248 replies to this topic

[Steve R.]

Wow. THAT place is still open? That's one of the first French restaurants I ever ate in.

Me too. Last I looked, there's a 2nd branch of Le Sans C. on Restaurant Row as well.

[Wilfrid]

Yeah, the no pants place is always there.

Speaking of no pants, IBA does not have anything remotely approaching three star service or systems; by systems, I mean things like knowing how much stuff to stock, being able to get glasses to the bartender, being able to get clean glasses to the bartender, knowing who is serving who.

It's delicious chaos, thanks in large part of course to the dumbfuck review.

[Eatmywords]

I'm waiting for a restaurant serving charcuterie to bring out a basketful of several varieties of entire salamis,cooked sausages, etc. and a knife to cut off your own pieces. Like raw milk cheese less then 60 days old, that too is probably illegal here.

Mon ami, je vous presente Les Sans Culottes

(I can't believe they're still going)

Vraiment?:

Potence de Cochonailles, panier de crudités

Terrine de pate et vinaigrette maison

(Sausages, basket of vegetables, chef pate

and house dressing)

According to that, it's just the vegetables that are in the basket. Then again, potence means gallows, so maybe there is some cutting at the table. I don't know; never been.
I too am amazed it's still there. Since 1976, they say. Well, East Midtown . . .

ETA: Look at those prices! They must own the building.

It was/is(?) a fun place. Your aunt would probably love it. The food was decent, never great, but a pretty good deal esp for big appetites on petite budgets. For under $20 (over 10yrs ago) you got that easter basket of crudite with 4 or 5 whole saucissons (you were encouraged to saw off as much as you desired), a pot of pate, baguette, entrée and dessert.

For a hokey little place that crudite setup reminded me more of France than anywhere else. For sure it was unsanitary that the baskets were passed from table to table without replenishing (maybe the DOH has forced some changes since) but you got over it. You were in France (sans culottes) after all.

There was another branch on resto row and a third somewhere, maybe next to Tout Va Bien? (you must have been there too, no?).

[oakapple]

Speaking of no pants, IBA does not have anything remotely approaching three star service or systems; by systems, I mean things like knowing how much stuff to stock, being able to get glasses to the bartender, being able to get clean glasses to the bartender, knowing who is serving who.

I wonder whether they will follow the Torrisi model: get the undeserved stars first, then add the missing amenities afterward.

[Suzanne F]

I'm waiting for a restaurant serving charcuterie to bring out a basketful of several varieties of entire salamis,cooked sausages, etc. and a knife to cut off your own pieces. Like raw milk cheese less then 60 days old, that too is probably illegal here.

Mon ami, je vous presente Les Sans Culottes

(I can't believe they're still going)

Vraiment?:

Potence de Cochonailles, panier de crudités

Terrine de pate et vinaigrette maison

(Sausages, basket of vegetables, chef pate

and house dressing)

According to that, it's just the vegetables that are in the basket. Then again, potence means gallows, so maybe there is some cutting at the table. I don't know; never been.

I too am amazed it's still there. Since 1976, they say. Well, East Midtown . . .

ETA: Look at those prices! They must own the building.

It was/is(?) a fun place. Your aunt would probably love it. The food was decent, never great, but a pretty good deal esp for big appetites on petite budgets. For under $20 (over 10yrs ago) you got that easter basket of crudite with 4 or 5 whole saucissons (you were encouraged to saw off as much as you desired), a pot of pate, baguette, entrée and dessert.

For a hokey little place that crudite setup reminded me more of France than anywhere else. For sure it was unsanitary that the baskets were passed from table to table without replenishing (maybe the DOH has forced some changes since) but you got over it. You were in France (sans culottes) after all.

There was another branch on resto row and a third somewhere, maybe next to Tout Va Bien? (you must have been there too, no?).

Alas, too goyish for My Beloved Aunt Bette.

No, I've never been. But it does look right up my (or more to the point, cheapo Paul's ) alley. Maybe next time we're around Times Square for a show we'll try the Resto Row outpost. At least at that price point, it may be less disappointing than some of the other places there.

Seems to me that this part of this thread belongs on the La Mangeoire thread, rather than here, if there's a way to move it and still make sense of everything. (As much sense as anything here ever makes. )

[oakapple]

Conversely, even the most accomplished seller of charcuterie, is like a movie theater - there may be a tremendous amount of skill and craft that goes into the movie, but by the time you actually consume the product, very little is being done by the venue itself. This was one of my objections to Katz's (as I construe the place, rightly or wrongly) is that it gets praised as a restaurant when it is really more like a food store.

Katz's is a delicatessen, and it's as much of a restaurant as any other deli. Many people think it's the city's best example of its kind. So you want deli food, and don't want to buy the ingredients and assemble them at home, you think of Katz's.

The thing is, no one would dream of giving Katz's three stars.

[Adrian]

Conversely, even the most accomplished seller of charcuterie, is like a movie theater - there may be a tremendous amount of skill and craft that goes into the movie, but by the time you actually consume the product, very little is being done by the venue itself. This was one of my objections to Katz's (as I construe the place, rightly or wrongly) is that it gets praised as a restaurant when it is really more like a food store.

Katz's is a delicatessen, and it's as much of a restaurant as any other deli. Many people think it's the city's best example of its kind. So you want deli food, and don't want to buy the ingredients and assemble them at home, you think of Katz's.

The thing is, no one would dream of giving Katz's three stars.

Sure they would!

Anyway, my point isn't just "three stars" but "any stars at all". No one here would dream of giving Murray's Cheese a single star. A review of Murray's Cheese would be incoherent under our restaurant rating framework. What if Murray's had tables? And service? Are we just rating "places you can sit down and eat" or is something else going on?

[oakapple]

The thing is, no one would dream of giving Katz's three stars.

Sure they would!

Until someone does (and I don't mean on Yelp), I will remain a skeptic of that.

Anyway, my point isn't just "three stars" but "any stars at all". No one here would dream of giving Murray's Cheese a single star. A review of Murray's Cheese would be incoherent under our restaurant rating framework. What if Murray's had tables? And service? Are we just rating "places you can sit down and eat" or is something else going on?

Bearing in mind that Chock Full o' Nuts and McDonald's are former recipients of one star from The Times, I can see no rational objection to Katz's current one-star rating. I don't know what a hypothetical Murray's restaurant would be like. Katz's is a restaurant.

[Adrian]

Anyway, my point isn't just "three stars" but "any stars at all". No one here would dream of giving Murray's Cheese a single star. A review of Murray's Cheese would be incoherent under our restaurant rating framework. What if Murray's had tables? And service? Are we just rating "places you can sit down and eat" or is something else going on?

Bearing in mind that Chock Full o' Nuts and McDonald's are former recipients of one star from The Times, I can see no rational objection to Katz's current one-star rating. I don't know what a hypothetical Murray's restaurant would be like. Katz's is a restaurant.

I don't want to rehash Katz's so let's not use that. The question is about whether the amount and kind of work done by the business itself matters as to whether we can evaluate it as a restaurant. The idea being that, regardless of whether some places have the trappings of a restaurant, if the business is serving you something that someone else, somewhere else made much earlier without any significant additions to the product (ie. something beyond simple slicing), it makes sense to evaluate it as a restaurant.*

* The converse seems too obvious to even state. No one evaluates Jean Georges as a bakery because they don't bake their own bread.

[oakapple]

The question is about whether the amount and kind of work done by the business itself matters as to whether we can evaluate it as a restaurant. The idea being that, regardless of whether some places have the trappings of a restaurant, if the business is serving you something that someone else, somewhere else made much earlier without any significant additions to the product (ie. something beyond simple slicing), it makes sense to evaluate it as a restaurant.

We've perhaps lost sight of something. If Wells had given IBA&V its correct one-star rating, we wouldn't be having this conversation. A place where you sit at a table and order food is a restaurant, by any definition, whether it be the dictionary definition, the legal definition, or simply what the establishment appears to be in the minds of the public.

From an evaluative standpoint, I don't care where the sausage is made. The restaurant doesn't get extra credit for making it in-house, nor demerits for sourcing it elsewhere.

[mitchells]

Adrian, is Epicerie Boulud a restaurant?

[Wilfrid]

I think the problem is that, while IBA is a restaurant, the things it does (let's say) to an exceptional level are not intrinsic to the restaurant part of the operation. (They happen to have a curing room on the premises; it could easily have been a block away or somewhere suitable in Queens.)

The bread and salami and sandwiches I've sampled so far have been very good. But you can indeed buy them from the counter at the front.

The composed dishes might be just fine, but I doubt they're three star. Given that the ambience and service aren't three star either...guess what?

[Adrian]

Yes. Although the praise we can give it is limited.

Ultimately my point is that we're engaging in an evaluation of the labour that goes into the preparation of food when we grade a restaurant. For example, everyone implicitly marks down steakhouses no matter how good the steak they serve is. I think that's because we don't recognize the skill and labour that goes into cooking a great steak as sufficient (anymore) to warrant a four-star rating.

In that sense, oak, I think you're wrong about what you're doing. You do care about where the sausage is made. Again, what if the only thing the restaurant serves is the very best sausage in the world made by someone else? Even if you thought this was a four-star sausage, you couldn't give the restaurant four stars in the same way that you can give Masa or Yasuda four stars.*

*perhaps there's some element of "sausages can't be good enough to get four stars". Which is fine, but I think the point still obtains.

ETA: Wilfrid, that's the spirit!

[Wilfrid]

Isn't it interesting that Rex Stout, who showed great interest in gourmet food, made the finest dish to ever appear in the Nero Wolfe stories a sausage?

[Sneakeater]

Anyway, my point isn't just "three stars" but "any stars at all". No one here would dream of giving Murray's Cheese a single star. A review of Murray's Cheese would be incoherent under our restaurant rating framework. What if Murray's had tables? And service? Are we just rating "places you can sit down and eat" or is something else going on?

Yvonne would always say things like, "delicatessens [for example] aren't restaurants [and so shouldn't be reviewed as such]." I never quite knew what she meant. Now I do.

I still disagree, of course.