|  Toujours
Bubbles
Toques, Trends & Top
Restaurants
by
Alain Gayot
Dear Reader,
Welcome
to our Annual Restaurant Issue. In our world, there is
a plethora of restaurant establishments that are all different,
and all fighting for life with a variety of motivating
forces. A restaurant is strictly a business for some,
and a labor of love for others. Whether an eatery is trying
to take your dollar or your heart, there are many degrees
of success, and quite a bit of risk involved. The restaurant
galaxy is a bit like a glass of Champagne; pour in the
sexy beverage and watch the bubbles travel up the glass,
then take it into your body and feel the action.
Our
rating
system often confuses restaurant-goers, but we’ve
used it for over forty years, so we’re keeping the
tradition alive. The rating on a twenty point scale is
used to grade the food only. Ambience, service, décor
and other parts of the dining experience are addressed
in the review. So for the most part, our restaurants are
at the top of our toque
tallies because of what you will find on your plate.
Since
we are now publishing our work on the Internet, we actually
update these ratings year-round, unlike printed guides.
The speed at which stars are born and vanish in the eatery
stratosphere is astonishing. Ventures open and close before
you’ve even been able to jump on OpenTable.com
to secure a reservation.
It’s
important for our readers to understand that beyond the
food rating, an establishment appears on our “Top
40 Restaurants in the U.S.” list because it
offers everything that a successful dining room must provide:
top ingredients, pronounced creativity in the execution
of the food, solid service and a look that you’ll
want to emulate for your next remodel. A small independent
restaurant that has remarkable food but a perfunctory
wine list would not make the grade, nor would a top dining
room with all the trimmings where the chef has fallen
asleep at the wheel. There might not be anything completely
wrong with the place, except that nothing has changed
in ten years. Top golfers and tennis pros eventually fall
from their apex and consequently, so do their scores.
Even if they maintain their skills, but fail to improve,
others may come along who surpass them.
How
many times have you dined at a restaurant that you tell
yourself you’ll never visit again? Others continue
to frequent the place, and they don’t seem to find
a problem with it. GAYOT.com
has been copied on countless letters to establishments
where diners got sick and were seeking damages. This illustrates
the risks in evaluating dining. One dish may be off. Perhaps
a bad shrimp got into the batch or the chef was thinking
of something other than food that evening. Perhaps he
was simply tired and too much salt got in. Does Tiger
Woods win every Grand Slam tournament? The worst is going
in with high expectations, which is understandable, especially
when you just listed your new exotic
car on eBay to finance the meal. Our role is to give
you a map of the solar system, to point out the safe planets
to avoid asteroids and to simply watch shooting stars.
I, along with my father André and my sister Sophie
Gayot,
want to congratulate all the hardworking men and women
whose restaurants are heralded herein. We welcome those
who made our Top
10 New Restaurants list as well as the nine restaurants
that have never earned a spot in our Top
40 before. With so much talent at work in the kitchen,
choosing our Rising
Chefs was perhaps our most difficult task. If you
get the chance, try tasting the work of other notables,
including Iacopo Falai, Marco Bustamante, and Ryan Racicot,
whose older brother Dave made our list this year.
We
also celebrate the return of Urasawa,
Seeger’s,
and Le
Rêve to our Top
40 after their brief absence last year. And while
we’re on the topic of resurrection, we’re
thrilled to see Le
Cirque, like an acrobat, make a successful landing
on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s turf at One
Beacon Court, where it can continue to entertain diners.
We’d like to bid a sad farewell to L’Orangerie,
which will close its doors Dec. 31, 2006, after 28 years
of fine dining, as well as other notable restaurants like
Bastide.
We
also want to thank our growing staff of trusted and dedicated
professional food writers around the world who have helped
make this issue, and our website, a success.
Best
wishes of health and prosperity to all of you.
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| In
last
year's Restaurant Issue, we remarked
on how top chefs were transforming Las Vegas
from a gambling mecca to the Restaurant
Capital of the World. With the triumphant
openings of Restaurant
Guy Savoy and Michael Mina’s Stripsteak,
his first steakhouse, the culinary explosion
along the Strip continues. But other goings-on
in the restaurant world have caught our
attention over the last twelve months:
In
the past, a peek into the kitchen of most
great restaurants would reveal either a
French chef or one trained in Europe. But
now, thanks to fine culinary institutions
like the California Culinary Academy and
The Culinary Institute of America, the United
States is generating a lot of homespun talent
who were born and learned to cook stateside.
Besides national pride, another benefit
of home-grown chefs is the pressure they
put on their region’s farmers to produce
fresh local ingredients.
The
small plates concept has been around for
a while, but more and more tapas restaurants,
lounges and wine
bars are focusing on the fun factor
instead of food. Their casual, comfortable
atmosphere has made them more of a place
to hang out for good times rather than gourmet
cuisine.
While
literally billions of these simple sandwiches
have already been gobbled up by Americans,
more and more places are concentrating on
the humble but heralded hamburger.
In most cities you can buy and eat one without
getting out of your car for the change found
under the driver’s seat, but they
are also being prepared, deconstructed and
cooked to order by top chefs. Hamburgers
made from Kobe beef are showing up on top
menus from coast to coast, and the hottest
item at DB
Bistro Modern in Manhattan is the $32
sirloin burger filled with braised short
ribs, foie gras and black truffle. (Don’t
worry, it comes with fries!) Although steakhouses
are still quite popular, at the trendy Hollywood
Roosevelt Hotel, many people ignore
Dakota
for the more casual atmosphere of 25
degrees, which specializes in burgers,
both beef and turkey. Even über-chef
Hubert
Keller of Fleur
de Lys couldn’t resist opening
his own Burger
Bar on the Vegas Strip.
Americans
like things BIG, and restaurants are no
exception. Despite astronomic real estate
prices in Manhattan, Buddakan,
a two-story Chinese mansion filled with
a labyrinth of corridors connecting various
chambers including a sunken ballroom, measures
a whopping 16,000 square feet. That’s
nosed out by Jack’s
La Jolla, which houses three different
San Diego restaurants under one roof covering
17,000 square feet. The City of Big Shoulders
is also the City of Big Restaurants with
the Latin-themed Carnivale
taking up a staggering 35,000 square feet,
bigger than the last two restaurants combined.
But
some restaurateurs still see the joy in
thinking small. True artisans like Daniel
Patterson at Coi
in San Francisco and Guenter Seeger
at his eponymous restaurant in Atlanta are
following in the footsteps of Ken Frank
(pictured above) of La
Toque in Rutherford, Calif., who knows
that the best way to please diners is to
give their food as much attention as he
can. Frank gave up his trendy business on
the Sunset Strip to open an intimate place
that is all about the food, and not so much
on the scene. Coi has just 27 seats in its
main dining room, allowing Patterson to
focus more on each course of his customer’s
meal, as opposed to becoming a food factory.
Which
of these last two contrasting trends will
play a bigger role in the dining scene of
the future? Come back and see what we have
to say next
year!
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