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The great New York chef Paul Liebrandt will soon add an eight-seat, tasting-menu counter to his hot new Williamsburg restaurant The Elm. Although exact plans for The Little Elm are unknown, it’s certain getting seats will be near-impossible.
Will I have any better luck there than at Momofuku Ko, where I’ve yet to eat after five years of trying?
It’s a painful admission for a restaurant critic. How can I skip one of the allegedly most fabulous places of our time?
But a more germane question on behalf of the dining millions would be: Doesn’t Momofuku chef-owner David Chang owe us an intelligible reservation system?
Or: How many normal humans have enough time on their hands (or an “intern”) to tickle a booking out of the online maze — and then devote up to four hours for a meal there?
Chang’s a brilliant, groundbreaking chef. I love his Ssam Bar and Ma Peche. But I’ve yet to crack Momofuku Ko. Its home page says my account “already exists” but offers no way to enter that account or start a new one.
If I did ever break through, my reward would be a $175 per-head lunch lasting three hours — a duration that last made sense in the “Mad Men” era. Maybe I’m lucky to be a computer klutz.
I’m probably nuts to hope The Little Elm doesn’t join Momofuku Ko in the world of Extreme Eating, which is more insufferably elitist, exclusionary and disproportionately expensive than the snooty “fine dining” of old. This entails struggling for months to book seats at a new restaurant superclass where, to consume 10-20 food items over three or four hours, you’ll spend enough to feed a starving Third World village for a week.
Momofuku Ko — and Masa, Atera, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, Blanca, Per Se and Eleven Madison Park — are mostly off-limits to all but those who are rich and have as much time on their hands as trust-fund layabouts and their doomed mistresses. Even many affluent New Yorkers feel shut out, as they once did from intimidating “Le’s” and “La’s.”
At all but Per Se and Eleven Madison Park, you sit at a counter that’s the chef’s altar. No one ever reports less than an epiphany after several hours under his halo. It’s the “Nicholas Nickleby” effect: Few who spent $100 a head to see the eight-hour long 1980s Broadway production, when others cost half as much, would admit dozing off.
Superclass places offer tasting menus only. I don’t hold that against them. While I’ll own up to palate fatigue after 10 courses, I’ve savored more than a few marvelous tastings. Esoteric, rare raw materials impossible to serve on a large scale — like Masa’s seafood flown in from Tokyo, Atera’s “foraged” roots — thrill the most jaded gourmands.
But their elitism is lost on sages who celebrate the collapse of the archaic culture of starchy sauces and starched linen. Yes, today’s scene is vastly more open and informal. But it’s the tiny superclass which increasingly defines New York’s dining landscape to the world — and to many New Yorkers who now regard justly popular destinations like Gramercy Tavern and BLT Fish as mere business-class seating.
Today’s superclass filters the snobbery of yore through new culinary and social prisms. Chefs boast of saving the earth and using “sustainable” products while their globetrotting clients, whom they rely on to stay afloat, spew greenhouse gas from private jets and limousines.
Extreme Eating spots can be tougher to crack than the patrician rug joints that breathed their last in the 1970s. Then, everyone feared judgmental maitre d’s, snooty sommeliers and tables in Siberia. But if you wore the right clothes, they usually gave you a table. In 1969, Gael Greene wrote that a New York dining “masochist thrives on a diet of flageolets and flagellation.” Now, you take your licks without a morsel for months on end as you pray for a seat — and then for a sugar daddy to pay for it.
Once, middle-class families could save up for a special night out even at exalted Lutece. In 2000, Alain Ducasse’s Essex House restaurant was vilified over its $145 tab — although it was a mere $25-30 higher than at places just one tier lower on the scale.
The gap’s much, much wider today. Overnight billionaires — Russian oligarchs, Asian chemical magnates, South American drug lords and Yankee-Doodle hedge fund thieves — drove up prices to levels beyond most households’ once-in-a-lifetime reach. Per Se’s nine-course menu was $150 in 2003; it’s $295 today. Meals start at $195 at Blanca and Eleven Madison Park — compared with $115-130 at four-stars Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Restaurant Daniel and Del Posto.
Then there are the counters, derived from the kappo tradition of Osaka. Their insidious creep is a plague to be deplored and, if possible, outlawed.
They deign to democratize seating by doing without a hierarchy of tables. No more class system! Sure: they desocialize the experience equally for all when everyone must face the chef, kiss goodbye to family and friend bonding, seduction, deal-clinching, and any of the myriad functions and pleasures which dining out is meant to serve.
That is, unless you like meeting strangers. At one superclass counter, we were befriended by a fellow enjoying a big night out with a girlfriend.
A Google search later turned up the reason for their celebration: he’d just been sprung from prison.
Welcome to the club.