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Buddakan

  1. Celebrity Settings
    Momofuku, Freemans, Spotted Pig Honchos Break Bread With Stephen Starr Our favorite celebrity sighting of the week was, of course, Lindsay Lohan at Peter Luger on Tuesday night — that’s because we saw her with our own eyes. Of course, we can’t be everywhere and see everyone, so as usual we’ve combed the gossip columns for other stop-ins. We’re sorry we missed Tracy Morgan at the Plumm, shirtless and offering to father babies as usual, and boy do we wish we were a fly on the wall when partners Ken Friedman and Taavo Somer, along with David Chang, dined with Stephen Starr at Buddakan. Is there a Spotted Buddafuku in the works?
  2. Back of the House
    ‘Top Chef’ Recruits Seven NYC ToquesTop Chef has announced its new cheftestants, and we, like everybody else who got the press release, were delighted to see that there are even more NYC cooks than ever before, from restaurants including Mai House, Buddakan, Public, 24 Prince, and Dos Caminos. You can’t go by where they work, though: Among last season’s rivals, Casey was a “personal chef,” whatever that means, and made it to finale, while poor Lia was at Jean Georges and got bounced halfway through the season. Still, we’re already thinking deeply about this crew — and looking forward to making fun of them in IM conversations a few months hence. ‘Top Chef’ Chicago Premieres in March [Bravo press release] Related: Adam Platt Was Right About ‘Top Chef’ All Along
  3. NewsFeed
    Meatpacking Moguls Remm, Birnbaum, and Rabin on How to Be CoolOur fave waitress Courtney Yates isn’t the only face Belvedere Vodka is using to try to look cool — the company, in association with UrbanDaddy, is running Web interviews with David Rabin, owner of Los Dados and Lotus, and Eugene Remm and Mark Birnbaum, owners of Tenjune. Remm and Birnbaum don’t exactly steer toward the underexposed when asked for their favorite restaurants: BondSt, Nobu, Bar Pitti, Los Dados, Mr. Chow, the Spotted Pig, Pastis, Buddakan, Dos Caminos Soho, Cipriani, Butter, Rose Bar, and Waverly Inn.
  4. Celebrity Settings
    Tom and Gisele Lock Lips at Nobu, ‘Full House’ Cast and the B-52sEarlier this week we linked to a Daily News item claiming Padma Lakshmi rudely refused complimentary dishes from Fiamma’s chef. A commenter wrote, “I was at Fiamma the night Padma was dining there and it absolutely did NOT go down that way. When the dishes arrived at the table, she thanked them profusely and apologized for being too full to eat any of them!” Whatever happened, Padma was just one of many celebs to chow down (or at least show up) at local restaurants this week, and here’s our gossip-column compendium of just who went where.
  5. Mr. Snitch
    Restaurant Titans Descend on Primehouse for a NightHere’s the thing about restaurateurs: They don’t really care about who has the best ramen in the East Village. They’re not really that interested in where Paul Liebrandt’s restaurant will be, and they find avant-garde desserts about as compelling as algebra. But when Steve Hanson opens a restaurant? That, that is something they’re interested in. The fine art of making money via replicable concept restaurants is one at which Hanson is an acknowledged master, and that helps to explain why the main room at Primehouse last Thursday looked like a who’s who of big-time restaurateurs.
  6. Restroom Report
    Visiting the Pachinko Parlors at Tao Last week we took a trip to the Far East to hit the loos at Sapa. Now let’s travel even farther east and a little bit north (Madison Avenue at 55th Street!) to Tao, an eatery that’s so authentically Pan-Asian it boasts an enormous Buddha. But then again, so does every other restaurant in town. So how is Tao to distinguish itself from Megu, Buddakan, Buddha Bar, and the rest of them? Via its restrooms, of course!
  7. Mediavore
    Chefs Are All Over ‘Ratatouille’; Allen and Delancey May Open AfterChefs say “Ratatouille gets it, it totally gets chef culture.” Even Tony Bourdain is onboard, calling it “the best restaurant movie ever made — the best chef movie.” [Ruhlman] Related: How Much Thomas Keller Is Really in ‘Ratatouille’’s Remy? Allen and Delancey may be coming back. Or rather, opening for the first time. [Eater] Related: Allen and Delancey Tripped at the Finish Line, Won’t Open The good people of Iowa may not get the whole niche-pork thing, but they are happy to supply the product. [Des Moines Register]
  8. Mediavore
    ‘Wichcraft Awarded Top NYC Honors; Shake Shack DefendedRegional-food gurus Jane and Michael Stern say that their favorite New York sandwich is … the bacon, egg, and gorgonzola from ‘wichcraft. [NYDN] One of New York’s top burger experts evaluates Steve Cuozzo’s takedown of Shake Shack in the Post, taking issue with key points in the article. [AHT] Chef Michael Schulson is said, in an unconfirmed report, to be leaving Buddakan. [Eater]
  9. Neighborhood Watch
    Pegu Club Shaking More Than Just Cocktails in SohoForest Hills: The layout for Trader Joe’s coming to 90-30 Metropolitan Avenue. [Forest Hills 72] Midtown West: Sample cuisine from more than 50 restaurants including Aquavit, Buddakan, and Eleven Madison Park at tonight’s Taste of the Nation at Roseland Ballroom; tickets are $200 and benefit the fight against childhood hunger. [Cakehead] Soho: Pegu Club accused of shaking down its customers by pouring drinks that haven’t been ordered. [Majikthise] South Hampton: Dune should pick up the slack where Cain left off. [Down by the Hipster] Upper West Side: The lobby lounge of the Mandarin Oriental now has a cart offering $75 flutes of Dom Perignon, but at least the price includes dried fruit. [NYS] Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe hopes to see a bidding war over Warner LeRoy’s Tavern on the Green between top “concessionaires” including Dean Poll of the Boathouse and Danny Meyer. [NYO] West Village: Awkward zoning prevents Camaje bistro on Macdougal Street from setting up outdoor seating, though it’s allowed for virtually all its dining neighbors. [NYP]
  10. The Gobbler
    This Is Why New York’s Not HotThe question the Gobbler gets asked more than any other is “What’s hot?” And for a several months now, the Gobbler has answered, with tedious regularity, “Nothing.” People are still clawing their way into Waverly Inn, and if you enjoy offal products done up in an elegant, Asian-fusion style, Momofuku Ssäm Bar is the place for you. But the grandiose cycle of openings which began with the arrival of Masa and Per Se at the Time Warner Center four years ago and reached a crescendo early last year with the giant Meat District extravaganzas like Buddakan and Del Posto has more or less petered out. Sure, there have a been a few tepid revivals (the Russian Tea Room), and bigfoot out-of-town chefs like Joël Robuchon and Gordon Ramsay have opened franchise outlets. There are plenty of restaurants in town, and plenty of them are busy. But this most recent boom may have run its course. Here are some possible reasons why.
  11. Back of the House
    The Great Chef CrisisRecently, apropos nothing much, a prominent young chef we were chatting with launched into a tirade about the restaurant world’s “labor problem.” “None of us can get enough good cooks!” he exclaimed, by way of explanation. Between 2000 and 2006, only a handful of high-end restaurants — Lespinasse, Meigas, Quilty’s — have closed, and there has been an avalanche of major openings: Robuchon, Ramsay, Per Se, Masa, Craft, Del Posto, Morimoto, A Voce, the Modern, Lever House, Buddakan, Cafe Gray, Alto — the list goes on and on. “And it’s not just the massive boom of restaurants,” Adam Platt tells us. “They also have to be either bigger, or chefs have to open multiple places, so that they can enjoy the economies of scale they need to compete.”
  12. The Gobbler
    Signs You’re About to Have an Awful MealThe Gobbler has often expounded on the role that subjective tastes play in the enjoyment of a particular meal or restaurant. Mrs. Gobbler, for instance, likes to dine in sushi bars and tiny English tea parlors, while the Gobbler prefers giant, smoke-filled barbecue establishments and unruly burger joints. During our time wandering the sprawling landscape that is New York City fine dining, however, we have noticed that not very good restaurants, like Kobe Club (reviewed this week, and which of course, not everybody thought was so bad), tend to have certain characteristics in common. So here are a few of the Gobbler’s tips for anticipating when your dinner might really suck.
  13. User’s Guide
    Got $25,000? A Learjet and a Table at Mozza Await How can a Batali completist visit the chef’s new place in L.A. and get back in time to pay the babysitter? Here’s one option: Dial-A-Dinner, the concierge service that dispatches tuxedoed drivers to deliver grub from upscale eateries, runs a side business called Jet Dining. Founder David Blum says George Hamilton, Paris and Nicky Hilton, and Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman are among the clients who’ve requested, on as little as four hours’ notice, private jets to take them to far-flung restaurants. We dialed what Blum confusingly calls the “unlisted listed number” (212-643-1222) to find out how much it would set us back to check out some recently opened NYC-restaurant sister eateries around the country. (Blum says you can request an onboard meal from your favorite local eatery, but we discovered that you might have to settle for substitutions.)
  14. The Other Critics
    The Economics of Big-Box Dining Regina Schrambling’s long L.A. Times feature on New York big-box restaurants might be a must-read for observers of the New York dining scene. Although better known as her brilliantly arch and caustic blog Gastropoda, Schrambling is a rock-solid food reporter when not in harridan mode, and she helps get to the bottom of a basic question. How, in a city where even small spaces are astronomically expensive, can it pay to open a restaurant the size of a bus terminal? The answer is volume, but the how and why of the way restaurants like Morimoto, Buddakan, and the Hawaiian Tropic Zone operate might not be immediately apparent to readers who don’t know a lot about the restaurant business.
  15. Back of the House
    Chefs Tortured by Possible Foie Gras Ban; De Niro Versus Trans Fat• In New Jersey, where a big distributor of foie gras is based, a legislator proposes banning the delicacy. Anthony Bourdain ain’t gonna take it: “It’s like beating up on Julia Child.” [AP] • “Some day a real rain will come and wash all the trans fats off the streets”? Bloomberg attempts to rope Robert De Niro into the debate. [Newsday] • Alain Ducasse moves to the former Lespinasse space in the St. Regis hotel and plans decanters modeled after Louis Vuitton trunks. [NYT] • Ruth Reichl: Coming to a multiplex near you. [NYP] • The new face of caviar: scannable sturgeons and fish biopsies. [NYT] • Starbucks rips off the Egg McMuffin. [Dow Jones] • Greenpoint’s Café Grumpy rents its back room out to hipstervangelists. [NYDN] • Del Posto, Craftsteak, and Buddakan called out as the principal hells of the meatpacking district: “The assholes are eating assholes. The cocks are eating coxcombs.” [Gawker]
  16. Back of the House
    City Fears Unflaky Pie Crusts, Turns to Whoppers and Whiskey• The city bans trans fats from restaurants, despite the fact that nobody minds the stuff, the industry is against the regulations, and New Yorkers stand to lose their flaky pie crusts. (NYT) • McDonald’s, meanwhile, donates $2 million to childhood-obesity research. (Nation’s Restaurant News) • And hackers bust open Burger King’s free Whopper offer. (A Hamburger Today) • More women are hitting the hard stuff. (NYDN) • In a champagne-and-caviar matchup, fired Gilt chef Paul Liebrandt will consult for Stephen Starr, the mogul behind Buddakan and Morimoto. (Snack)