appetites

I subscribe to the New York Times Dining & Wine’s rss feed, and so Tuesday evenings my newsreader fills up with around 14 stories that will appear in the print version of the Gray Lady tomorrow. I don’t get to New York often enough to make practical use of the restaurant reviews, but I do enjoy a good piece of food writing, and generally speaking, Frank Bruni does an outstanding job.
Which is why this review of Monkey Bar has got to be either a brilliantly subtle evisceration, or some kind of joke, right?
The majority of that review is about Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and the principal owner of the restaurant. I don’t know Mr. Carter, and I’m sure Bruni’s review of his restaurant doesn’t paint a full picture of the man, but this sort of thing…

With his magazine sanctum doubling as a reservations office, Mr. Carter, the raconteur-cum-restaurateur, decrees who gets in and which table they occupy. And he fashions a fantasy New York where arrivistes bask in mutual recognition and reciprocal adoration, each mirroring the others’ sense of triumph, the unruly city edited down to one preposterously romantic room for the most unromantic of pursuits: back scratching and social climbing.

…Leads me to conclude that Mr. Carter is probably a douchebag of the first order. Indeed, from the depiction of the restaurant and its patrons, I can’t help but picture it as some sort of Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life where the characters are all bulimic fashionistas and bloated, self-important dicks. Sort of like, well, Graydon Carter…
When I first read the review, it appeared to me that Bruni was more or less accepting of a restaurant atmosphere in which “back scratching and social climbing” are the norm. Because after being unable to get a better reservation than dinner at 6:30, and with a 90 minute time limit to boot (which is roughly akin to being told “you can come by and pick through our garbage, peasant” in the New York restaurant scene), he faced yet more indignity:

Shortly after that the Monkey Bar essentially shut down its phone line and began accepting general reservation requests — the ones from those of us not pulling strings — by e-mail only. The first time I sent an e-mail, I got no response. One of the next times I got a 7 p.m. table, but when I showed up, the restaurant had no record of the reservation, and I had to plead to be let in.

I don’t really care who you are, or what you’re serving, if you make me “plead” to get into your restaurant after I’ve made a reservation, you’re not getting my business. I suppose the bottom line is that I don’t want to be someplace where I don’t feel welcome. If you make a customer plead to get into your restaurant, you don’t really want them there. You are doing them a favor by allowing them to dine with you. That is not the optimal relationship, any more than it would be optimal for your customers to feel that they are doing you a favor by showing up to pay your for food. The ideal is that there is an equal exchange between restaurant and patron. If your business model is instead built around excluding most people in conspicuous favor of the very few, like some velvet-roped nightclub for the rich and douchy; and if that business model is successful, I wish you good luck spending your remaining years in the company of like-minded assholes.
But all of that is not what prompted me to write this little rant. What really got my juices going is that after all of the discussion about the decor, and the crowd, and the ultra-exclusivity of the place, is that it sounds like the food is mediocre at best. And that’s despite the fact that Larry Forgione is in the kitchen there now, apparently.
“You can eat well if you order carefully,” says Bruni, after noting that he’d suffered mishaps such as “a watery dish of linguine with flavorless clams and calamari; a buffalo mozzarella salad drowning in its dressing.” So what’s “ordering carefully” mean? Apparently, it includes:

“Nora’s meatloaf,” made with input from the writer and moviemaker Nora Ephron but not from an actual recipe of hers, was thicker and richer than the usual meatloaf, though I found its mushroom gravy slightly overbearing.
And it established a chummy insiders’ nomenclature that carried over to such dessert options as “Babe’s chocolate cake” — a reference, it turns out, to the slugger Ruth, not the socialite Paley — and “Mrs. Carter’s butter tart.”

I recognize that Bruni gave the restaurant one star out of four, but from the overall tone, and even granting some complimentary descriptions of a few dishes, that sounds generous. I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would voluntarily subject myself to an evening at the restaurant described in Mr. Bruni’s review.
So I ask you, and I wish I could turn comments back on here, even for this one post: is this a generally positive review, or does Bruni have his snark on?