B & B RISTORANTE

CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC!

One of the ways a guy knows he’s middle-aged is when he sees a woman walking with her daughter and they both look good to him. And a sure fire way to tell if you’re too old or jaded to worship at a celebrity chef shrine is whether you think basking in some Food Network God’s absentee aura is worth the price of his ruining your meal – with things that have nothing to do with his cooking. Take that chef’s taste in music for example…PLEASE!

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Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare shamelessly imitated in New York

I heart New York. I really do. I travel there at least twice a year and used to live within an hour of Restaurant Row (just off of Times Square) on West 46th Street.

And nobody, outside of a native, loves New York restaurants more than I do. I can wax poetic about Big Apple eateries from Gray’s Papaya to Patsy’s Pizzeria; wd-50 to Le Bernadin; BLT Fish to Bar Boulud. But it’s become increasingly evident that the New York food scene, cutting edge though it may be, is also capable of shamelessly imitating what’s already happened in Vegas, and claiming it as its own.

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DJT closes…(sigh)

Joe Isidori, the Executive Chef for the Trump organization called Tuesday to inform me that DJT would be closing immediately, and the concept of the restaurant would be “reworked” to fit better with the economic times.

Whatever DJT becomes it will never be what it once was. For barely four months it’s been bucking the tide of vacancies, foreclosures and recession, and trying to carve a niche for itself as a premium restaurant experience, in an intimate setting, with superior food, that isn’t driven by a casino marketing machine or an absentee celebrity chef.

That it failed is due more to a perfect storm of negative market forces than from anything else. The 1,200 unit Trump International Hotel/Condominium Tower has closed on less than 300 units to date, and the rooms are being rented at 1990 prices, by bargain hunters with no interest in Tasmanian sea trout with yuzu emulsion, roasted jidori chicken with Oregon morels, slow roasted halibut with sweetbreads, or one of the best steaks in town.

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