A nasty review?
Oh, well, here there is an easy and safe one.
You drop a bomb and after that you say to the readers: Good.
The Russian Tea Room restaurant in New York?
A Good restaurant.
Because, you know, in order to be culinary correct, in The New York Times one star means Good.
Good?
Read these “good” comments from the review:
“Some dishes seem not to have any firmer tether to Russia than the restaurant’s ersatz Chagall and Kandinsky paintings and golden firebirds have to conventional elegance. Other dishes blur the boundaries between Russia, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and even the Far East.”
—
“More than a few dishes weren’t so successful.
Tea-smoked sturgeon had an acrid aftertaste.
The chicken Kiev, unexpectedly straightforward, did a rubbery impersonation of airline food, and I mean coach.
There are nearly a dozen kinds of caviar — foreign, domestic, wild, farmed — and several of the ones I tried had an excessively pasty texture, lacking any bouncy pop.
The kitchen was also bedeviled by inconsistency.
Buckwheat blini that were golden and fluffy one visit were charred and leaden the next.”
—
“But this restaurant’s real shortcoming is its service, unforgivably poor in the context of dinner entrees that frequently exceed $40, appetizers that infrequently fall below $18 and 30-gram servings of caviar that cost as much as $300.”
—
“Outdated menus with erroneous information were put on the table.
Drinks and food were ludicrously slow to arrive.
Servers responded dismissively to complaints, one of them telling us that we shouldn’t bother him with questions about a fugitive bottle of wine.
It was, he shrugged, the sommelier’s problem.
And what a problem.
Although we had ordered a 1998 French Burgundy for $84, we got a 2001.
We flagged the discrepancy, and for the next 15 minutes, as we ate our appetizers and thirsted for pinot noir, both the wine and sommelier were on the lam.
When he showed up, he presented us with a similar 1998 — the listed one was unavailable — for $20 more. He paused, seemingly waiting for us to agree to spend that.
Then, in the manner of a car salesman, he said: “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll call it an even $90.
He later dropped the price to $84, the right end to a wrong situation that typified the restaurant’s clumsiness.”
—
“And at times the experience indeed feels like a gift. The desserts fulfill their sweet obligations, though apart from a pair of blintzes, they’re geographically unbound.”
—
“In terms of food and all else, the Russian Tea Room doesn’t add up neatly or quite make sense.”
—
As I said, The New York Times ranks the restaurants with stars that really mean:
(None) Poor to satisfactory (means really bad)
* Good (means bad)
** Very good (means mediocre)
*** Excellent (means good)
**** Extraordinary (means very good)
If this is a “Good” restaurant, imagine what a “poor” one must be.
(Picture by Joe Fornabaio)