If You Don't Care About the Quality of Your Matsutake-Infused Yam Dumplings, Sure Why Not Eat at Per Se?
The restaurant Per Se—once declared “the best in New York” by the New York Times—has fallen from the grace of Times food man Pete Wells, who just downgraded it to two stars (or “very good”) after encountering an apparent cacophony of horrors during his most recent visit.
Wells first became dismayed during the dinner service, if you could even call it that, when a woman in his party threw her napkin on the ground, apparently to see what would happen. A waiter picked it up and didn’t give it back to her.
(Could his insouciance stem from the $500,000 windfall that recently befell the restaurant’s servers, who were, up until recently, insulated from notions of grandeur by management, who were stealing their tips? Who’s to say!)
Either way—if you can believe it, it was only downhill from there. The bacon-wrapped quail was dismal; the matsutake mushroom-infused yam dumplings were a disaster. A sample of Wells’ disappointment:
The kitchen could improve the bacon-wrapped cylinder of quail simply by not placing it on top of a dismal green pulp of cooked romaine lettuce, crunchy and mushy at once. Draining off the gluey, oily liquid would have helped a mushroom potpie from turning into a swampy mess. I don’t know what could have saved limp, dispiriting yam dumplings, but it definitely wasn’t a lukewarm matsutake mushroom bouillon as murky and appealing as bong water.
It’s a bit of a mystery what pickled carrots, peanuts and a date wrapped in a soft crepe were supposed to do for a slab of Dorset cheese from Consider Bardwell Farm, but a good first step would have been allowing the washed-rind cow’s milk cheese to warm up to a buttery softness; served cold, it was rubbery and flavorless.
Does it get worse? Of course—Wells was not permitted to smell a truffle he admired. The poached lobster was chewy. The gift bag was unsatisfactory.
So sure—why not eat at Per Se—if you’re Pete Wells’s dog.
