Page 43 - Demo

and at Hudson Yards - the music, the cocktails, that whole kind of Hollywood glamour thing of the 50’s and 60’s’.
Right now, it seems it’s all plain sailing for Keller, but the chef has had to negotiate some choppy waters. In December 2014, eater.com published a damning review of Per Se, calling the food ‘tired’ and the experience ‘just what you’d expect from a high-end shopping mall’. But it was nothing compared to New York Times critic Pete Well’s 2016 coruscating diatribe that demoted the restaurant from a maximum four stars to two and criticized everything from a failure to replace a dropped napkin to ‘intransigently chewy’ lobster, summing up with ‘Is Per Se worth the time and money? In and of itself, no’.
‘It made me sad, not for myself of course, but for my team. It was devastating to them to receive a review like that. But I said to them, the New York Times is not coming back here for at
least seven or eight years so we’re a two-star restaurant in their eyes for the next seven or eight years. The only way that we can be successful here is to diminish the credibility of the New York Times and therefore the person that wrote the article, and the only way to do that is to give an experience to our guests that walk into this restaurant and when they leave they go, “What the hell was that person talking about?”’.
Keller views the whole idea of judging and rating restaurants with a healthy dose of cynicism. Despite the French Laundry topping the World’s 50 Best List in 2003 and 2004, he calls the idea of being number one in the world ‘totally absurd’. ‘If you’re in the top 10 or the top 20 worldwide - or the top 30 - that’s pretty extraordinary when you think about it. I mean, do we really need a number one every year? I don’t know. It creates an imbalance in what we all do’.
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