THE BAD DEAL

The only time the room feels small is when you are attempting to book one of the 28 seats, but even that is a fairly painless process thanks to a widget on Chez Sardine’s Web site that lists open time slots rather than making you guess. (I hope the technology catches on.)

Hey OpenTable, Pete Wells is talking about you! He’s criticizing those reservation time GUESSING GAMES you make us play. End the madness and just tell us when there are available seats, OpenTable!

# the bad deal

# new york times

The Marrow: When Critics Disagree

Time Out New York: ★ ★ ★ ★
Bloomberg News: ★ ★ ★
New York Post: ★ ★ ★
New York Times: ★
New York Mag: ★

We always like to say that when critics disagree, the consumer wins, as diversity of opinion beats reading the same review over and over again.

No, you can’t really divine the truth about any particular restaurant (or from any individual critic) by comparing star ratings (Time Out’s is “out of five”, the rest are more or less “out of four”). But in this case, the stars are a pretty good indicator about how each of these critics feel about Harold Dieterle’s Italian-German joint. Some of them like it a lot, others, a little. (Bad Deal editor Ryan Sutton, of course, is the man behind the Bloomberg review).

Here's a New York Times Story about how the director of admissions for a Greenwich Village nursery school and her banker husband look for a $1 million apartment.

“As the director of admissions for a Greenwich Village nursery school, she had had awkward street encounters with students and their families. Out of context, it was sometimes difficult to remember who was who. (Once, a mother approached her at the hairdresser.)”

We realize this isn’t a topic we normally cover here on The Bad Deal, but somehow, for reasons we can’t quite explain, this piece seems to fit quite nicely on our site.

Should Waiters Get a Higher Minimum Wage?

Following President Obama’s call in the State of the Union to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour, Pete Wells of the New York Times sparked a lively Twitter discussion among members of the food world about the welfare of restaurant workers. Commenting in this fine NYT Twitter roundup are Tom Collichio, Grant Achatz, Nortnern Spy, Ryan Sutton (that’s me!), and others.

Now here’s the thing: The minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.13 an hour, Wells correctly reports, while $7.25 is the current the non-tipped minimum wage. Making up that difference depends not just on the generosity of the dining public, but how much you, as a waiter, are required to kick back to your bussers, backwaiters and bartenders.

We at The Bad Deal are big fans of Per Se-style “service included” pricing, which ensures waiters earn a stable wage, and which also lets kitchen staffers earn a bit more too (that’s a big deal at fancy joints where wait captains make bank while line-cooks come home with much less). Then again, service-included pricing is a touchy issue in America, where many diners (incorrectly) think they deserve to control how much a waiter earns based on his or her “performance” that evening.

So, should waiters get a higher minimum wage? Feel free to chime in below.

Pete Wells on Why Restaurants Can Be More Important Than Post Offices

pricehike:

New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells makes a profound point about the importance of restaurants and fundraising in our post-Hurricane Sandy New York. Here’s what he has to say:

“A good restaurant can be more important to its neighborhood than the post office. I suspect that’s why so many people have been donating to the many fund-raising sites set up by flooded restaurants. I can’t think of many for-profit businesses that people would pay to subsidize without getting a direct return on their investment. But if the place where families go to celebrate birthdays just disappears one day, it can leave a big hole in the community.”

What Wells is saying reminds me of the way society, particularly the wealthy, subsidizes artists. Whether through foundation-supported grants, or direct gifts from high-net worth individuals, artists depend on our support to do what they do. And I’m not just talking about buying their paintings or photos; I also mean simply giving them money, without the expectation of something immediate or tangible in return, because we know that doing so will let the artist continue his or her lifestyle, and hopefully make our world a better place.

Sometimes, members of the culinary cognoscenti tend to think of restaurants in very transactional terms; just look at my blog, The Price Hike, dedicated to tracking the minute (and sometimes not-so-minute) price changes at restaurants across the U.S. You really don’t get more transactional than that, and I’m okay with that, because, well, that’s what I do, and we only have so much money to spend!

But the reason this quote by Mr. Wells strikes a cord with me is because he’s encouraging us to contemplate the joy of restaurants in terms that transcend “I pay $58 for a steak and I get twenty-two ounces of USDA Prime in return,” or even, “I’m donating $500 to this GoFundMe account and hopefully the restaurant will give me a signed cookbook as a present.”

This quote is about restaurants not just as businesses but as community centers, places that make us happy for reasons we can’t necessarily put a finger on, and sometimes it’s hard to put a quantifiable price on that.

↵ Reblogged from pricehike

Should We Be Allowed to Watch `Game of Thrones’ at Ambitious Restaurants Like Momofuku Ssam Bar or Marea?

Something interesting happened this week in the world of culinary journalism; New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells didn’t critique a restaurant. Instead, he used his column space to advise diners to eat downtown, penning a fine love letter to those “temporarily shuttered” by superstorm Sandy.

This critic, in turn, took a somewhat analogous course, forgoing a review to advise restaurants on what they could do to better serve diners in preparation for the next natural disaster.

One of my chief suggestions raised a few eyebrows: More good restaurants need televisions, especially when the power’s out. Conventional wisdom, of course, is just the opposite. Here’s what Sam Sifton had to say about the matter early last year when he was still the NYT food critic:

“You know why your favorite restaurants don’t have a television on where you can watch the game? Because restaurants that make it onto lists like yours don’t generally have televisions on where you can watch the game. That’s not a Zen koan, either. It’s part of the Manhattan social contract, the same sort of understanding that keeps polka off the speakers at sushi bars and fluorescent lights out of bistros. Televisions don’t belong in good restaurants.”

All fair points. I like to think that social contract is voided once the lights go off in half the city. I don’t go to the library, to town square, or to the local barbershop when things go dark. Rather, I go out to eat. And when the lights come back on, I go out to eat again. Restaurants, for many of us urban dwellers, are the centers of our communities. They’re our surrogate kitchens, civilized extensions of our living rooms.

So when the lights go off, I wish I could watch the latest edition of “60 Minutes” in the bar area at Empellon Cocina, Mission Chinese, The Brooklyn Star, Marea, or even Frankies 457.

The challenge that every single restaurant is faced with is the elasticity of demand from consumers,” said Ben McKean, Savored’s co-founder and C.E.O. “In an off-peak hour, you might get only a couple people who want to go to the restaurant, and in a peak hour you might get people out the door.” Restaurants are “leaving so much on the table,” he said.

The New York Times profiles Savored, a restaurant reservation website that offers guests 15%-40% discounts, typically in the off-hours.

We at The Bad Deal have said NICE THINGS about Savored in the past. The service requires no pre-payment by guests and the demand-based pricing makes more economic sense than a deal from Groupon or Gilt City, which can overrun your restaurant with cheapos in the prime-time hours.

ALSO: Savored diners, as far as we can tell, aren’t limited to “Restaurant Week-esque” menu restrictions, as is often the case with deal sites. For example: At Le Cirque, you can get your discounts off the regular menu or the tasting menus.

While the service is now FREE, we were still kinda sorta fans of Savored even when it was charging $10 for reservations; we like to think the pre-payment was a reasonable “cancellation fee” of sorts.

But what has become apparent is a basic contradiction at the heart of the daily deals industry on the Internet. The consumers were being told: You will never pay full price again. The merchants were hearing: You are going to get new customers who will stick around and pay full price. Disappointment was inevitable.

Writes David Streitfeld for The New York Times, in his reporting piece “Coupon Sites Are a Great Deal, But Not Always for Merchants.” This jives nicely with The Bad Deal’s longstanding (and not terribly original) thesis that customer loyalty is difficult in the era of daily deals, where misinformed consumers find value not necessarily in quality but rather in the degree of the discount. And a merchant can only discount so for long before it has to raise its regular non-sale prices to justify the deal.