Restaurants Stop Playing Hard to Get By FRANK BRUNI

February 4, 2009
Critic’s Notebook
Restaurants Stop Playing Hard to Get By FRANK BRUNI

HAS a restaurant hugged you lately?

Has it insisted that you can have it more cheaply than you thought possible and whenever you want, not just at 5:45 p.m., when your desire isn’t close to peaking, or at 9:30, when you almost can’t be bothered anymore?

Has it dropped its usual guard? Surrendered its typical reserve?

I’m betting that the answer is “yes” — and that if you eat out regularly in New York, you’ve noticed a different reception, an altered mood: extreme solicitousness tinged with outright desperation.

Battered hard already by the recession and petrified of what’s to come, restaurants are talking sweet and reaching out in ways they didn’t six or even three months ago. They’re cutting special deals, adding little perks, relaxing demands and making an extra effort to be accessible.

They’ve seldom wanted you so bad, so they’ve rarely treated you so good. If you can still afford to dine out, you’re likely finding yourself enfolded in what the restaurateur Stephen Hanson— who recently closed two Manhattan restaurants, including Fiamma — describes as a big, tight embrace.

Predicting that “the consumer will just shut down” and that 2009 would be “a very, very tough year,” Mr. Hanson told peers at a conference in Manhattan last month, “You need to hug the customer.”

Trust me: the hugging had already begun.

I was feeling it regularly in restaurants where I was certain I hadn’t been recognized as a critic and where the “hello” from the host station sounded more like a “thank God.” I was feeling it on the telephone, as reservationists who couldn’t accommodate me one night veritably pleaded that I book another, or beseeched me for a callback number just in case a table suddenly opened.

And I wasn’t the only one.

Joan Rappoport, a Manhattan event planner who lives in the West Village and eats out regularly, said that she sensed a climatic shift as early as six months ago.

“The attitude that a number of places used to have, they don’t have that anymore,” Ms. Rappoport said, her tone of voice communicating equal measures bewilderment and relief. “That attitude of ‘we’re doing you a favor,’ that frosty condescending attitude — I don’t find that anymore. And I’ve experienced that change over and over again.”

Servers, she said, make double- and triple-sure that her table has everything it needs. Managers circle back to the table more often than ever to ask, with new urgency, if everything’s O.K.

They have the time. Fewer restaurants are filling up every night and more tables are going empty. According to Technomic, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm, fine-dining revenues could fall by 12 to 15 percent in 2009.

That may not sound cataclysmic, but restaurateurs say that for many restaurants, it is the difference between making and losing money.

“People need to understand how tight the margins are in the restaurant business,” said Alfred Portale, the chef and one of the owners of Gotham Bar and Grill, which opened 25 years ago.

Mr. Portale said that Gotham’s revenues are down by about 15 percent from a year ago, adding, “This is the toughest January I’ve ever seen.”

I asked if the restaurant was still eking out a profit. After hesitating for several seconds, he said, in a staggered cluster of short sentences: “I hope so. Yes. We will. A small one.”

Fabio Trabocchi, the chef at Fiamma, sounded even more dire in a recent telephone conversation, saying that some restaurants with prices as steep and standards as high as Fiamma’s and Gotham’s were seeing declines of up to 40 percent.

You get an immediate sense of that when hunting for reservations. While getting into a select cadre of perpetually mobbed restaurants can be as hellish and humbling as ever, getting into others isn’t nearly as tough as it once was.

“I’m a big fan of Chanterelle,” said Niko Canner, a management consultant who lives in Chelsea. “You can go to Chanterelle at the last minute now, in a way that you couldn’t nine months ago.”

As Mr. Canner spoke to me on the telephone last Wednesday around noon, he began surfing the Web site of Open Table, an online reservation system, and found that several highly acclaimed, steadfastly popular restaurants — including Chanterelle — could take a twosome that very night at the prime time of 7:30.

About two hours after our phone conversation, I tried my own Open Table experiment. I looked in the area round Union Square for a table for four at — or within a half hour of — 8 p.m. I had many options, including Gotham, Irving Mill and 15 East.

I looked in TriBeCa. I could dine in a foursome around that time at many of the neighborhood’s all-stars, including Chanterelle, the Harrison, Mai House and Matsugen.

Then I called Karen Waltuck, one of the owners of Chanterelle, who said that in the nearly 30 years since she and her husband opened the restaurant, she has never felt so unsettled.

“There’s a tenuous quality to everything that doesn’t give you a feeling of standing on solid ground,” she said, referring to herself and other restaurateurs. “We’re all looking around and saying: ‘What is going on here? What can we do to make it better for ourselves and for our clients?’ We all have to be clever in our ways.”

Chanterelle hasn’t instituted bargain menus or price reductions because, Ms. Waltuck said, the restaurant has always operated on a slim profit margin and tried to keep prices in check.

But so many other restaurants have fashioned so many special deals that two of the city’s most prominent dining-related Web sites — Eater and Grub Street, which is owned by New York magazine — have invented cheeky tags and new features to keep track of them.

Almost daily on Eater, about a half dozen new items pop up under the header “Dealfeed,” and the Web site has also unveiled a “recession specials map.” The flag that Grub Street uses for its ever-growing tally of price reductions: “The Recession Is Your Friend.”

At the avant-garde restaurant wd-50, on the Lower East Side, anyone who orders a 12-course $140 tasting menu can get any bottle of wine on the restaurant’s excellent list for half price. The promotion, begun in December, was initially supposed to last three months. Now it has no definite end date.

Wine discounts, waived corkage fees or wine lists showcasing less expensive bottles can be found in Midtown at Alto and the Modern, where bottles under $50 appear in the Bar Room as “wines for our times”; in TriBeCa at Capsouto Frères; and in Greenwich Village at Perry St., owned by Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Mr. Vongerichten, many of whose restaurants have always offered price reductions at lunch, is being particularly aggressive (by which I mean huggy). In October Perry St. instituted the option of a $35 three-course dinner menu during the slow hours of 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 to 11 p.m. In December, his restaurant Nougatine, a casual adjunct of his Columbus Circle flagship, Jean Georges, instituted its own $35 three-course menu, every night but Saturday from 5:30 to 6:30 and 10 to 11 p.m.

That same month he began to offer a $35 seven-course omakase dinner at Matsugen, of which he is a principal owner. There are no restrictions on the hours when it can be ordered.

Not even the best-known chefs and most acclaimed restaurants are immune from the pressure to give diners more for less, and wild spending for extreme luxury is rapidly falling out of fashion.

At Del Posto in Chelsea, whose owners include Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich and Joseph Bastianich, the price for the most extravagant, 20-course meal was reduced last month to $175 from $250. The price for a nine-course tasting menu fell to $125 from $175.

Daniel recently began offering, for people with reservations between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. on Monday through Thursday, an early-bird special: three courses, including wine, for $98 as opposed to the usual $105 without wine. The restaurant Cru’s early-bird special, available every day up to 6:30 p.m., is three courses for $49.

Compass, on the Upper West Side, is promoting a “lobster sample sale,” until Feb. 15, that includes a whole three-pound grilled lobster for $39 and a lobster salad for $13.

Craft, which in October opened its private room twice a month for 10-course, $150 dinners cooked by Tom Colicchio — called Tom: Tuesday Dinner — reached out in the other direction, to bargain hunters, last month. It opened that room once a week for Damon: Frugal Fridays, with a range of dishes cooked by Craft’s executive chef, Damon Wise, for $10 apiece.

Dozens of prominent New York restaurants are extending the $24.07 lunch menus and $35 dinner menus of Winter Restaurant Week, well past when they were set to end last weekend. Le Cirque is prolonging them through February, something its owner, Sirio Maccioni, said he had never done.

Lever House has a $35 three-course dinner menu that it has said it will keep through March. Other restaurants have said that similar specials will last until the end of the year. At the rate things are going, Restaurant Week could become Restaurant Millennium.

And all sorts of rules and rigidities could crumble. The 21 Club recently abandoned requirements — in place for more than 75 years — that men wear neckties at dinner.

While its manager, Bryan McGuire, said the change wasn’t directly linked to the recession, he conceded in an interview with Glenn Collins of The New York Times that it “could help the restaurant greatly in a time of difficulty.”

So could the restaurant’s relatively new offer of free parking at any time of the night for diners, a bit of hugging that pales next to what one Chicago restaurant, Everest, is doing. Customers traveling 15 miles or less to the restaurant can get a luxury car service for $15.

Restaurants in New York and elsewhere are working harder than ever to make sure that no diner who has expressed an interest in them slips away.

David Barber, one of the owners of Blue Hill, in Greenwich Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Westchester County, said that reservationists at those restaurants are newly assiduous about taking careful notes on any reservation request that couldn’t be met and are getting detailed contact information for whoever made the request. That way, a cancellation can be quickly replaced, and interested customers are more likely to be accommodated.

“There’s no assumption anymore that those cancellations are going to refill automatically, like in the days of two years ago,” Mr. Barber said.

And they’re showing their regulars even more love than usual.

Mr. Canner said: “If I walk into Craftsteak in my neighborhood without a reservation and they see me, the degree of palpable warmth around the ‘Oh, Mr. Canner, happy to see you!’ — the body language and the physicality around that — feels different.”

“Not that they wouldn’t be nice anytime,” he added, “but there’s more emotion around it.”

And at another of his regular haunts, Blue Ribbon Sushi in SoHo, a server brought him a free plate of fluke sashimi he hadn’t requested, as a thank-you.

“That’s something they generally don’t do,” he said. “And at that moment, I remember thinking, ‘If this restaurant, one of the most financially successful in New York, feels it’s so important to have that extra touch, what does it mean about the restaurant economy in New York?’ ”

It means tough going — and alms of a sort for the diners who help restaurants get through it.