One of the city’s most prominent restaurateurs took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, accusing the newspaper’s chief food critic of lacking the bona fides to do the job.
Your readers would not expect your drama critic to have no background in drama or your architecture critic to not be an architect,” Jeffrey Chodorow wrote. “For a publication that prides itself on integrity, I feel your readers should be better informed as to this VERY IMPORTANT fact, so they can give your reviews the weight, or lack thereof, they deserve.”
The ad comes on the heels of Bruni’s review of Chodorow’s newest Manhattan eatery, Kobe Club, which specializes in serving tender and fatty Kobe beef from Japan. A 10-ounce rib-eye portion of the beer-fed cattle, considered a delicacy, costs $150 on Chodorow’s menu.
Bruni didn’t think much of the place and chopped it into little pieces, essentially warning his readers to stay away. He gave it zero stars out of a possible four.
“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,” Bruni wrote on Feb. 7.
Another high-profile critic, Adam Platt, of New York magazine, also panned the restaurant.
“Mr. Chodorow’s restaurant seems to me less like a steakhouse than a bizarre agglomeration of restaurant fashions and trends, most of them bad,” Platt said earlier this month in a review entitled “Butchered.”
In the highly competitive world of city restaurants, such criticisms can be the financial kiss of death.
An exasperated Chodorow decided enough was enough, and he struck back with an ad the newspaper says typically costs $115,000.
“It’s expensive, but not that much,” Chodorow told The Associated Press.
The ad was addressed to Pete Wells, editor of the newspaper’s Dining section.
