Pulino’s Bar & Pizzeria owner Keith McNally, who called New York magazine critic Adam Platt “overweight” along with other insults, is a big, fat crybaby.
When Platt dumped on Pulino’s last week, McNally struck back with a rant that consumed the blogs and diverted attention from the new Bowery eatery’s conspicuous lack of fabulousness. That McNally’s thin-skinned — maybe no-skinned — isn’t exactly breaking news.
In the ancient, pre-blog era, he once whined to this newspaper’s then-editor over something I’d written about Pastis that was merely 100 percent accurate — that its “no reservations” policy was a lie, and that oodles of tables were held for his throng of celebrity and media pals.
We thrashed it out over the phone. But McNally’s more recent ravings have been increasingly personal, public and mean-spirited. Better he should look in the mirror. His best boldface pals won’t tell him, but McNally has lost the creative daring that made him a Prince of the City.
London-raised McNally embraced New York when it was on the ropes. He graced it with an original, gritty-urban sensibility and brought transformative energy to some rough precincts.
He took pioneering risks, launching Odeon when “TriBeCa” hardly existed; Pastis when the Meatpacking District remained creepy, smelly and bleak; and Schiller’s when Rivington Street was still edgy enough to give you the jitters.
Those places — and Balthazar and Café Luxembourg — were (and still are) beautiful to boot, with haunting superimpositions of past and present, of home and afar, and with crisply turned-out menus attuned to their settings. Their moody gestalt was new to Manhattan, but the dining millions justifiably loved it and imitators rushed to copy it.
But if he’s a “restaurant auteur,” as he’s been called, his recent work is more like “Godfather III” than the Francis Ford Coppola masterpieces it followed (well, maybe not quite that lame). The maverick who played with fire now plays it safe. Morandi is a fake-looking Italian joint in a district full of them. Minetta Tavern thrust a steak-and-burger house onto teeming MacDougal Street.
And he’s late to the party on the Bowery. Pulino’s is another artsy-pizza parlor with some trattoria dishes grafted on — not bad at all, but hardly worth wasting a review on. You can eat just as cheaply at DBGB, which opened across the corner a year earlier with a global-sausage lineup unlike anything around.
Even McNally’s vaunted design gift seems on furlough. Pulino’s faux-distressed shtick is McNally-by-numbers, embarrassed by Double Crown’s deliciously ambiguous Lower East
Side/Southeast Asia morph up the street. Pulino’s brick arches, white tile columns and industrial lights resemble a Photoshop scrunch of Pastis, Odeon, Morandi and Schiller’s.
Platt had the temerity to give Pulino’s just one star out of five. The Times’ Sam Sifton, who gave it one star out of four, liked it more. But for McNally, one good review isn’t enough.
So he fired off an e-mail to Platt (with copies to the blogs) ridiculing him as “bald,” “overweight” and “out of touch” with young downtown — and as basically being an over-the-hill yutz. I often disagree with Platt, but McNally doesn’t grasp the sport in having different impressions and perspectives.
Three years ago, he fried the Times’ Frank Bruni for an appropriately downbeat review of Morandi. McNally was so obsessed that he pored through hundreds of Bruni reviews to try to prove he was biased against female chefs — a tacky tantrum he now seems to regret.
Like the hit on Platt, it was far worse than Jeffrey Chodorow’s comical bellyaching over Bruni’s bad Kobe Club write-up, or the large ad Nello Balan took out protesting my diss of his joint. Unlike their infantile ravings, McNally’s words can sting.
We expect better from “the man who invented downtown” — and a man who, if he sets his mind to it, might one day do for 125th Street or Bushwick what he did for TriBeCa and SoHo. But if he spends more time on insults than on being great again — fat chance!
scuozzo@nypost.com