American Madness

A recent comment to my old Perry Street review left me writing a too-long response in the comments section. I think it deserves a wider airing here.

Stevie Vong points out that he had recently eaten at Perry Street and

The food was delicious. Does the author has no taste? Or was so drunk, couldn’t taste the food?

The rabbit especially- very tasty. That new avocado, mushroom with jalapeno appetizer is to die for.

You want taste…go to Spice Market…if you don’t taste the food- it’s you!

I responded with an indictment of the Citysearch comments section. It’s not their fault, actually. It’s just hard to know if overly positive comments are spam or if these people can’t stop taking happy pills.

My reply, and Andy Rooney, after this jump:
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I stand by what I have had to say about CitySearch.
If you are censored from writing an honest review what is the point of writing at all.  Knowing that all of their reviews may not fully reflect the actual quality of the restaurant leads me to write them off.
As I have been ranting about them here and feuding with them over email. I do feel obligated to post their final* repy to me about why I was not allowed to discuss my experience:

Hi Matt,
Thanks for contacting us with your concerns. Regarding your review, we ask our users not to mention potential health code violations. Your review mentions bugs, roaches and bad oysters, all of which are health code violations.
We’re more than happy to host negative reviews, but we want them to adhere to our guideline, which you can find here: http://national.citysearch.com/saved/html/my_citysearch/terms_of_use.htm
l. Scroll down to ‘Posting Reviews on Citysearch.com‘ and you should see them.
We hope you’ll revise your review with the recommend changes so we can put it back on the site.
Thanks, and feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.
Best,
Joe
Citysearch User Review Monitoring Team

So, yes, they do have a monitoring team, but still honesty is not at the top of their agenda. I understand the argument that anyone can log in and write a slanderous review, but anyone can write in and write a glowing review as well.

*final because I have no intention of fighting over this any more, I am simply writing CitySearch off and deleting them from my bookmarks 

So, as I previously posted I was a bit, shall we say, disappointed with CitySearch’s B.S. policy on not allowing me (I don’t think it is necessarily personal, but it might be) to use words like “roach” “infested” or “bug” in my review. So I altered things a bit, spacing out words to trick the program and it worked, well mostly. My post went up Thursday, though it took them a few days I got his letter today:

 

Hello MattC,

Thank you for submitting a review of Five Points on Citysearch. In order to assure that reviews are as helpful as possible to the community, we’ve established content guidelines for all submissions. Unfortunately, your review violates these guidelines and cannot be posted.

Your participation is important to the Citysearch community. We invite you to return to [the reviewed page] and resubmit your review.

If you have any further questions about reviews, please feel free to contact us at ratings_questions@citysearch.com. We look forward to posting your revised review.

Sincerely,

Citysearch Ratings Team

So, either I am guessing someone from 5 Points is keeping track of what gets posted about them and reported my posting or folks at CitySearch are actually reading all of the posts going up. But I kind of get that, and that’s why… (come on, after the jump for more) (more…)

I have used Citysearch for a long time. I admit, 3 out of 4 times I am just looking up the address of a restaurant, but every now and then I actually like to use it for reviews, checking out what other folks have to say about where I am going.

Well, today I finally decided to sign up to write a restaurant review about a particularly bad restaurant experience I had. Make the jump to read my complaints about both Citysearch and 5 Points on Great Jones.
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Let me say upfront that I think the location is very nice, the decor is beautiful and the staff is extremely pleasant. But the entrees I had there (September 25) were completely tasteless, and I don’t say that to be hyperbolic. I really mean that they had no taste.

A world-traveling businessman friend of mine was in town and wanted to have some exceptional New American cuisine. Perry St. was recommended by another friend (not much of a friend, apparently!), and I was exceptionally embarrassed when the restaurant failed to live up to ANY reasonable standard of excellence with regard to its food.

The presentation was fine, but each entree had no taste. NO TASTE. It was like eating unseasoned tofu that had been made up by some genius to have the exact texture of the Rabbit and Bass we thought we had ordered. The sauces on these dishes were overpowering and did not rescue the blandness of the flesh.

TO BE FAIR, it was pretty clear from our waitor that the restaurant was known for its meat, but neither my guest nor I wanted to eat beef, so we chose unwisely. Our appetizers were: a Sashimi seviche doused with so much gross citrus dressing that the snapper had no taste; Tuna (sushi grade, but not especially fresh) covered in something crunchy (this was the most tasty item on the menu, only diminished by the sauce around it, which was basically the kind of thick Russian dressing I like a lot better with a kosher turkey sandwich).

DESSERT: The coffee was weak, but good. The chocolate mousse was OK.

For $170+, we could have done better. MUCH better. This place needs to bring the cusine up to snuff with the decor. I can not believe Jean Georges is behind this place.

UPDATE!
Someone has responded to my review on Citysearch.

“I gotta tell ya, I am very confused by the friedlander review,” writes mobetta123.

I gotta tell you, Mobetta123 (Mo Betta’ 123 ?!), you don’t fool me with your attempt at a casual rebuttal! The review, to me, sounds apologist and too-knowing.

“…we had the tuna, the sashimi and the mozzarella–all totally delicious. Then we had the rabbit, the bass and the arctic char. Everything was cooked and seasoned perfectly. I mean totally perfectly.”

Really? I suppose the sauce was perfect. It was a perfect Russian dressing on the tuna! But, really, who writes this way? And how many people did you have with you? If you were worried about my review, but went anyway, why would you have ordered the exact dishes I panned? Especially when the staff, in my experience, had recommended the meat dishes in particular?

The review continues:

“And the sauces really made the food jump off the plate. They are not timid french style sauces, in fact, they kinda had the kick of a thai or vietnamese sauce, but there wasnt too much on the plate and they were complex and captivating.”

Please. I’ve gone back and read Bruni’s review from the NYTimes and I know he and the restaurant have some sort of Thai sauce in mind, but between the idea and the execution stretches a chasm of taste. And for the kicker, you say the sauces were “complex and captivating.” Jean-Georges, is that you? I think I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out how authentic “complex and captivating” is coming from a New York diner.