The Future of the New York Food Scene

Andrew Carmellini: How has the New York food scene changed since 1990?

The food scene in New York has changed completely. It’s gone
through a couple of different scenes. I mean, when I came to New
York there were seven, eight restaurants if you were a serious cook
to eat at, most of them French. I think, you know, David Burke
was at River Café, Charlie Palmer just opened up Aureole, Boulud
just got four stars at Boulud. And they were really the three
American guys at the time that had just started to kind of like do
something. And then there were other French.

There was Compass* there was -- Cultedraf* was around,
LaCirque, that whole scene. Now it’s unbelievable. I mean, there’s
a lot of good restaurants around town, good restaurants that are
doing 800 covers, and good restaurants that are cooking for 80
people. There are chefs from all over the world now that have
come to New York. There are small little places that are great.
There’s a lot of great ethnic food also.

I mean, you can go. Go all over the boroughs and get some pretty
good ethnic food. So it’s changed like, it’s pretty unbelievable. I
was a young cook coming to New York and people, you know, we
have been starting our kitchen, we have a couple every week, and
the first question I ask is, “So, where else are you looking at
working?” And the variety is just unbelievable. They say, “Well,
I’m looking at Daniel and I’m thinking about going to Momofuku,
but maybe I’ll go to The Little Owl and maybe I’ll go to
Morimoto. I mean, how different can you get as far as ambiance,
price point, style of cuisine. It’s pretty amazing.

Where will it go from here?

I mean, everyone always asks, well, how many more restaurants
can New York City take? And my answer to that is if you go to
Tokyo, you could live in Tokyo your whole life and have lunch
and dinner at a different restaurant every single day and never,
ever, ever repeat. And, you know, New York will always change.

There will always like those iconic favorites, there’ll always be
like the hot new spot, and there’ll always be something coming and
something going. So that’s always going to change. One thing that
has changed is -- I think it’s the class division as it relates to
restaurants, it has really changed, and there’s a lot of transparency
between high-end four star places and like the little place at a
corner. I remember a chef that will go unnamed, he was
complaining one day that-- we were trying to get fresh porcini
mushrooms, and this was in the mid-‘90s.

We were trying to get it, we were on the phone, we were trying to
get some food in the market, and the purveyor just ran out of these
mushrooms and there was some discussion, because I think there
was a party that requested them, and it was a restaurant that was
downtown that just opened back when there weren’t restaurants
downtown, or maybe there were two or three, and he was a French
chef that was yelling and screaming like, “How can these guys
open up these restaurants downtown and take porcini mushrooms,
because they shouldn’t be taking porcini mushrooms, they should
be cooking hamburgers.” And that’s changed because you can go
down Avenue A, or you can go to LES, or you can go to West
Village or you can go on Smith Street and you can probably find
some wild mushrooms on the menu.

So that’s really changed, is that kind of like the high-end
ingredients have made their way to the neighborhood restaurants,
and the lower-end ingredients have made their way to the higher-
end restaurants. You know, you have pig’s feet at Daniel, and
you’ll have veal head at Per Se, and that’s a pretty interesting
phenomenon.

Has dining become more casual?

I mean, the casualness is really — well, you have classically
trained guys or like high-end guys that have done more casual
stuff. I mean, it’s funny with me, I met someone who doesn’t have
a restaurant now, but was around New York for a long time, and I
met her for the first time three months ago and she thought I was
Italian. She didn’t know that I was American because we’ve never
met before, but she just assumed because she might have glanced
at something about me that said France and said Italy and said
some fancy restaurants and assumed that I was European. And that
blew me away a little bit.

I think that -- and I’m not so inspired for myself really to do high-
end cooking anymore at this point for myself and, you know,
where A Voce is, I don’t think I’ll go in a higher level than that
again. And I want to do different levels of stuff moving on, just
because that’s the way I’ve been eating lately.