How do you select a top restaurant when visiting a major city? This can be difficult especially if eating at a $75/person+ restaurant is something you can afford to do only once and a while. Are you really getting a top restaurant with excellent, delicious, and beautifully prepared dishes or are you paying top dollar for a celebrity chef’s new restaurant in a chichi neighborhood?
I wrestled with this question when selecting restaurants for a night out in New York City with a good friend of mine and fellow Foodie. On most of his visits, I try to take him to top ethnic restaurants in Chinatown, Little Korea, or just a favorite sushi bar. But this time we decided to go top shelf. I really wanted to try Esca, Mario Batali’s seafood restaurant but we couldn’t get a table at a reasonable hour. So we decided to try out NY’s trendy meat market district and stopped in Morimoto’s and Jean-George’s Spice Market.
Both of these restaurants are trendy. Dress ‘hip’ if you want to fit into the crowd. You’ll need to call in a reservation a few days in advance (or longer) if you want to eat in the main restaurant at a reasonable hour. Walk-ins can order a la carte in their lounges. Both restaurants have stunning decors and excellent service. Also, both restaurants have chef’s tasting menus that are good values, but you’ll have to order a la carte if you want the more interesting items on the menu.
As a Foodie, I had a hard time selecting my dinner options. Seriously. At Spice Market, are the Vietrnamese Spring Rolls really that interesting and superior to the ones that I love at Nha Trang? At Morimoto’s, is the eel avocado roll that much better than what I would get at a good (but less pricey) sushi bar?
I ponder this question. When I look up reviews on these restaurants, I’ll read twenty that love the food and another twenty that think the restaurant is beautiful but the food is just mediocre. I think there are two basic issues. First, these restaurants engineer their recipes to insure that they are highly reproducible, can be prepared very efficiently, and can be sold in volumes with good profit margins. Now I can’t fault restaurants for this, but the human touch is missing from these recipes and presentation. Can top restaurants allow their chefs a little creative licensing when preparing the dishes and plating?
The other problem is the menu itself. Chefs design their menu for general consumption which often means selecting recipes that are highly recognizable. But there are always hidden gems on the menu. At Spice Market, they have a silken tofu entrée served pad-thai style. I forget the exact name, but you shouldn’t have a hard time finding it on the menu. I thought it was awesome and more interesting than the cod that we ordered. Is this item tailored to foodies? Maybe. But finding the real standouts on the menu is challenging.
I now try two approaches to finding top restaurants. If it’s a friend’s recommendation, I ask them what to order and gauge their enthusiasm. I also look at the menu. If I see many items that I’d like to order, it passes the test.
