There was brilliant choreography behind a dish of Japanese snapper sashimi. The lusciousness of the fish was brightened by the sweetness of sliced muscat grapes, which was in turn offset by a buttermilk vinaigrette’s faintly sour notes. Mixed into the dressing or sprinkled onto the fish was a bevy of herbs and spices, including mint, tarragon, basil and Thai chili, each of which registered a fleeting, teasing impression. The proportions were precise. The results were dazzling.
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LE BERNARDIN: Only the Four Stars Remain Constant
By FRANK BRUNI | March 16, 2005
LE BERNARDIN GRABBED HOLD OF FOUR STARS from Bryan Miller in The New York Times less than three months after it opened in early 1986 and has never let them slip from its grasp, maintaining its superior rating more than twice as long as any of the other New York restaurants in its elite company. (The runner-up, Jean Georges, earned four stars in mid-1997.)
Le Bernardin has aged with astonishing grace, more Deneuve than Dunaway, doing what it must to remain youthful without ever making an elastic fool of itself, staying true to its identity while adapting to changing times. Now as before, it is a high church of reverently prepared fish. But more than ever global currents inform and influence what emerges from a kitchen that can no longer be succinctly described as French.
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SUSHI AT MASA: It’s a Zen Thing
By FRANK BRUNI | December 29, 2004
I COULD REACH DEEP INTO A HEADY BROTH OF adjectives to describe the magic of the sushi at Masa. I could pull up every workable synonym for delicious. Or I could do this: tell you about watching a friend bite into one of Masa’s toro-stuffed maki rolls.
His eyes grew instantly bigger as his lips twitched into a coyly restrained grin. Then the full taste of the toro, which is the buttery belly of a bluefin tuna, took visible hold. Forget restraint: he was suddenly smiling as widely as a person with a mouthful of food and a modicum of manners can. His eyes even rolled slightly backward.
This play of emotion mirrored my own toro-induced bliss. It also explains why Masa, despite its chosen peculiarities and pitiless expense, belongs in the thinly populated pantheon of New York’s most stellar restaurants. Simply put, Masa engineers discrete moments of pure elation that few if any other restaurants can match. If you appreciate sushi, Masa will take you to the frontier of how expansively good a single (and singular) bite of it can make you feel.
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PER SE: The Magic of Napa in New York
By FRANK BRUNI | September 8, 2004
IT IS NOT WONDROUS 100 PERCENT OF THE time, and it can be maddening: at moments too intent on culinary adventure or too highfalutin in its presentation and descriptions of dishes, one of which came with a choice of four salts from three continents. To get a reservation may well require a degree of planning and effort that verge on masochistic, and a multicourse, mini-portion extravaganza may well require four hours, which is more time than many diners have or want to spend.
But here is the thing: the return on that patience and that investment is more than a few mouthfuls of food that instantaneously bring a crazy smile to your face and lodge in your memory for days and even weeks to come.
DANIEL: Promise Fulfilled
By WILLIAM GRIMES | March 14, 2001
THERE’S A DEFINITE TONE AT DANIEL, A warmth usually associated with small neighborhood restaurants, and it emanates from the kitchen. Mr. Boulud has both feet planted in the rich gastronomic soil of the Lyonnais region, an area renowned for its robust, no-holds-barred cuisine. His personality, as a proprietor, has been shaped by the little restaurant that his parents once ran, and if he does not actually stand outside on the sidewalk greeting guests, there is an unmistakable spirit of generosity hovering over the dining room that makes Daniel unique. The name says it all.
If Daniel has a fault, it is that Mr. Boulud offers too much. His menu is overwhelming, with a dozen appetizers and 10 main courses supplemented by a daily list of specials and assorted tasting menus. The dessert menu is two menus, with a second page devoted entirely to chocolate. The wine list comes in two bound volumes.
This all adds up to a lot of reading, and painful choices. The diner who orders the sublime velouté of mussels, sweetened with carrot and spiced precisely with a few specks of cumin, must forgo the sea scallop ceviche in a clean, bracing oyster-water nage touched with horseradish, lime and sea urchin. Rarely have I experienced so much distress in ordering dinner, or witnessed so much around-the-table envy once the food arrived. Mr. Boulud’s go-for-broke menu inspires greed. You want it all.
Dress Code: The Last Gasp
By WILLIAM GRIMES | January 28, 1998
ADAM DOLLE WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO A big night out. The date was December 16, his 47th birthday, and Mr. Dolle, an interior decorator, had a dinner reservation at Le Cirque 2000 with his roommate. It would be an exaggeration to say he was dressed like a million bucks. He was dressed, to be precise, like 4,050 bucks, attired in a $700 Ralph Lauren pearl-gray-and-beige sport coat, a $30 Barneys T-shirt, a $300 gray cashmere polo shirt buttoned to the neck, a $200 pair of gray gabardine trousers from New Republic, a $20 pair of heathered McLaughlin socks, a $300 pair of suede Gucci loafers and a $2,500 Bulgari watch. It was a look that Mr. Dolle characterizes as “urbanely chic” and “discreetly in the know.”
In a small experiment, The Times enlisted the cooperation of an ordinary citizen to test the dress code at several restaurants.
He and his similarly dressed roommate, Joe Brown, did not eat at Le Cirque that night. Or any other night. As bad luck would have it, they had selected one of the few remaining restaurants in New York that require gentlemen to wear a necktie.
Mr. Dolle pleaded. He joked. He cajoled. He appealed to reason, justice and mercy. He did not prevail. Nothing could alter the policy emblazoned on the sign that guards the stairway to Le Cirque’s doors: “Jacket and tie are required to enter Le Cirque.”
Le Cirque belongs to a dwindling breed: even the swankiest restaurants no longer insist on jacket and tie. The trend line is clear. Before too much longer, neckties in restaurants could become as rare as fedoras in Yankee Stadium. For the moment, a lonely handful continue to hold the line against casualness.
But are they really?
In a small experiment, The Times enlisted the cooperation of an ordinary citizen to test the dress code at several restaurants. Patrick Webb, 42, an artist, showed up for his assignment last weekend dressed in expensive black slacks, handmade British shoes and a bottle-green mock turtleneck.
First stop, Le Cirque 2000.
At 7 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Webb walked past the forbidding dress-code stanchion, approached the reception area and announced his intention to have a drink at the bar, which is governed by the same jacket-and-tie policy. As he unpeeled his overcoat, the receptionist’s head snapped back, his eyebrows shot upward and he executed a full-body wince. “A jacket and tie are required,” he said, sharply.
Mr. Webb came clean. “I only have a turtleneck,” he said. The shade of Mr. Dolle, hurled from the gates of paradise a month earlier, seemed to hover nearby. Suddenly, and inexplicably, resistance evaporated. “She has a jacket for you,” the receptionist said quietly, gesturing toward the coatroom attendant.
Mr. Webb slipped into his borrowed jacket. Versace V2. Not bad, although a couple of sizes too big. His sense of good fortune ebbed a bit on entering the bar, however. Two other customers with turtlenecks under jackets had also penetrated the inner sanctum. The vaunted dress code seemed to be flexible.
Refreshed by a glass of Perrier-Jouet, Mr. Webb proceeded uptown to the Carlyle. The receptionist appraised this new specimen and inhaled slowly, emitting a soft, disapproving hiss. “I’ll have to get you a jacket,” he said, and dashed off to the coatroom, where he flapped both arms quickly, funky-chicken style, to indicate that a jacket was needed. Mr. Webb slipped into a navy-blue blazer with gold buttons, a tad conservative perhaps, and lacki
ng a label, but a perfect fit.
Twenty-four hours later, Mr. Webb invaded La Cote Basque, where his tieless attire brought him a stereophonic rebuke from the receptionist (“You’ll have to have a jacket”) and the coatroom attendant (“A jacket is required for the gentleman”), who was vigilant despite her tiny television set tuned to the Super Bowl.
Navy blue again. Double-breasted. Pierre Cardin.
But things are changing at other restaurants, and even Le Cirque seems to be softening. When asked to explain the Le Cirque dress policy, Sirio Maccioni, the restaurant’s owner, simply overruled his own sign. “You know, we prefer a tie, but if someone comes in a nice turtleneck, we try to be pleasant,” he said. “We say O.K.”
Give it another try, Mr. Dolle. Just tell them Sirio sent you.
Damn Yankees
SPORTS
New York is, without question, a sports town. It has high-profile teams, highly demanding fans and high-flying stars, from Joe DiMaggio to Bill Bradley to Joe Namath to Alex Rodriguez to Pedro Martinez to next year’s draft picks. And it’s hard to imagine Babe Ruth’s off-the-field carousing, Yogi Berra’s malapropisms, Billy Martin’s temper or George Steinbrenner’s management anywhere else.
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But really, it’s a fan town. There are fans who mourn the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles more than fifty years ago. There are fans who still mourn the loss of the baseball Giants, who decamped to San Francisco about the same time. There are Jets fans who say they were raised to hate the football Giants. Week after week, they cheer for two teams: the Jets, and whoever the Giants are playing. Basketball fans suffer as the Knicks and the Nets stagger onward, “knees buckling, shoulders sagging, propelled by the sheer tropism of will and desperation,” the Times sports columnist George Vecsey wrote. The players hope against hope that they can make the playoffs, sign LeBron James and, in the case of the Nets, move to Brooklyn.
As the author Peter Handrinos has noted, sports are at the center of New York’s turbulent identity. Sports complement the city’s “No. 1” self-image, its obsession with winning and losing, its preoccu-pation with who’s hot and who’s in a slump. Sports are, after all, about competing. And New York is about competing—even snatching a taxi away from the guy on the opposite corner when you’re really in a hurry. Handrinos maintains that New York would be different without the daily dramas that sports provide: “We’d be a Metropolis without Superman, a Gotham without Bruce Wayne.”
Season in and season out, sports provides something that everyone can talk about—doormen, investment bankers, teachers, doctors. Consider Brett Favre’s Cinderella year with the New York Jets in 2008. He had retired from the Green Bay Packers at the end of the previous season. Then he decided that retirement wasn’t for him and he wanted to play one more year. The Packers traded him to the Jets. But was Favre, who turned 39 while playing for the Jets, too old? Long before he threw his first pass in a Jets’ uniform, the opinions were flying.
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The teams have changed as the city has changed. The Brooklyn Dodgers integrated baseball by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947. He endured epithets from players on other teams and road trips where the rest of his team stayed in whites-only hotels. Players on some teams talked of boycotting games against the Dodgers if Robinson was in the lineup. Ford Frick, the president of the National League, put a stop to the talk by declaring, “This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another.” (The Yankees were slow to integrate. They did not have a black player on their roster until Elston Howard arrived in 1955.)
Half a century later, the New York Mets hired the first Hispanic general manager in baseball history, Omar Minaya. He built a lineup, and a marketing strategy for the underdog Mets, around ethnic identity, signing Pedro Martínez, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado.
Both baseball teams opened new stadiums with the 2009 season—“houses of baseball worship,” The Times columnist Harvey Araton called them. The Mets’ new Citi Field is smaller and more elegant than Shea Stadium was (and has more bathrooms). “Citi Field is the cozy cousin,” Araton wrote. “Yankee Stadium is shock and awe. Ticket prices may stretch the limits of affordability and perhaps fan loyalty in both, but there is something to be said for the Mets’ having built their ballpark to a nearly 42,000-seat scale that isn’t a monument to a generation of American excess.” But the Mets are the Mets, too often a study in haplessness and, for fans, frustration. The first home run at the new stadium was hit by Jody Gerut of the the San Diego Padres, a team that had lost 99 games the previous season. That first game did not go well for the Mets: they lost to the Padres, 6-5.
The Yankees’ $1.5 billion stadium replaced the one where, on opening day in 1923, Babe Ruth looked around and said, “Some ballyard! I’d give a year of my life if I could hit a home run.” He blasted the stadium’s first homer, in the third inning of a 4-1 win over the Boston Red Sox. The Times called it a “savage home run that was the real baptism of Yankee Stadium.” In the new stadium, Mark Texeira smashed two home runs in an exhibition game a couple of days before the baseball season opened. “I think this is going to be a pretty good hitter’s park,” Texeira said. Not a word about shortening his life. But Texeira’s teammate Derek Jeter joked that he had to caution Teixeira to hold the homers until the games counted.
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BASEBALL AND FOOTBALL
Giants Capture Pennant, Beating Dodgers 5-4 in 9th
By JOHN DREBINGER | October 4, 1951
IN AN ELECTRIFYING FINISH TO WHAT LONG will be remembered as the most thrilling pennant campaign in history, Leo Durocher and his astounding never-say-die Giants wrenched victory from the jaws of defeat at the Polo Grounds, vanquishing the Dodgers, 5 to 4, with a four-run splurge in the last half of the ninth.
A three-run homer by Bobby Thomson that accounted for the final three tallies blasted the Dodgers right out of the World Series picture. This afternoon at the Stadium it will be the Giants against Casey Stengel’s American League champion Yankees in the opening clash of the World Series.
Seemingly hopelessly beaten, 4 to 1, as the third and deciding game of the epic National League playoff moved into the last inning, the Giants lashed back with a fury that would not be denied. They routed big Don Newcombe while scoring one run.
Then, with Ralph Branca on the mound and two runners aboard the bases, came the blow of blows. Thomson crashed the ball into the left field stand. Forgotten on the instant was the cluster of three with which the Brooks had crushed Sal Maglie in the eighth.
For a moment the crowd of 34,320, as well as all the Dodgers, appeared too stunned to realize what had happened. But as the long and lean Scot from Staten Island loped around the bases behind his two teammates, a deafening roar went up.
The Brooks club had blown a 13½-game lead. But that would have been forgotten and forgiven had Branca held that margin in the last of the ninth.
But with one out and runners on second and third Chuck Dressen, the Brooks’ pilot and as daring a gamester as Durocher, chose to follow the “book.” He refused to walk Thomson because that would have represented the winning run. Yet behind Bobby was Willie Mays, a dismal failure throughout the series and behind that the Giants had even less to offer. It’s something the second-guessers will hash over through many a winter evening.
Ball Park Well Built And “Could Have Lasted Forever”
By ROBERT LIPSYTE | May 31, 1964
THE SCOREBOARD CLOCK IS FROZEN AT 10:24, and nobody seems to know whether it was day or night when the electrician pulled the plug on the Polo Grounds for the last time.
It hardly seems to matter now. From Coogan’s Bluff the ballpark looks like a wood and concrete corpse rotting into a steel skeleton. A great crane reaches down and picks up pieces of nostalgia, a section where many men spent their boyhood, an aisle where some hero’s mighty home-run ball landed among scrambling fans. A torch sputters and sparkles, and a piece of steel falls—so slowly�
�from a light tower, end over end until it plunges into tractor-scarred earth that once was left field.
“One thing I’ll say for this place, no collapse action here, very well built,” said Harry Avirom, the vice president of the Wrecking Corporation of America, the firm that is demolishing the park.
“Very well built,” he said. “It could have lasted forever.”
By August it should be a vacant lot, and soon after that apartment houses will rise on the site.
“Wrecking is some business, let me tell you,” he said. “Gotta make the right moves. Gotta take calculated risks. Yeah, yeah, something like baseball, you could say.”
Giants Defeat Indians 5-2 In World Series Opener
By JOHN DREBINGER | September 30, 1954
The Polo Grounds was demolished 1964 and a public housing project was erected on the site.
AT PRECISELY 4:12 O’CLOCK BY THE HUGE clock atop the center-field clubhouse at the Polo Grounds, Leo Durocher decided it was time to play his trump card.
It was the last half of the 10th inning in the opening game of the 1954 World Series. The tense and dramatic struggle had a gathering of 52,751, a record series crowd for the arena, hanging breathlessly on every pitch.
The score was deadlocked at 2-all. Two Giants were on the base paths and on the mound was Bob Lemon, 23-game winner of the American League, who had gone all the way and was making a heroic bid to continue the struggle a little further. Then Leo made his move.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 57
