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As far as American culinary plaudits go, a four-star review from the New York Times is like winning the Pulitzer, despite Michelin's attempts at stateside gastro-kingmaking. Sam Sifton, the Times' restaurant critic, who replaced Frank Bruni over a year ago, has not yet placed a quad-asterisk crown atop an NY restaurant -- until today. And the winner is...Del Posto, the first Italian restaurant to have that sacrosanct honor since 1974.

What makes this a story of note for us non-New York food lovers is the review itself. While any hack can write a smarmy take-down, only the best food critics can write eloquent praises that are enjoyed for their own merit. Also, a persuasive four-star review instantly puts a restaurant on the Must-Conquer List of every fervent and far-flung foodie.

Here are the opening paragraphs of Bruni's excellent 2004 review of Per Se, a piece that was the eventual-catalyst of an incredible meal, and a considerable budget re-allocation, of mine earlier this year:

The butter-poached lobster almost did it, but not quite. I had been wooed with succulent lobster before. The Island Creek oysters and Iranian caviar, mingled in a kind of sabayon that I was served during that same dinner and during others, made a seductive case. But I was wary of such ostentation.

In the end, it was a different night and a nine-course vegetable tasting, of all things, that made me drop any reserve, cast aside any doubts and accept the fact that I loved Per Se — and that this preening, peacock-vain newcomer deserved it.

I ordered the meal out of a sense of duty, with a heavy heart. Jicama ribbons? Warm potato salad? How transcendent could those be?

Silly, cynical, carnivorous me. The jicama was sensational, so packed with moisture and so faintly sweet that it could have been a new, undiscovered fruit, and the cilantro and avocado that came with it were like idealized essences of themselves, so flavorful that they seemed to have been cultivated in a more verdant universe. The bite-size marble potatoes in the potato salad popped like grapes in my mouth, and an exquisitely balanced mustard-seed vinaigrette gave them a subtle zing.

Lobster is easy; potato salad is hard. And a restaurant that turns a summer picnic staple into a meal-stopping, sigh-inducing dish — and makes that dish a legitimate course in a $135 tasting menu — cannot be denied. Per Se is wondrous.

Sifton's review seems limp by comparison:

Great restaurants may start out that way. But an extraordinary restaurant generally develops only over time, the product of prolonged artistic risk and managerial attention. An extraordinary restaurant uses the threat of failure first as a spur to improvement, then as a vision of unimaginable calamity. An extraordinary restaurant can transcend the identity of its owners or chef or concept.

And of course an extraordinary restaurant serves food that leads to gasps and laughter, to serious discussion and demands for more of that, please, now. The point of fine dining is intense pleasure. For the customer, at any rate, an extraordinary restaurant should never be work.

Consider Del Posto, which opened in 2005 on a wind-swept corner of that grim Manhattan neighborhood that is neither Chelsea nor the meatpacking district, in the shadows below what is now the High Line park. The restaurant’s owners, Joseph Bastianich, Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali, and its chef, Mark Ladner, envisioned a temple to Italian cooking to match any ever built to honor a European cuisine in New York, a 24,000-square-foot palazzo of mahogany and marble devoted entirely to the pleasures of Italian food and customer satisfaction.

Five years later Del Posto is that and more, a place to sit in luxury and drink Barolo, while eating food that bewilders and thrills — an abalone carpaccio to start your meal, perhaps, and absolutely a celery sorbetto to end it, as well-played Gershwin and Kern tinkle in the background.

Del Posto’s is a pleasure that lasts, offering memories of flavors that may return later in a dream: a tiny cup of spiced gazpacho, say, rimmed with a salty dust of dried capers; or a plate of the square-cut whole-wheat pasta known as tonarelli, with fiery little chickpeas, fried rosemary and bonito flakes in place of the more-traditional bottarga; perhaps a nectarine cooked into slow and amazing submission, with a savory grilled lemon cake and intense basil gelato. And, oh, that wine!

Here's the full review, not nearly as excellent as the food it describes.

Baffling Understatement of the Day

The NYT on Mel Gibson's marketability abroad:

Normally, foreign film markets are deeply forgiving of idiosyncratic behavior or the ravages of time when it comes to action-oriented male stars who have reliably turned out hits. [Emphasis mine.]

Talk about poor wording. It would be outrageous if a supermarket tabloid had described Gibson's sickening behavior, which covers the full gamut of hate (anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyneny, and racism), in the flippant manner of an oddball quirk. To read it in the New York Times is scandalous. Does the Grey Lady still edit her articles?

Reality Check: "That Kind of Stuff Makes Normal People Want to Throw Up"

The good news: District gays can now legally marry. The reality check: some Washington Post readers found the front-page image of two men kissing controversial. From the Atlantic Wire:

Last week, same-sex marriage became legal in the District of Columbia, to the delight of some and the consternation of others. On March 4, The Washington Post marked the occasion with a front-page story, accompanied by a photo showing two young men sharing a chaste kiss outside the D.C. Superior Court. Michael Tomasky applauded the Post's decision to run the photo, calling it a bold and welcome move from a usually "provincial and cautious newspaper."

But according to Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, the photo has drawn an unusual amount of ire from readers. In a column at Omblog, Alexander describes fielding "rants, often with anti-gay slurs," and hearing from more than one reader that a snapshot of two men kissing doesn't belong in a family newspaper. (One reader complained of the photo, "That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up," suggesting Dahlia Lithwick might have been onto something when she wrote about "the politics of disgust" in Slate this week.)

The Total Irrelevance of "Person of the Year"

This morning Time magazine announced that their "Person of the Year" is Ben Bernanke, for "saving the American economy." Let's set aside the very thorny issue of whether or not Bernanke actually accomplished this, whether the economy is "saved" or if the Fed's actions were even efficacious. The real issue is: who the hell cares about who Time's editors think is "the single person who, for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year?" Reason's Jesse Walker sums it up nicely in a 2002 post on Time's selection that year, "The Whistleblowers":

My hat goes off to Time—not for its selection, but for once more inspiring so many people to discuss the world's single vaguest annual award as though it were meaningful and important. Even People's yearly announcement of the Sexiest Man Alive—isn't it funny how the sexiest man alive always turns out to be famous already? What are the odds of that?—has the advantage of being restricted to one qualification (sexiness); if an aggrieved fan wants to dispute the pick, she at least knows what she's disputing. To this day, I'm not sure how one outqualifies someone else to be Man of the Year. The magazine's definition—"the single person who, for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year"—isn't helpful, since the mag regularly ignores the "single person" bit in practice and doesn't seem very interested in the admittedly impossible task of measuring "influence," either.

Nonetheless, each December people behave as though there is some platonic ideal Man of the Year out there, and that the disinterested scientists at Time somehow misidentified it. Last year the rap on the editors was that they only picked Rudy Giuliani because they were too scared to select Osama bin Laden. (Their stated rationale was that he was "not a larger-than-life figure with broad historical sweep," but "a garden-variety terrorist whose evil plan succeeded beyond his highest hopes.") This time the complaint is that they've picked three people whom hardly anyone's heard of and who didn't make much of a difference in the big picture anyway. (They are nonetheless, one presumes, larger-than-life figures with broad historical sweep.) Next year, when Time honors Whitney Houston or Carrot Top, the naysayers will doubtless swoop in once more.

Even better is Radly Balko's reponse to Time's choice of "You" as the "Person of the Year" back in 2006. When asked who he would choose as "Person of the Year," Balko replied:

If Time magazine picked "you," as its Person of the Year, then everyone alive is "person of the year," except, ironically enough, for the staff of Time magazine. Even the two dozen or so marketing professionals the magazine just laid off can take solace from the fact that now that they're no longer with the company, from Time's perspective, they're no longer "us," but "you," meaning that they too now inherit the title of "Person of the Year." So I'm going with the staff of Time for my "Person of the Year," for two reasons: One, it seems silly to leave them out. And two, their gimmicky stunt gave the rest of us an extra line on our resumes.

Media Bias and Leftist Jingoism

Michael C. Moynihan responds to Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg:

Sure, says Weisberg, MSNBC and CNN are attempting to boost ratings by copying the Fox model, but the blame ultimately lies with Murdoch who "provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news." So if Rachel Maddow calls Americans for Prosperity's Tim Phillips a "parasite," if Olbermann calls anyone to his right a "fascist," you know who to blame. And it's downright bizarre to claim that, prior to the advent of Fox News, American media had a "tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups."

There are plenty of problems with Weisberg's argument, but, as many others have pointed out, there is something peculiarly disconcerting about liberals, who frequently reminded us that dissent is the "highest form of patriotism," getting in to the un-American, unpatriotic game. I took a quick (and by no means comprehensive) look in Nexis and found the following recent examples of lefty jingoism:

Bill Press, syndicated columnist and former CNN host: "There's only one thing left: to rename the party for what it really stands for. It's no longer the Republican Party; it's the Hate America Party."

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post columnist: "Why, oh why, do conservatives hate America so?...As Republican leaders -- except RNC Chairman Michael Steele -- are beginning to realize, "I'm With the Taliban Against America" is not likely to be a winning slogan."

CNN Headline News host Joy Behar: Guest Richard Belzer: "We see, you know, they`re cheering when we don`t get the Olympics and - and demeaning the Nobel Prize...Joy Behar: Right, which is so un-American.

MSNBC's host Ed Schultz: "This attack on President Obama trying to get the Olympics is about the most un-American thing I think I've ever seen."

Radio host Cynthia Hardy on MSNBC's Hardball: "So [with the case of Rep. Joe Wilson] what you get is this blatant disregard for the office of the presidency, which is extremely un-American."

MSNBC's host Ed Schultz: "Rush must have been popping a few too many pills that particular day. Turning a hopeful message about the resiliency of Americans into a partisan attack. That's un-American 'Psycho Talk,' which is par for the course."

Blogger Steve Clemons, appearing on MSNBC: "Jesse Helms of North Carolina was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. And many of these folks that have come into their own today, particularly in the Bush administration, were essentially tutored by Helms to bring, you know, somewhat of a 'Fortress America' attitude to the comments, which are, I think, quite unpatriotic."

CNN Headline News host Joy Behar: "Now why don`t you figure that this is a little unpatriotic for [Palin] to go to Hong Kong and badmouth the president of the United States? At the very least it's disrespectful."

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, appearing on MSNBC: "But they're trying to delegitimize him in any way they can, be as disrespectful, not just to him but to the office as they can. And to my mind, to be actually, what I would call unpatriotic in their approach."

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann: "How are Democrats, anything but at best -- I`ll use this combination -- irresponsible at worst, unpatriotic for giving that party more say than utterly necessary than what they have already in many amendments of this bill in health care reform."

Is Media Bias Un-American?

CNN and MSNBC are leftist mouthpieces, and Fox News is scripted by Karl Rove. Let's assume this statement is true, just for a moment. Would it matter? As long as people know a channel's biases (much like how people know the WSJ slants right, the NYT left), what is the problem? Yet, pundits on both sides continue to work themselves into a froth arguing that one of the above news channels has whatever political bias. From Newsweek:

That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he's doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, "fair and balanced" is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media's role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it's a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

Who really believes Fox News is "fair and balanced," or that CNN or MSNBC is, for that matter? They're all biased, which means the prudent person follows one simple dictum: viewer beware. Get your information from multiple sources. It takes effort, yes. But expecting someone to feed you the truth without any effort on your part is more Un-American than Fox News and CNN combined.

Bias?

John Stossel says that he, like every other reporter, has political beliefs. Only he admits it:

When I announced last week that I was leaving ABC for Fox, some readers complained about my "bias." I replied: "Every reporter has political beliefs. The difference is that I am upfront about mine."

Look at today's burning issue: President Obama's pledge to redesign 15 percent of the economy. Virtually every reporter calls his health care plan "reform." But dictionaries define reform as "improvement." So before they present any evidence, reporters pronounce Obama's plan an improvement. Isn't that bias?

The New York Times took its bias to an absurd length. Its page-one story on the big anti-big-government rally in Washington, D.C., referred to "protests that began with an opposition to health care. ..."

Apparently, in the Times reporter's and editors' view, opponents of the Obama health care plan oppose health care itself. (The online article was later changed.) [...]

I admit that my guiding political and economic philosophy—libertarianism—now shapes my reporting, in this way: It prompts me to ask questions that others don't ask.

I don't claim to be the expert. But some of my colleagues who write about business know nothing about economics. Many are comically hostile to profit—they dismiss it as "greed" (although they bargain for the highest salaries possible). [...]

I'm surprised that the self-described enemies of intolerance can't tolerate even one MSM reporter who doesn't share their statist premises. The interventionist state has been the status quo for generations, so I must be something other than "conservative." "Liberal" is what my philosophy used to be called. It's the statists who are the reactionaries.

Accuracy in Economic Reporting

In a recent post, Cafe Hayek's Russ Roberts corrects an AP article, and illustrates how bias can creep into supposedly "objective" reporting. Roberts strikes the hyperbolic language, and adds caveats (in bold) where needed:

Recession-battered employers eliminated 598,000 jobs in January, the most since the end of 1974, and catapulted increasing the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent. The grim figures were further proof that the nation's job climate is deteriorating at an alarming clip with no end in sight.

The Labor Department's report, released Friday, showed the terrible toll the drawn-out recession is having on workers and companies. It also puts even more pressure on Congress and President Barack Obama's administration to try to revive the economy through a stimulus package and a revamped financial bailout plan, both of which are may be nearing completion.

The latest net total of job losses was far worse than the 524,000 that economists expected. Job reductions in November and December also were deeper than previously reported.

With cost-cutting employers in no mood to hire, the unemployment rate bolted increased to 7.6 percent in January, the highest since September 1992. The increase in the jobless rate from 7.2 percent in December also was worse than the 7.5 percent rate economists expected though the tenth of a percentage point difference could be treated as negligible.

All told, the economy has lost a staggering 3.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. About half of this decline occurred in the past three months.

"Companies are in survival mode and are really cutting to the bone," said economist Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "They are cutting and cutting hard now out of fear of an uncertain future."

Factories slashed cut 207,000 jobs in January, the largest one-month drop since October 1982, partly reflecting heavy losses at plants making autos and related parts. Construction companies got rid of 111,000 jobs. Professional and business services chopped 121,000 positions. Retailers eliminated 45,000 jobs. Leisure and hospitality axed 28,000 slots.

Those reductions swamped employment gains in education and health services, as well as in the government but I won't bother telling you the size of these increases.

To repeat what was said a few paragraphs earlier in a trivially different way: Just in the 12 months ending January, an astonishing 3.5 million jobs have vanished, the most on record going back to 1939, although the total number of jobs has grown significantly since then which is just a confusing way of saying that as a percentage of the work force, it's nothing close to 1939.