Good afternoon, everyone. Late send today. Hopefully you’re reading this on the train home, or at the bar over a large bowl of guacamole and chips.
I loved seeing/meeting so many of you last night at Canyon Coffee. We went Jeff Klein mode and stickered everyone’s phones with a soft no-phone rule in an attempt to get people to talk to each other. I woke up to several late-night texts and DMs, including selfies of groups of friends who didn’t know each other before the party and ended up going out together afterwards. We’ll do it again soon. Stickers work!
Today’s newsletter includes: Molly Baz’s new business venture, J Lee reviews Marcel, Noguchi in Midtown, an inventive (and useful) new use of the Substack comment section, an excellent hotel lobby guide to Toronto ahead of the Toronto International Film Festival, and Anthropic is attracting New York Times employees.
FOR YOUR CALENDAR
🥞 LOS ANGELES: Sag Harbor-based diner Babe’s is serving pancakes (blueberry, classic, and chocolate chip banana) all morning at Uncle Paulie’s Deli. Saturday, September 12.
🐟 MONTAUK: A late-summer seafood festival might call you to the Hamptons this weekend. The Montauk Seafood festival will have over ten restaurants participating, serving lobster rolls, fish tacos, chowder, tuna sliders, sushi, dumplings, and more. Saturday, September 12.
🍔 MARTHA’S VINEYARD: A ticket to Burger and Bubbles gets you five burgers, four glasses of wine, and a pre-sunset end time at 4pm. As a ticket holder, you’ll sample each burger and cast your vote to help crown the People’s Choice winner, who will receive a major prize. Sunday, September 13.
🍦 OJAI: Molly Baz launched a traveling ice cream sandwich pop-up called Mister’s. She’s hosting a pop-up at Rory’s Place next week. Flavors include Choco Peanut Toffee Crunch and Corn Nut Brittle with Blueberry Swirl. Friday, September 18.
🔮 NEW YORK: Flower Power, my favorite East Village potion store, is hosting an Autumn Equinox circle where attendees will make a traditional herbal honey. Sounds fun. Tuesday, September 22.
“The room was not built for me, but I’m happy to be there.” By J Lee
Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name, which is back next month! This week, he wrote about the VC-backed berries and picture-perfect potato gratin at Marcel.
Much has been said about Marcel. I can’t remember the last time a restaurant in New York has been so universally panned. I think for critics, Marcel has been quite the fun punching bag this year. It’s been entertaining for me to watch, from the outside, as someone with no opinion, and only the slightest amount of skin in the game. It’s not often that a critic gets to throw a guilt-free haymaker to boost their credibility, and Marcel is an easy target. It’s rare that a restaurant has so unabashedly, and enthusiastically, embraced commerce. We live in New York and we love to pretend that money is this taboo icky topic. I have to admit, I still don’t know how most of my friends pay their rent.
Marcel doesn’t try to hide who butters their bread, and how it’s buttered. After all, Marcel is a French restaurant, co-owned by a luxury design brand (Roman and Williams), in the corporate headquarters of an auction house (Sotheby’s) on Madison Avenue. They wear their dollar signs and their ambition on their sleeve. Everything in the restaurant is for sale, from the martini glass in your hand, to the paintings and dinosaur bones on display. Go ahead, call it gauche, but you have to hand it to them, they know who they are, and who they’re for, and what they want, which is more than a lot of restaurants can say. They’re not a restaurant for you, or for me. It’s not for the person reading restaurant reviews in the Times, the Yorker, or the Mag. It’s a restaurant for people who eat dinner on Madison Avenue, it’s a restaurant for people who wear suits and never sweat. It’s for people who buy paintings and dinosaur bones at auction. It’s a restaurant for people who don’t care about food, people for whom money is not an object. I’ll stand on my platform and say that these people deserve a place to call their own, a place to eat steak, and drink Bordeaux, and spend enormous amounts of money. I don’t really need or want them coming downtown, taking up a seat at one of my favorite restaurants, complaining that the fish is too fishy, and the music is too loud. Let them eat cake at Marcel.
“It’s interesting eating at a restaurant after a deluge of bad reviews. There’s palpable anxiety. You can feel it in the air. I’m well aware that everyone is just trying their best and doing their job, and I appreciated it, and tried to come in and taste the food from an open and unbiased place. But, the thing about their anxiety is that you can taste it in the food.”
