All stories about "Bar Blanc"
Eater Maps: New York's Cursed Restaurant Spaces
'Tis the season for restaurant openings. And thinking about the slew of scheduled openings in the upcoming months, we're sickly curious about the new Chodorow project at his doomed space at 12 East 22nd Street. Most recently Borough Food & Drink, it will open at some point in the fall as Almond. The epic saga of that space got us thinking of all of the other restaurant disasters around the city and which spaces are perhaps cursed to fail. We've compiled our eight favorites below, but there are countless other contenders just waiting to be added to the map.
Know of a space that is doomed? Let us know, and we'll do an update.
To the MAP!!>>
The Week in Eater: Robins, Samuelsson, Ramirez Out, Country DOH'd, One Year in at Tailor, and More!
This week: Marcus Samuelsson Divorces Merkato 55, Ends Epic Charade, One Year In: Tailor, Bar Blanc Swaps Chef Ramirez for Ex-Bouley'er Zijp, Eater Inside: Delicatessen, Deathwatch Update: Franklin Becker Replaces Robins at Sheridan Square, DOH Chronicles: Country, Eater Sneak Peek: The Colorful Kurve, Eater Book Report: 'Alinea' To Debut This Fall, Online Community Live and Active.
Bar Blanc Swaps Chef Ramirez for Ex-Bouley'er Zijp
Kalina, 1/9/08
WEST VILLAGE—The somewhat shocking news lands in our inbox this morning that Bar Blanc chef César Ramirez has left and will be replaced by Sebastiaan Zijp, last of Bouley Upstairs. Ramirez is responsible for winning the West 10th Street restaurant an unlikely deuce from Frank Bruni. More from official Bar Blanc gabber Sam Firer: "The partners decided to go their own ways and [the parting is] quite amicable, believe it or not. Sebastiaan is leaving Bouley Upstairs to come to Bar Blanc (he did help open the restaurant, since Cesar and Sebastiaan know each other from Bouley, of course). He was previously at Gilt and Gramercy Tavern. Sebastiaan is Dutch by birth; trained in Canada. The big plan is to expand and grow the menu, offer a wider price point, and grow the bar menu!" Which is to say that the initial Bar Blanc plan of a high price point, stuffy self-important staff, and pretentious food doesn't exactly have legs in a down economy. We should also note that a report we received this morning puts the parting at less than 'amicable', that it was more of a firing, but re that we'll defer to the official version. [EaterWire]
Week in Reviews: Mas Gets the Deuce
Kalina, 09/07/05
Bruni re-reviews four year-old West Village spot Mas, and upgrades it from one to two stars. It's just as graceful and energetic as when it first opened, but now the food is more nuanced and interesting:
"...there are restaurants with every bit as much vim and vanity after years on the scene as they had when they unveiled themselves, and Mas is a great example.Franktastic doesn't give Mas the old three because it isn't as "thrilling" as it could be (especially at those prices). Yet: "Four years along, the restaurant is still making fans. More than ever, it deserves them." [NYT] Mia Dona to the Fourth Power, Merkato 55, the Elsewhere, next.>>...It’s an example, too, of the favors that age can bestow on a restaurant, or rather the way a restaurant can use age to its advantage. In growing older Mas has indeed grown wiser. Its talented chef, Galen Zamarra, is making better decisions and his kitchen operates with more discipline than in 2004, when I gave the restaurant one star...
...For the most part this isn’t a restaurant for diners with big, blunt appetites. It’s for those who revel in little surprises and unexpected nuances, like the smoked celery root purée that came with grilled turbot one January night."
Week in Reviews: Deuce for Bar Blanc
Kalina, 1/9/08
The Bruni heads to West Village's Bar Blanc this week, deems it worthy of the big two stars and makes a point to mention they haven't fooled him: he knows it's not just a bar. And like many other non-bars in the city these days, the food—though a tad fussy—wins him over in the end:
"Among its semantic siblings is Bar Stuzzichini...Bar Milano, an apparently full-fledged Italian restaurant scheduled to open next month...And then of course there’s Bar Boulud...What’s next: Ramen Boulud, serving Spanish tapas?...The design rubs B the wrong way, but the food is good enough to mitigate: "The kitchen’s seriousness and skill ultimately win out over aspects of Bar Blanc, like its design that can feel cold to the touch....something of an exercise in igloo chic..." [NYT] Mia Dona, Tre, and The Elsewhere, up next.>>They’re most certainly not doing bar food, not with a menu on which the half dozen appetizers are easily outnumbered by the pasta dishes and main courses, not when the lasagna, made with braised lamb shoulder, is sculptured into a perfectly round and tidily layered cake that’s like a prim haircut you itch to muss...
But the kitchen otherwise demonstrated impressive care — and had terrific success — with seafood, whether it was sweet, tender poached lobster in a foamy grapefruit sauce or seared black cod, making a rare miso-less appearance on a Manhattan menu...I loved it."
BruniBetting: Bar Blanc
Tomorrow, Frank Bruni reviews Bar Blanc, the latest and greatest in downtown pretense. Today, the Eater oddsmakers have set the action as follows:
Zero Stars: 5-1Bar Blanc is the newest in a long line of West Village restaurants that have opened with two star dreams. These are restaurants with a price point too high and menus too narrow to be entirely local. And without the deuce, or Harold Dieterle, things get dicey quick. Gusto, Perilla, Centro Vinoteca, for example; in 6-8 weeks Commerce will be gunning for at least two. On Bar Blanc, Platt and the RG concur that chef César Ramirez can cook two stars good. The one issue with this restaurant that makes the Bruni doser less than a sure thing is the brutally self-satisfied demeanor of the whole place. Bar Blanc believes it is better than you. Fact. If the Frank is really cranky, he'll dock them a star. But that scenario is unlikely, which leads us to this: the Eater cash is on two stars.
One Star: 4-1
Two Stars: 3-1 √√
Three Stars: 8-1
Four Stars: 25,000-1
· Bar Blanc [NYT; after 8:00 PM]
√√ denotes the Eater bet.
Week in Reviews: 2nd Ave Deli Gets the Onespot
As he did with Katz's last year, today the Bruni hands down an expected onespot to venerable and newly relocated "and newly misnamed" 2nd Avenue Deli. Brunster devotes much of his word count to the musings of his famous dinner guests, Ed Koch (who likes him some fatty pastrami), Nora Ephron (who looks for "courage" in her hot dogs), and writer and director Laura Shapiro (who thinks all liver should be made in the home). You catch on quickly that the overarching theme here is "to each his own:"
It's about tradition, nostalgia and (my favorite part) the sport of friendly bickering over what's orthodox, what's not, whether there's room in this short life for lean sandwich meat and who has the best tongue in town...Our pastrami — on rye — turned out to be plenty fatty. It was borscht red. It glistened. The machine-carved meat was also stacked very tall, which troubled Nora...
And I realized that we weren't so much eating in a specific restaurant as passing through a communal storehouse of memories, on a bridge of babkas from the past to the future.
Precious. But in the end, what kind of star count can nostalgia, grease, and kreplach earn? A good, solid, uno. [NYT]
South Gate, Dovetail, Bar Blanc, and the Elsewhere up next. >>
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