William Baude asks:
Is there any way to predict which celebrity-chef-branded restaurants will be better than others? Obviously one rarely expects such restaurants to be excellent, but there are times (airports, Las Vegas) when a celebrity-chef-branded restaurant may well be the best one around. Is the best chef likely to endorse the best restaurants? Or should one look for profligate branders like Wolfgang Puck and Emeril? Or something else?
When it is “branded” or when simply the genius chef owns and runs a few places (e.g., Thomas Keller) is a tricky distinction. That said, the Wolfgang Puck pizza outlet at O’Hare airport counts as branded, as do many of the fancy places in Las Vegas. Overall I find these restaurants to be a good bet, conditional on the fact that you are somewhere which encourages the proliferation of branded restaurants. I haven’t eaten everywhere in O’Hare but odds are if you are by the Puck outlet you should stop and eat there, relative to what you are likely to find and have time for. The branded outlets in Las Vegas may not be the very best places but again they are fairly wise choices, knowing that just about everywhere is frequented by tourists. Joel Robuchon’s restaurant in Las Vegas isn’t exactly hated.
Branded restaurants tend to be poor choices when they are offered as a protection against an ethnic food subculture, which maybe is considered inferior by many subgroups but actually is superior. Yes, Jean-Georges does have a place in Shanghai and probably it is quite good. Yet you should be out in the street looking for noodles and dumplings, waving your arms in desperation if need be.
My next book — An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies — is out this coming April.
Pizzeria Uno is a better choice for pizza at O’Hare.
The best airport food I’ve had was in O’Hare. But it is from another celebrity chef – Rick Bayless. His Tortas Frontera is quite good, and also meant to be quick.
Second that. The tortilla soup is a wondrous liquor.
+1. Not just good by airport standards, but simply good by any standard (for $10 tortas, at least)
Ryan beat me to it. If you eat anywhere in O’Hare it should be at Tortas Frontera. Pizzeria Uno is disgusting.
So, the visitor in Las Vegas should really wave his arms around in search of the best shrimp cocktail and all-you-can-eat buffet?
Tyler-
When do you sleep?
Maybe he can blog when he is sleeping?
Tyler doesn’t sleep. He waits.
+ 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510…
Nom, nom, nom.. It’s as hard as I expected!
I second the suggestion of Tortas Frontera at O’Hare…I eat there about once a week (there is one right next to the United gates from which the Chicago – DC flights leave and another in terminal K (American)). Similar menu to Xoco. Tasty stuff, and the margaritas make a flight delay a little more tolerable. I’ve seen Rick Bayless (and Art Smith) in there more than once…
Morimoto in Philly is pretty darned good.
Paul Prudhomme’s K-Paul’s in N’Awlins I found to be overrated.
Haven’t tried any Bobby Flay joints but will give Mesa Grill a whirl this year.
Of all the chefs on TV, I dig Rick Bayless the most – wish he had a place on the East Coast.
Does K-Pauls count as “celebrity branded?” When he started it he wasn’t a celebrity; K-Paul’s success is why he became a celebrity. Obviously now he’s not running it anymore so maybe it does.
That being said, if you are ever visiting downtown New Orleans, K-Paul’s lunch specials are an incredibly good deal and the #1 restaurant recommendation I would have for any tourist; or any local for that matter. I’ve never eaten there for dinner as the prices increase fourfold (although the menu is obviously quite a bit expanded, and you get waiters for dinner if the white tablecloth thing is important to you.
The food at K-Paul’s was certainly good; I won’t dispute that. My comment was more about value given pricing (and for dinner specifically – that’s good advice about the lunch specials.)
I loved K-Paul’s. I’d skip Mesa Grill. Might have been something years ago its pretty meh by today’s standards.
Nah, Gordon Ramsey is the best – I don’t care about the food, I just love the rage
+1 to Morimoto in Philly
Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah is great for the buffet, but only better than average off the menu.
It’s been a few years, but Todd English’s Olives in Boston was always outstanding.
Also, for Chinese street food, I think the nighttime outdoor food market on Wangfujiang Street in Beijing is a must.
You get really ripped off in Wangfujiang – but the scorpions on a stick are not a bad snack.
I ate at Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain a couple months ago. The appetizers and snacks were excellent, the entrees and desserts were underwhelming which seemed to be the consensus of the rest of my dining group.
Wolfgang Puck’s “The Source” in DC is pretty good, too.
At Chicago O’Hare, the best dining [I can afford] is the Berghoff Cafe on Concourse C. It is a local, family owned and operated restaurant, related to the Berghoff restaurant downtown, fine German cuisine, the oldest operating restaurant in the city (at least, according to them). The corned beef, pastrami, reuben and so on (including slaw, beet salad) – all excellent, messy, delicious. It makes me look forward to a layover at lunchtime.
I was pretty impressed with the food at O’Hare – there’s a place (in some part of the domestic terminal) that serves some pretty solid gyros.
If I’m not mistaken, the University of Chicago Gleacher Center – which is the downtown campus of its business school – is also catered by Wolfgang Puck. I’ve had the catered food there and thought it was excellent (relative to most catered food).
Whatever the charms of the street food in Shanghai, it is not superior to a Jean-Georges outlet (assuming it’s in the same ballpark as the one in New York). No simple street food is actually better than the astonishingly sophisticated combinations of far fresher and far higher quality foods assembled by master chefs at one of the world’s best restaurants. The assertion is just silly.
More of Tyler signaling his superior cosmopolitanism and his refusal to be deceived by aesthetics and snobbery. But it’s too brazenly wrong to work.
If you’re going to make an argument to skip JG in Shanghai and go with the street food, it’s that you can get better versions of haut French elsewhere but the best Shanghai street food is in Shanghai and it comes with a peek at how normal people in the city live, which is one of the big points in travel. (But this case does not win out. If you have the money and the time, there’s a good case to be made for simply taking the best available meal wherever.)
I meant “does not necessarily win out.”
Also it’s probably like 50 times cheaper, although you have to balance that against the concerns about indigestion.
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-10-25-a-close-encounter-with-chinese-sewer-oil
Great point, Scoop. In fact, eating the street food in China is insane. They use oil to fry it that’s often recovered from sewers! Google it. Street food in China is a serious health hazard.
Save the street food for Xi’an. In any case if you’re going to China, street-food or not you really SHOULD be eating Chinese – otherwise what’s the point?
Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. Much more important to get your business done without getting sick. That means eating imported (non-Chinese) food for health and safety reasons. You think Party cadres are eating local crap?
When Michael Jordan endorses a shoe, or Schumacher endorses a car, I doubt it has much real signalling value. Why are chef endorsed restaurants any different?
Haven’t eaten at the Puck location in O’Hare but third or fourth Tortas Frontera.
I understand what you’re getting at, but Vegas is a terrible example, as it is probably one of the top-7 high-end dining cities in the country – and you mentioned an entire city, not just an airport (where your example is much more apt.)
Tyler
Somewhat off topic, but on the general topic of restaurant incentives; we know that some restaurants are run as cash businesses for tax reasons. Wouldn’t such restaurants lack incentives to make good creative food, since they’re at least a writeoff and at most something more nefarious? Maybe the key to good eating is thus aligning owner interests with culinary interests? Thoughts on how the tax code distorts food culture in this instance?
See I told you to do another restaurant post – doesn’t this make you feel much better then more Paul Krugman stuff?
Maybe this is addressed in your book, Tyler, but I have a tough time differentiating good Chinese places from the take-outs. Say I’m driving through a mid-sized city and lack recommendations. A name like Sichuan Pavillion could mean either the cheap stuff or the real deal. Yelp and Google are filled with clumsy reviews, and it’s hard to know what the reviewer’s standards really are. Would the only option be to look hard at the foodies blogs, or can good restaurants send out credible signals?
Stay away from any that have “yummy” in their name.
There’s one in my neighborhood called O’Tasty (yes, seriously).
On anything with a circular neon “Open” sign.
I searched SE Virginia for 8 years, and questioned every New Englander that I met down here, in search of what I considered to be “good” Chinese. I doubt it’s terribly authentic, but based on what a lot of what I ate at the booths at Newton Circus it is certainly Asian enough for me.
It took forever, but finally found a place with table cloths, a full liquor license, non-plastic flatware, duck sauce that does not come out of a little ketchup packet, and chicken dishes prepared with “chicken” that is less than 20% breading by weight (or volume).
I suspect that “Chinese” in the US is highly regional, and few from the northeast would be satisfied with any of the typical takeout places I’ve seen in the south, and few southerners willing to pay the prices for the normal full service restaurants we have up north.
One thing that does seem to taste the same almost everywhere is hot and sour soup. Never got a bowl anyplace that I really didn’t like.
Do they all have those China cats with a raised paw? Is that a (lack of) quality clue?
Or are they serving cat?
Maneki Neko are very common in Japan. No idea how common they are in China, so I don’t know what it says about the authenticity of a Chinese place, but I would not be at all surprised to see them in an authentic Japanese place.
See Tyler’s “General Tips”
http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/?cat=154
You probably won’t find good Chinese in a mid-sized city in the US unless it has a sizable Chinese population. That having been said, look to see if their signage is bilingual (the Chinese name will usually be wildly different from the English one) and a nontrivial number of their patrons appear to be Chinese. If there’s an Asian grocery store in town check to see if it has a food court. Hell, even if you go to a major Chinatown with Chinese friends it can be tricky to find a decent restaurant.
Assuming the staff are Chinese, tell the waiter to ask the cook what the cook would fix for his mother or for the staff at the end of the day.
You want that (does not guarantee a good meal, but it does increase the odds in your favor).
This increases the chance your meal will be authentic. It does not increase the chance your meal will be good.
Emeril’s Delmonico in New Orleans was actually pretty good as well as his steakhouse in Las Vegas; I think I hit both after peak BAM.
Rick Bayless does good work at both ORD and in Chicago.
Tom Douglas restaurants in Seattle are decent, but certainly less exciting than any of the new flourishing of un-branded restaurants like the Bookbindery, Revel, Walrus and Carpenter or Spinasse.
I was surprised by the quality of Emeril’s New Orleans – I wasn’t expecting great things. Maybe a little overpriced, but New Orleans fine dining seemed pretty pricey generally. I’ve never been impressed by a Puck place.
Does Tom Douglas count, Jason? I have a soft spot for his restaurants, although I haven’t been to one in a few years.
FWIW, I wasn’t expecting much from Emeril’s place at the Sands Casino in Bethlehem, PA but was very pleasantly surprised.
Why not just use your smart phone and look up the place and see what reviewers say about it?
Scoop said:
“No simple street food is actually better than the astonishingly sophisticated combinations of far fresher and far higher quality foods assembled by master chefs at one of the world’s best restaurants. The assertion is just silly.”
I have retired to a Chinese town in Malaysia and I have to disagree. The guy who cooks my noodles on Saturdays uses fresh pasta, local produce, jungle vegetables, river prawns bought at the market early each morning and he goes home when he’s sold out of ingredients. I watch him cook my meal for me and I guess he’s pretty expert at the 3 dishes he offers including a great soup. And the meal costs about USD1.50
There’s a significant rural versus urban confound here. You find the same thing in the US.
Scoop won the thread – Tyler is signaling.
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