One of the methods humans use to be sophisticated about eating places nowadays is by claiming that the New York City dining scene has lost its edge. The sheer range of restaurants within the city — approximately 27,000, in keeping with the fitness inspectors — makes the argument absurd. How a lot of them are slipping? All of them? Just the primary 20,000 or so?
In reality, folks who gripe approximately the kingdom of New York restaurants normally speak about a sliver of a slice of a fraction, in all likelihood around 50 locations whose names are in constant motion, with the most up-to-date weighing maximum heavily within the effects.
The wide variety of exact ones is better than anyone can depend on. Places where different towns could brag approximately wandering away from the crowd right here. The chef Günther Seeger, for instance, became a nationwide big name while he cooked in Atlanta.
The tasting-menu restaurant he opened inside the West Village 3 years in the past must have been a chief vacation spot, especially after he dropped the prices. Mr. Seeger can make components bend to his will nearly without touching them. His cooking outshone some of the metropolis’s extra famous chefs, who whip their elements harder with far less payoff.
Yet, he struggled to put Günther Seeger NY on the map. I reviewed it. However, some different critics didn’t, and by the time it closed, ultimately, Chris Crowley of Grub Street wrote, “it wasn’t an eating place you heard a whole lot of meals geeks speak about.” Mr. Seeger complained to at least one acquaintance that he couldn’t even get on a list of New York’s one hundred fine eating places.
Of course, precise eating places fail everywhere, but it’s hard to imagine Mr. Seeger vanishing into the group in San Francisco, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Considered and rejected, perhaps. But overlooked? Not in all likelihood. I’m now not positive that any phrases of mine ought to have persuaded the metropolis to cuddle as much as Mr. Seeger, who isn’t specifically cuddly. But I wish I’d found ways to remind New Yorkers that his breathtakingly natural cooking was there to be loved, at the same time, as that was nonetheless genuine.
This brings us, via a circuitous and no longer specially properly-paved route, to Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana. Using naturally leavened dough and a short buying listing of elements, Mr. Mangieri makes what is unmistakably the greatest sit-down pizza in the five boroughs. (I doubt he has any rivals inside the stand-up joints, both, but slice pizza is a unique game.)
Two years in the past, I posited that Razza, a pizzeria in Jersey City, made “the great pizza in New York.” I don’t regret writing that; however, I would love to factor out that Mr. Mangieri no longer cooks inside the metropolis at the time, and that Razza’s chef, Dan Richer, has stated that he started out taking pizza seriously only after he met Mr. Mangieri.
Una Pizza Napoletana saw a rush of curious pie-eaters after it opened on Orchard Street a touch extra than a yr in the past. But the previous few instances I’ve long passed were too many unclaimed chairs and bar stools. When Anthony Mangieri is making pizza, the proper range of empty seats is 0, as any New Yorker who waited in line at the vintage Una Pizza Napoletana, within the East Village from 2004 to 2009, should tell you. Press hobby inside the new vicinity has died down, too.
