, you know, move out of Flavor Country if you can't stand the chicken fingers.

How's that for awkward? 

The New York Times confirmed to food website The Braiser that the party did, indeed happen. “The Times ad sales department hosted an event for clients at the restaurant last night. The event was planned two months ago,” reported The Braiser.

Mr. Fieri brought up the point when he defended himself from the Times' hate this morning on The TODAY Show. “And by the way,” Mr. Fieri said, “last night, they hosted — The New York Times hosted a 160-person party at that restaurant.”

That's 160 people who had to eat dishes described in the pages of the Times as "a plate of pale, unsalted squid rings next to a dish of sweet mayonnaise with a distant rumor of spice," "ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat," unlovable nachos and "Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders" that taste like "chewy air" rather than pretzel or awesome. Perhaps the guests drank blue cocktails that Mr. Wells wrote tasted like nuclear waste or watermelon margaritas that he found reminiscent of a "combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde."

Well, we guess this means that the ad sales team who planned the party doesn't read The New York Observer. Because we were on to the disappointing quality of Mr. Fieri's Times Square eatery back on October 2. To think, the whole situation could have been avoided if they had just listened to us.

Or if they had  just asked their own, in-house restaurant reviewer for advice when selecting restaurants.

"On Oct. 1, I placed nearly 40 calls to the restaurant. They all bounced straight to voice mail, giving me some time to wonder whether there is any point in writing about a 12-seat restaurant that serves 60 people a week," Mr. Wells wrote today. "If I have trouble getting in the door three times to do my job, how many readers will manage it even once?"

Mr. Wells may wonder how his faithful readers will manage to score a table. But if they are anything like Mr. Platt, they will get help from their tech - offspring.

"When I first called for a table, a canned voice informed me that the voice-mailbox was full. When I got the same message the next week (and the week after that), I explored a few furtive, sub-rosa options ('I’ve failed you, Platty,' said one supposed 'friend of the chef')," Mr. Platt wrote. "When those dried up, I handed the task over to my daughter, who discovered (on the website that Dad had ceased checking long ago) that Blanca would take reservations by phone on the first day of each month for dates 7 to 30 days hence. 'Okay, Dad, you’re all set,' she said after a few minutes of speed dialing, 'but don’t be late, or next month we’ll have to do this all over again.'"

Both critics basically agree--the $180, 20-something-course meal is really pretty good, if a bit rough around the edges.

We wondered whether the two critics ever bumped into each other getting off the L train at the Morgan stop, but Mr. Wells heard a Dolly Parton record during his meal, while Mr. Platt listened to Frank Sinatra on the turntable. So we suppose that means they didn't cross paths.

But the real news is that neither critic wasted too much ink explaining that spending over $200 for a 20-course dinner in Bushwick (or East Williamsburg, we lost track of what we are calling the neighborhood now) is the new normal.

Looking at the three critics' first six months on the job side-by-side, The Daily Meal's executive editor Arthur Bovino found that Mssrs. Wells, Sifton, and Bruni all reviewed the same number of restaurants. During those heady and caloric early days, Mr. Wells gave out three more stars than Mr. Bruni and fourteen more than Mr. Sifton.

"Sifton was twice as likely as Wells and five times as likely as Bruni to drop a big fat zero. Both Sifton and Bruni were almost twice as likely as Wells to give a restaurant one star," Mr. Bovino wrote.

The Daily Meal, the two-year-old food site run by former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, has also deemed Mr. Wells "the czar of the two-star review."

All told, Mr. Wells averaged 1.8 stars per restaurant while Mr. Bruni averaged 1.7 stars and Mr. Sifton averaged 1.3 stars.

Maybe the restaurants are just getting better?

For more detailed analysis—including by borough, neighborhood, and cuisine—click through to The Daily Meal.

Yes, Pete "The Punisher" Wells has focused his sights on the most humble entry in restauranteur Danny Meyer's kingdom, and also by far and away his most profitable. Usually restaurants like Shake Shack are relegated to the '$25 and Under' column of the Times that doesn't give starred-reviews to restaurants.

Yet, with Shake Shacks now all over the city—and world—maybe it was high time for the ShackBurger to get mapped by stars, as well as earn a serious critical appraisal long-removed from the various cycles of hype it has endured (which goes without mentioning the endless debate of Shake Shack's merits against those of its supposed west coast counterpart, In-N-Out Burger). But fans of the 'Shack, take note: If this is what you wished for, you got it. Because—while the shakes were hailed—Pete Wells slammed the burgers for inconsistency.

How the burger could change lives I never divined, but on occasion it was magnificent, as beefy and flavorful as the outer quarter-inch of a Peter Luger porterhouse. More often, though, the meat was cooked to the color of wet newsprint, inside and out, and salted so meekly that eating it was as satisfying as hearing a friend talk about a burger his cousin ate.

Also, beware the fried potato fetishist:

And you can get better fries just about anywhere...they are pretty awful. Freezing turns them mealy, and no amount of oil or salt can make them taste like the fresh-cut potatoes that are standard issue at some burger joints now.

Ouch. The final count? One star. Also, note the "Reccomended Dishes" portion at the bottom of his review, lined with the subtle nuance some of Shake Shack's food is apparently missing:

RECOMMENDED DISHES Hot dogs, chicken dogs, shakes, frozen custards, concretes, floats, lemonade.

Yes, you read that correctly: Excluded from that list is the ShackBurger. Read not this man the riot act, for he's just doing his job. Knowing Danny Meyer's obsessive commitment to satisfying customers, a serious assessment of the ShackBurger such as this that points to flaws in performance (as opposed to fundmental burger-build) may be the straw that breaks the burger's back, giving the process by which the ShackBurger is assembled a much-needed overhaul.

Or because Danny Meyer's going to continue to rake in cash because it's a burger joint, and maybe a high-profile burger joint, but still a burger joint: nothing will change. After all, you can't expect perfection from every short-order cook at every entry in a worldwide franchise.

Then again, a fast-food joint just got reviewed in the Times. So maybe—at least here—you can.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

via nytimes.com

The New York Times Thanksgiving Help Line, once a modest live blog manned by outgoing dining critic Sam Sifton, looks like a mission control center this year.

Due to the overwhelming volume of questions, the Dining section decided to kick off a week of aid with a print Q&A and keep the conversation going online, with the help of a new interactive template set up by Web producer Emily Weinstein.

"I guess we're overcompensating for having lost Sam," former dining editor Pete Wells wrote the Observer. (Mr. Wells, recently appointed restaurant critic, was replaced by Susan Edgerley.)

Having print and online space devoted to Thanksgiving questions helps the section touch on both the popular, perennial concerns (Will stuffing cooked inside the bird give my guests salmonella?) and the "utterly sui generis," Mr. Wells said, "like the person who asked for suggestions for incorporating smoked monkey meat into the meal."

The holiday hub includes a series of videos by "Good Appetite" columnist Melissa Clark, so there's no confusion about what she means when she says "stick the thermometer into the thickest part of the thigh."

"The funny thing about this project is that I can't figure out if it's web-first or print-first or really, what it is, period," Mr. Wells wrote.

We hope he's more decisive about Le Bernadin's paprika sauce!

News of the appointment to the post was first rumored last week by Dylan Byers at Politico; during the time between Sam Sifton's retirement and today's announcement, a number of candidates were rumored as being eyed for the job, especially the New Orleans Times-Picayune's Brett Anderson, who the Observer hears from a source familiar with the situation that he did not, in the end, want to leave New Orleans if offered the job. A spokesperson for the New York Times did not immediately confirm the rumor (The Observer will update if she does).

[UPDATE: Amanda Kludt at Eater has confirmed both appointments. She also notes: "It should be mentioned that Wells just changed his Twitter profile picture from a photo of himself to a photo of oysters and the Times removed his photo from their website." Meanwhile, the Times has filed their own post on the move, noting that Wells won't begin his duties officially until January.]

Mr. Wells has been the Times Dining editor since 2006, when he joined the paper from Details magazine, where he was an articles editor, prior to which, he was a columnist at Food & Wine for two years. In the weeks between Frank Bruni's retirement from the post in 2009 and Sam Sifton's first filing at the position, Mr. Wells filled in as dining critic for the paper, and was—infamously, gloriously—critically violent to the few restaurants he reviewed in that time. A sampling:

From a goose egg "FAIR" review of celebrated Greek chef Michael Psilakis Gus & Gabriel Gastropub: "A selection of offal and other oddities, it raises hopes that those dishes are exempt from the pub theme because they’re so delicious. Those hopes wither at the first bite of a sour chicken-liver mousse paired with a mushy terrine, and they die with a taste of tongue that seems to have passed through the flavor subtractor. (The tongue came with a dish of what the waiter said was the poaching liquid. It didn’t taste like anything, either. The only thing on that plate that did was the bread.)"

From his following filling, a goose egg "SATISFACTORY" review of Hotel Giffou, in which he found a table difficult to secure: "I was afraid that if I returned [to the host's stand] they would hit the one-hour mark and lead me to a produce crate by the dishwasher. So I stayed away."

From the filing after that, a one-star review of The Standard Grill: "We didn’t blame the overwhelmed waiter, but we did want to wrap him in a warm blanket and pack him into a cab with the names of a few restaurants that give the staff more than 30 seconds of training before sending them into battle."

Mr. Wells received some criticism for what was seen as being unduly harsh on these restaurants at the time (his final of the four filings was, indeed, a two-star review). Yet, if critical relentlessness is what Mr. Wells brings to the Times Dining table, it may not be undue: Even Mario Batali himself expressed surprised at what was perceived by some to be an overwrought and all too kind review of his big box operation in the Meatpacking District, Del Posto, to whom Sam Sifton awarded four stars (which hadn't happened for an Italian restaurant in New York City since the 70s), a restaurant whose cuisine Bloomberg critic Ryan Sutton derided as "mushy."

In other words, may Mr. Wells bring forth the critical hounds of hell on New York City's dining scene. This will likely be a great deal of fun.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Which New York Times section is responsible for this viral photo sensation, again?

In an era in which everyone’s becoming a critic, or at least a Yelper, one would think that fewer and fewer people would care what The New York Times says about a restaurant. Ruth Reichl said as much around the time it was announced that Frank Bruni was leaving the post.

“From the time of Craig Claiborne—who basically invented the genre—there has been a waning power among each Times restaurant critic,” she told The Observer.

But that didn’t stop Hugo Lindgren from getting much of the disempowered foodie gang together in this week’s Times Magazine. He enlisted former Times restaurant reviewers Sam Sifton, Mimi Sheraton and Ms. Reichl for the annual food issue, plus Amanda Hesser, who used to write Recipe Redux for the magazine. The package occasioned a specially designed web page.

“It’s not just about a restaurant,” Mr. Lindgren told Off the Record. “Food has cultural, political and policy implications for the whole world. It’s not contained to one human activity.”

Indeed, within the world of The Times, just the opposite is occurring: in the past decade, restaurant reviewing revealed itself to be one of the most opportune perches within the paper. Frank Bruni graduated to write for the Times Magazine and then took Frank Rich’s spot on the op-ed roster. Mr. Sifton will start as national editor later this month.

It’s probably true, as Ms. Reichl suggested, that a Times reviewer no longer makes or breaks a restaurant, but given food’s rising prominence within the national discourse (First Lady Hillary Clinton wrote a health care plan; First Lady Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden), it may be more true that food coverage makes or breaks a newspaper. Any time the Minimalist Mark Bittman compiles a list (“101 Things to Grill”), it’s likely to top the Most Emailed charts for a week; Mr. Bittman was recently given a Sunday Review column.

“It hasn’t escaped the notice of anyone,” Times dining editor Pete Wells told Off the Record. “The list can be tricky to interpret, but in a crude measure it tells you people care about food stories.”

Mr. Wells agreed that the cultural significance of the restaurant reviewer has risen but said the trajectories of Mr. Sifton and Mr. Bruni are more likely reflections of their personal versatility.

Mr. Bruni’s reviews revealed his skills as a reporter, Mr. Wells explained. “He picked up on trends and noticed things about restaurants no one else did. Those reviews were great examples of criticism, but they were really well observed and reported.”

Mr. Sifton’s pop culture references reflected the democritization of fine dining.

“Sam’s reviews were loaded with super smart, plugged-in references to books, theater, TV, music and movies, and just a general sense of the common culture and the way that restaurants now belong to that culture,” Mr. Wells noted. (Although Mr. Sifton’s legacy may not be in food criticism, Off the Record believes his recent battle of the boroughs with his predecessor Ms. Sheraton will be a primary source in the history of Brooklyn-Manhattan culture wars.)

On the matter of who will become Mr. Sifton’s successor, Mr. Wells had no comment.

For those with money on the question, Mr. Wells, who may be a candidate, did say that invisibility is no longer a make-or-break job requirement. Mr. Bruni’s “unmasking” gave his memoir a boost of publicity, but having already promoted oneself in the occasional TimesCast or gratuitous Tumbling won’t disqualify any writers. Critical anonymity was instituted to replicate the treatment and experience of a normal diner, Mr. Wells explained, which is no longer the exclusive domain of The Times.

“If you want to know how a normal diner is treated, go to Yelp or other places and actually hear from them,” Mr. Wells suggested.