Juiciest Beef in Town
Restaurateur, Steamed, Says He Was Burned

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007

NEW YORK -- Everyone at the Kobe Club knew the drill: When the New York Times critic comes for dinner, the whole place goes on high alert.

Whoever recognizes him raises the alarm. The chef prepares two of every dish the reviewer orders, so he can taste-test a duplicate of the entire meal before sending it out to the table. Waiters are attentive but not overbearing. And the owner, Jeffrey Chodorow, keeps a respectful distance.

When the moment of destiny finally arrived in the form of Frank Bruni, the Times restaurant critic since April 2004, every procedure was followed to the letter, according to staffers and Chodorow. After Bruni departed, the Kobe Club's general manager called Chodorow at 2 a.m. and made a bold prediction: We're getting three stars.

Wrong. On Feb. 7, Bruni awarded zero stars, which for a dining establishment aspiring to top-tier status in this town, the restaurant capital of the USA, is a failing grade with a side order of crow. He found a "rubbery" pork chop, "limp" iceberg lettuce, "gluey" mashed potatoes and a clam with a "metallic tang."

"We ate his meal in the kitchen," recalled Chodorow, who was livid. "We would know if something was off." Chodorow then shelled out $40,000 to take out a full-page ad in the Dining Out section of the Times two weeks later.

In his broadside, which took the form of an open letter to Bruni's boss, Chodorow said Bruni had launched "personal attacks." He questioned the reviewer's credentials, citing his previous job in Rome, covering politics, the pope and other general news subjects. He promised to start a blog with a section called "Following Frank," in which he would review the critic's reviews.

"There had been previous times I wanted to write a letter," said Chodorow, adding that everybody around him had persuaded him not to. But this time the review was "so off-base," it was offensive, said Chodorow, who has since banned Bruni from his restaurants and offered $1,000 to the first staff member to spot him on the premises.

In a phone interview, Bruni, 42, seemed unperturbed. "I go into every restaurant with an open mind. I have no animus," he said. "If he wants to have a rebuttal, and he's willing to pay the ad rate to get that space, it seems fair that he get it."

Bruni says he has long loved food but underwent no formal training. After he was named restaurant critic, he read books on cuisine and did a quick tour of New York, Paris and Hong Kong to "have some fresh memories on the palate."

Like him, Chodorow, 57, did not always make food his work. He was formerly a real estate investor, then an airline owner. Then he helped pioneer the idea of status restaurant as theater, creating 20-odd restaurants known for their size and drama. New York's Asia de Cuba has a 50-foot alabaster communal dining table and a 25-foot hologram of a flowing waterfall. At Red Square in Atlantic City, gilded doors open onto an anachronistic fantasy of Russia, including red velvet seating and paintings depicting political propaganda.

Kobe Club's specialty is, of course, Kobe beef, from Japan's Wagyu cattle, animals fed beer and given massages to tenderize their flesh. The $2.5 million decor includes a bar shaped like a samurai sword and covered in black stingray skin; 2,000 samurai swords affixed to the ceiling and dangling point-down; leather, fur, mirrors and chains on most every surface; and a video of a fireplace flickering on one wall.

But that's style. Then there's the substance: the food. Bruni called Chodorow a "gimmick maestro" and brought up the debacle of a reality television show about his restaurant Rocco's, "where Mama's meatballs were sauced with acrimony and eventual litigation."

He also wrote: "Although Kobe Club does right by the fabled flesh for which it's named, it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account."

Chodorow, interviewed during dinner at the Kobe Club, takes issue with the idea that his restaurant, which serves a $290 steak, is overpriced. Expensive, yes. But not overpriced. He said he's already working on deals to replicate the place in Miami and Los Angeles.

And Kobe rib-eye steak. Striped with pink in the center and a dot of red at the core, with a crispy, salty layer on the outside, the beef indeed proves "rapturous," as Bruni conceded.

No question, Kobe Club has its fans. On a recent Tuesday night they included a midtown finance crowd of baby-faced expense-account boys, and older men with younger women; on weekends, the clientele is 99 percent New Jersey, said General Manager Philipp Posch.

"I love this place -- I go to the best restaurants all the time," said Robert Rosenberg, a Manhattan real estate investor. "I have money," he added, opening his wallet to show off his black American Express card.

Critics of Times critics have delivered their message in advertising before. In 1990, for example, the Broadway producer David Merrick took out a full-page ad in the Times against theater critic Frank Rich and columnist Alex Witchel. And the food section of the Times has been a favorite venue for debate. A Chinese restaurant once took out a full-page ad asserting that Times critic Mimi Sheraton, who reviewed the place, had never eaten there. The high-end market Zabar's placed a smaller ad objecting to Marion Burros's evaluation of its caviar. And the Italian restaurant Patsy's placed an ad, paid for in part by Frank Sinatra, rebutting reviewer Bryan Miller's claim that the celebrities in photographs on the wall had never visited the restaurant.

In fact, the power of a New York Times review often dwarfs all others -- so much so that Adam Platt, a food critic at New York magazine, asked on his blog why his own negative review got barely a mention in Chodorow's screed. Nor was the poor review from the New York Post mentioned by the owner. Instead, he cited three positive reviews since the place opened in December.

On Wednesday, the Times' Dining Out section seemed to take a swipe back when it ran a story about restaurateurs who threaten libel suits after negative reviews.

And Bruni still had the last word -- at least for now. After the Chodorow ad, Bruni surprisingly awarded a star to a steakhouse in a strip club, the Penthouse Executive Club. He says the timing was coincidental, but it couldn't have been a more perfect riposte. He seemed to be saying to Chodorow: You may be vulgar, but vulgarity's not the problem. It's your food.

Staff writer David Segal contributed to this report.