When Did "Whoa" Get So Rare in NYC Restaurants?
New York doesn't do bad restaurants anymore. That's exactly the problem.
I’ve been eating my way through New York since 1983, and here’s something I don’t love admitting: I almost never get surprised anymore. Not disappointed — surprised. The number of meals in the last ten years that made me put my fork down and go whoa is small enough to count on one hand, with fingers left over.
That’s not a complaint about the food. It might be the strangest compliment this city has ever earned.
New York doesn’t really do bad restaurants anymore. Think about it - when’s the last time you ate somewhere genuinely, memorably bad? Not overpriced, not loud, not annoying to book. Bad. It almost doesn’t happen. The floor came up. Everybody’s sourcing well, everybody’s plating well, everybody’s staff was trained by somebody who trained somewhere good. You can walk into a random place in almost any neighborhood and eat a perfectly competent meal.
And that’s the trap. Competence is everywhere now. Astonishment is rare. Those two facts are the same fact.
So what happened?
Two things, and I’m only going to be flattering about one of them.
The first is me. I have better taste than I did at twenty, and better taste is expensive - it costs you your own capacity for delight. I’ve eaten the thing. I’ve eaten the thing that the thing is copying. Being harder to impress isn’t a credential, it’s a tax, and I pay it every time I sit down.
But here’s the part that isn’t about me. Social media happened to restaurants, and it moved the industry’s center of gravity from the kitchen to the marketing department. A restaurant now opens into a wave of hype that has almost nothing to do with whether the food is good. The virality is the product. And when the hype is the product, the incentive is to build a room that photographs well, a dish that photographs well, a moment that photographs well - and to let the food and the service coast on the reputation the feed already built for you.
(The Corner Store comes to mind!)
You’ve felt this. You’ve gone to the place everyone posted about, eaten a competent meal in a beautiful room, walked out thinking that was fine - and then felt vaguely stupid for having expected more.
The honest version: the hype now exceeds the restaurant almost every single time. The number that goes the other way is indeterminately small.
Which brings me to the ones that went the other way.
Torrisi. Very few restaurants in New York - or anywhere - live up to the noise around their opening. Torrisi exceeded it. The space is genuinely transforming; you walk in, and the room does something to your posture. Every single item on the menu is beautifully constructed, and then, inconveniently for the cynics, it also tastes incredible - in layers. The service is above and beyond - even where you wait with a cocktail for your table. And the part that actually matters: every single time I’ve been there, the experience is incredible. Not the first time. Every time. Consistency is the least photogenic virtue there is, which is exactly why it’s the rarest one.
Tuome. In such an out-of-the-way pocket of the city, which is already a tell - nobody accidentally goes viral in a location like that. The story behind it, the founder-chef and his parents, is genuinely wonderful, and you can feel it in the room. The first time I went, the first thing I ordered was the snow crab - noodle, squash, dashi butter. I can’t fully describe how creative and flavorful that dish was. What I can tell you is what I did about it: for the first time in my life, I ordered it again for dessert that night. I’ve been back many times since. They have a Michelin star now. I’d like to think the crab did it.
Fedora. This one breaks my own framework, and I'm keeping it anyway. I'd known the original - the old-school room, exactly as it had always been - and then the space went dark for four or five years, the kind of closure you quietly assume is permanent. So when it reopened with a new team and the same name, I was genuinely excited: I got to walk back into a great space I thought I'd lost, with someone special. The atmosphere, the food - every dish - the drinks, the service, the interior. And the person across the table from me. That's the whole list, and I refuse to separate the items on it, because that's the point: the whoa wasn't only in the kitchen. It was in the room - a restaurant resurrected, dark for years, suddenly lit again - and I happened to be in it with the right person, and it still delivered. New team, same name, an old space brought back to life. Names are portable. That night wasn't.
And then the deep cut: Bouley. The original - 165 Duane Street, opened in 1987, gone by the summer of ‘96 when the rent finally outran it. (He reopened two blocks away years later; it isn’t the same room (which has since also closed), and it isn’t the one I’m talking about.) Here’s what I remember most, and it isn’t a dish. You walked in the door, and the entire space smelled completely, overwhelmingly of fresh apples - because it was apples, real ones, lined up on shelves surrounding the entrance. Not a diffuser. Not a brand scent. Apples on a shelf.
Sit with that for a second, because it’s the whole argument.
That apple wall was not a photo op. It couldn’t have been - this was the late eighties; there was no feed to post it to. It was built for the nose of the person walking through the door, which is the least scalable, least measurable, least marketable place a restaurant can possibly decide to spend its money. It existed to do something to you, in a hallway, for four seconds, and then you’d never think about it again. The room has been gone for nearly thirty years now.
Except I’ve thought about it for decades.
Here’s what the four of them share. Not a cuisine, not a price point, not a neighborhood. Every one of them was built for the person in the room instead of the person scrolling past. The apples at the door. The parents in the story. The service that still shows up on the ninth visit, when nobody’s reviewing you anymore. The night that was really about why I was excited to go back and share it with who was across the table.
You cannot photograph any of that. That’s not a coincidence - it’s the mechanism. The stuff that makes you go whoa is, almost by definition, the stuff that doesn’t survive being turned into content. So an industry optimizing for content will produce less and less of it - and it will do so while getting better at everything measurable. More competent. Less astonishing. Which is exactly what I’ve been eating for ten years.
So am I jaded? Sure, partly. Guilty. But I don’t think I’ve lost the ability to be astonished. I think astonishment got un-economic.
The good news is that it’s still out there, and it’s findable, and it announces itself in a specific way: it’s the place your friend can’t explain properly. Not the one they showed you a picture of. The one where they say “you just have to go,” and then trail off - because the thing that got them wasn’t a dish. It was four seconds in a hallway that smelled like apples.
Go to that one. Bring someone.
The Long Table — food, restaurants, and the New York that survives at the table. My taste, not a star rating. This is my experience and my palate, not a critic’s star rating. Reasonable people love restaurants I found merely fine, and that’s the correct outcome.
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Build it for the people in the room 👌🏽