This will be the year when New Yorkers truly feel the consequences of the great Red Plates/Blue Plates dining divide. Most new restaurants are likely to be boringly traditional or scarily progressive — and the hell with everyone else.
The Red Plate crowd wants food it knows and loves, but refined and mildly tweaked, served in a civilized environment. Blue Platers crave all-out exoticism and culinary obscurantism — is this tuna or tofu? — in restaurants where the quest for a table is part of the thrill.
There’s always been room for both schools. But the two approaches in their most extreme forms are crowding out the great middle ground. To draw buzz, new restaurants must be either reactionary or revolutionary.
Chefs cater to one preference or the other; forget marrying tradition to innovation as in the past. We might not see another NoMad, Bar Boulud or The Modern for a while.
Look at Alain Allegretti’s delightful La Promenade des Anglais: Last year it had to conventionalize its Provençal-themed menu and changed its name to Bistro La Promenade because it proved neither predictable enough for Red Platers nor progressive enough for Blue Platers.
The highest-profile new places tend to be steak-and-chophouses with aggressively retro menus (Bill’s Food & Drink, Arlington Club, Beatrice Inn) — or joints offering fanciful takes on Chinese (Mission Chinese Food), southeast Asian (Pig and Khao) or Mexican (Empellón Cocina).
So, if you want old-fashioned beef and potatoes or molecular jellyfish, 2013 might be for you. For Red Platers, there’s barbecue and repetitive Italian. Let’s hope Andrew Carmellini’s upcoming Lafayette does something fresh, but not too fresh, with southern French cuisine.
Blue Platers can expect more far-out brands of far-flung cuisines by chefs who aren’t themselves Thai, Mexican or Japanese. And more tasting-menu-only counters: Although all the seats at Momofuku Ko, Chef’s Table, Atera and Blanca combined wouldn’t fill the bar at DBGB, they have a wildly disproportionate hold on those with unlimited time to kill — and on the media.
Deciding where to eat starts as many arguments as politics. Polarization over guns and abortion is nothing compared to the split over beef. Red Platers want USDA Prime, well-marbled and dry-aged. Blue Platers reject “industrial” beef in favor of lean, grass-fed and artisanal cuts.
It’s old news that downtowners rarely eat uptown. But some of my friends north of 59th Street have quit going south; they’re fed up with seating hassles, noise and menus that scare them off. Guys, it’s safe to try Bowery Diner: They finally took whelks off the menu.
I even struggle to persuade young friends downtown who live closer by subway to Cobble Hill than to Lincoln Center to go to Brooklyn. They don’t care that Brooklyn offers a thrill rare in Manhattan: the special energy that infuses a room when the chef is actually in the kitchen. But they don’t want to stand in the cold waiting for a seat at Pok Pok.
So this year, we’ll get what we’ve earned: a restaurant scene a lot more provincial than New Yorkers like to admit. Choose your color.