Who goes where in the city’s dining world? Usually, a lot more people to a lot more places than you often read about — because media perception of New York’s restaurant universe is ruled by planet Bushwick.
Take La Grenouille, one of the city’s greatest dining institutions that’s also a great restaurant. If you believe eater.com’s entertaining “Who Goes There?” column by “Brooks of Sheffield,” ever-buzzing La Grenouille belonged until maybe five minutes ago in a category of “mysteriously enduring,” “unsung, curious” survivors grimly resisting a long, inevitable slide into “Dunzo” land.
WTF?
To the Midtown- and uptown-phobic elites who drive media coverage, Gotham’s dining scene increasingly means North Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan at its nastiest. Their tastes toggle between Crimean, Guatemalan and Mongolian holes in the wall, and a precious few superclass boites where three hours on a stool costs $500.
But the great middle ground? Ha! For them, it’s strictly for the Olds and tourists.
Of course, most New Yorkers don’t live on or near Bedford Avenue, and have no burning desire to go there. Even many serious eaters pay little attention to a beef cut’s pedigree or to a rare mushroom’s “foraged” origin.
Yet that lust to be onboard the Kings County Express prompts writers to gush over ridiculous restaurants notable only for their proximity to the Gowanus Canal, and national magazines to proclaim Brooklyn, land of no-reservations 25-seaters, a culinary capital in the league of Paris or San Sebastian, Spain.
I’m routinely amused by how little some restaurant pundits with huge Twitter followings know about Manhattan above 14th Street. They have no idea that the reviled Upper East Side’s less-fancy eastern side offers nearly as much choice as the West Village — which, last time I checked, offered no Belgian and Burmese cafes within a two-block radius, as my nabe does.
They’d give up Cronuts rather than admit the city’s great-dining epicenter isn’t Williamsburg (ha!) or Tribeca, but Columbus Circle, where Per Se and Masa stand a stone’s throw from Jean-Georges and the city’s best Italian restaurant, Marea.
It’s barely a 10-minute walk from there to Le Bernardin, Nobu 57 — or La Grenouille.
Only a discombobulated culinary compass can explain how that fabulous frog ended up in “Who Goes There?” — a feature I treasure when it affectionately brings to life an antique Danish cafe in Bay Ridge.
Sure, last week it found the East 52nd Street temple to classic French cuisine “throbbing” with life, wonderfully run by “attentive” floor staff serving “top-notch” food. My judgment exactly.
So what was it doing at all in a column about musty old joints hanging on for dear life? Well, we’re told, it had been “somewhat forlorn and forgotten” until a 2009 New York Times review “jolted it back into relevance.”
Not breaking news: La Grenouille has been neither “forlorn” nor “forgotten” for approximately a decade. Its clientele was approaching rigor mortis when I first wrote about it in 1998.
But when I reviewed it, in 2004, following a gentle tweaking of the dining room by owner Charles Masson — and every time since when I’ve been lucky to be there — tables were as hard to come by as they are today.
They were filled with people as young and as sophisticated as too many who now presume to make choices for the rest of us. Sometimes, the dining millions make the wisest critics of all.