Restaurant review, A Lower Bar.

Not so long ago, dinner at the bar was a kind of in-house secret among the restaurant-obsessed. You didn’t need a reservation when you ate at the bar, and the meal was often more streamlined and intimate than at a regular table. Sometimes you met other quirky, like-minded characters at the bar who told tall tales about their Runyonesque lives and gave you menu tips. If you didn’t feel like talking to anyone, you had a frosty martini for company or an inky glass of Bordeaux, and instead of communing with chatty guests or intrusive waiters you communed directly with your food. Of course, bar dining isn’t anyone’s secret anymore. Danny Meyer was the first serious restaurateur in the city to popularize the habit in lofty gourmet circles, and more recently, chefs like Joël Robuchon and David Chang have taken the classic Japanese-bar-restaurant model and turned it into a full-blown international fad.

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Restaurant review, A Lower Bar.

As any blog-obsessed restaurant geek worth his gourmet salt can tell you, the hallowed Michelin-guide star-rating system works as follows: Three stars denote “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”; two stars “excellent cooking, and worth a detour”; and one star “a very good restaurant in its category.” But as tastes change and the economic downturn continues its rampage through restaurant land, the notion of “exceptional cuisine” continues to shift before our eyes. While bourgeois burger joints and glorified noodle bars proliferate around town, old-line “three-star” restaurants are coming under increasing pressure from diners who either don’t want to eat their “exceptional” brand of cuisine anymore or can’t afford to pay for it. If Michelin retains its lofty, increasingly outdated standards in this age of culinary deflation, soon there won’t be any stars to dispense at all.

Read more at http://nymag.com/