After working his way through a few of Fabio Trabocchi’s ornate compositions on the new menu at Fiamma, the high-end showpiece of Steve Hanson’s vast and profitable restaurant empire, one of the voluble gastronomes at my table put down his fork and knife and made the following grave declaration. “I consider this to be a French restaurant,” he said. A few years ago, that might have been high praise, even for an Italian joint like Fiamma. Not anymore. As Alain Ducasse and Gordon Ramsay have learned, New York has become a fickle place for out-of-town, Eurocentric chefs peddling really expensive meals. In this era of artisanal purity, the appetite for showy auteur cooking has declined, especially among younger, well-heeled diners. A good farm-raised pork chop is the new haute dish of choice (replacing filet mignon), and no one wants to wear jackets to dinner the way their parents did. French is a watchword for the busy, the excessive, the needlessly baroque.
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