Of NYC’s Infinite Eateries, Pass on These
Deinfluencing Subpar City Spots
I’m going to be totally honest; I’m a harsh critic. Everyone around me knows it; my own boyfriend tells me he’s scared to take me to omakase. I promise I’m not an asshole, and I have a few theories about why I have such particular taste: I think part of it has to do with my culinarily diverse upbringing, another has to do with being a poor adult at one point and only being able to justify steep price points to suggest a very high culinary and service caliber. Living in New York City the second time around (and the first time around with some financial flexibility), I knew that I wanted to explore the city’s food scene comprehensively, from the hole-in-the-wall joints of each borough to the finest establishments I can afford. With this mindset, I’ve been privileged to dine in restaurants where dinner costs me literally 25% of my old rent, a typically unforgettable treat. Like most things, though, not all of my fancy culinary splurges have been successes.
While New York has one of the best food scenes in the world, with such a high cost of living and being home to a clusterfuck of political, economic, and social elites, the city boasts some of what I would consider the most overpriced and under-delivered bites as well. With that being said, here’s my run-in of those deeply regrettable meals and moments in the Big Apple.
NARO
My dining experience at NARO was, in all honesty, heart-wrenching. I was so excited about this dinner; I made the reservation weeks back for a special occasion, and this was probably within the top 3 fanciest (and most expensive) dining experiences I’ve had with my partner thus far. That being said, everything, from the service to the food, was nothing like I had expected and incredibly disappointing.
The first thing I noticed upon stepping into the restaurant was just how cramped the space was. Sitting on the lower level of the Rockefeller Center, NARO’s space is far from ideal; the ceilings are low and full of pipes, the space itself is so small that tables have been placed close enough to hear a neighbor’s conversation word-for-word, and there’s a hideous “outdoor” seating area that looks like the back of a TGI Friday’s. There are, most definitely, beautiful parts of NARO, like the pearly white entryway and Nighthawks-esque curved bar, but even these elements are shrouded in a cheugyness that comes from the rest of the space.
Our service was, well, great on our waitstaff’s side, considering his skillsets. Quite frankly, our servers and runners were all very sweet, but none of them were Korean or spoke any form of conversational Korean, thus making every dish explanation inextricably difficult to sit through. While I’m all for hiring a diverse staff, I found that the non-Korean (more specifically, predominantly white) servers struggled to pronounce Korean ingredients like 미더덕 correctly and were also not trained to explain the ingredients in their explanations. This led to a strange dance between me and my dining mate; as the Korean, I was focusing more than ever before to try and understand the Korean ingredients our waiter was reciting out to us, and then providing translation and context for my dining mate. While at some restaurants this is fine, for $200 a person, I expected to be able to just sit back, listen, and enjoy my food without having to guess what I’m eating despite explanations presented alongside each dish. The only other major fallback of the service at NARO was the pacing of our dishes and the clear inconsistencies; it took over thirty minutes from the time we ordered the regular tasting menu to receive our first course. From there, pacing gradually got faster, but we were seated before the table next to us and ended up receiving some courses later than them (which was blatantly clear given the aforementioned cramped table layout). Again, not entirely the fault of our waitstaff, it was just a rough night for the maitre d’. My partner ended up hating his beverage (to be fair, the cola tea was terrible), so our server put it on the house - a sweet gesture but also a reactive rather than proactive one, which I’m on the fence about at an extremely high-end dinner.
Notice how I haven’t been talking about the actual food; sorry I’ve been avoiding the conversation. I am incredibly heartbroken to share that there is not one (1) memorable bite from this meal, but overall notes were “fishy,” “oh wow a lot of seaweed,” “what is this supposed to taste like,” and “it’s fine.” I’m not going to bore you (or make you sad) by going through every course since they were all forgettable, but the oysters to start in the seaweed shell with seaweed in the cup were quite the fishy start to the evening. I love oysters, and I like seaweed, but all I got is mush with a punch of seaweed/kelp. Seaweed stuck with us through most of the meal, and desserts, although beautiful, were also forgettable.
The star of the show was my Dongji Martini, a take on a dirty martini made with Korean water radish kimchi and brine instead of olives.
On a positive note, NARO boasts a decently affordable a la carte menu at their bar and family restaurant-style “outdoor” seating. I was a big fan of my martini, so I’d return for a nightcap and some fried chicken, if convenient. In all honesty, though, I don’t know how keen I am on returning; I don’t really want to be reminded of this disappointment of a meal.
Shukette
Oh man, I wish I could take back visiting this one. Shukette was raved about by a few friends and loved ones, so I went in with an open mind despite hating most Mediterranean cuisine (sorry, I will forever hate $12 hummus). Honestly, I don’t think I would have hated it if my friends and I didn’t have an atrocious service experience; it would have been pretty on par with the rest of New York’s Mediterranean/Middle Eastern joints (aka in my books, mid).
I don’t know how to sugarcoat this, so let me just say it: Shukette’s staff are like the service industry’s nepo babies. They’re where they are because of their white or white-passing identities, wealthy enough to deck themselves out in hip jewelry and accessories, and somehow my host and server yet condescending. To quote the literal email I sent to Shukette’s general manager after she emailed me (more on that later), “Our party felt a general lack of hospitality from our host and waitstaff on Monday evening….our host had said something we did not hear, so I asked “I’m sorry?”, to which your host repeated their words in an unnecessarily loud and adamant tone.” Let’s also just add in this one: “I believe we had a staff member being trained whilst we were being served today, but our trained waiter was divided in attention between serving us and training his colleague. I would have loved to get an explanation that training was going on instead of presuming….”
Do you get what I mean here? No blatant racism, no blatant sexism, no blatant assholery, but overall dismissive, curt, and definitely not hospitable. The food was again, mediocre at best; the dips were overpriced but fine, bread was oily but fine, and the fries were actually not good. I’m sure, however, the food would have tasted a little bit better had we been treated with more warmth and kindness; perhaps the hype got to them too much.
Shukette’s general manager, Patty Groenke, emailed me a day after I left them a three star rating on Resy. This tells me a few things: (1) Patty’s doing her job, (2) They’re doing well enough to spend time emailing me for feedback, (3) This is not a normal Shukette experience, which leads me to (1) dining as three young Asian American women in a sea of older largely white and Middle Eastern folks may have led us to have a uniquely bad experience (we sure felt out of place!), (2) I did not, in fact, receive any comped meals or even incentives to revisit other than “I will personally ensure you have a wonderful night.” I hope they can use a sliver of the time they save by not having to serve me again to better train their staff, though as a former service industry worker, I think that may mean hiring some kinder people, since kindness doesn’t come from in-house training.
The Palm Court at The Plaza Hotel
This experience was unfortunately relatively similar to Shukette, but a little worse. My boyfriend and I were so excited to have holiday tea at the Plaza! It’s such a treat, and I haven’t been to the Plaza since I was like six years old. We dressed up and got to the Palm Court, to be met by some congestion at the hostess table. It seemed like they gave our table to someone else, and it took them some time to sort out seating for us. This would be fine, other than the fact that I had already had a messaging encounter with the staff; we tried to reschedule our reservation, but they didn’t pick up the phone and replied to us with a very curt message, so we rearranged our plans and made it for the 4PM seating.
After feeling out the energy (or lack thereof) at the hostess stand, we were greeted, or rather given some menus, from which we quickly picked our teas. Our waiter came back to take our order, but this is where things started to go even more wrong. My boyfriend and I were seated at a round tabletop next to each other, and our waiter stood next to my boyfriend, across from me, to take our order, but looked specifically only at him to order on our behalf. My boyfriend orders our two holiday afternoon teas, after which our waiter asks us for our tea selection. I state “I’ll take the holiday tea, please,” before my boyfriend tells him his choice. To our surprise, our waiter had totally tuned me out; he looked blankly at my boyfriend saying “two of the same?,” to which I grabbed his eye contact and said “no, the holiday tea for me.” He left thereafter, leaving us honestly stunned by the interaction. The both of us generally take turns ordering for the table, and I’ve always been the friend to order for the table on behalf of everyone’s requests, but with two of us there and two distinct teas, it felt clearly sexist to ignore literally half of our party and look to the man for answers.
By this point, the Palm Court had left a sour taste in my mouth, so I was just waiting for the time to pass so I could enjoy our teatime treats. While we were waiting for our tea, however, we overheard (and saw) our waiter’s interaction with a party of white women and a little girl, and the unsurprising yet always-shocking discrepancy in service between our interaction and theirs. The waiter was cheery, listened to all three of them, and called them “ma’am” and “miss.” It’s always incredibly disheartening for me to see other people of color submit to standards of white supremacy, but alas, reality can be tough. I don’t know whether it’s the sexism, racism, or assumed lowly class status imposed on us, but regardless of the food, I knew this experience wouldn’t be worth the $200 I’d have to dish out at the end of this occasion.
Our tea sets came, and they were so beautiful!!! I was a little disappointed by the quality of the food; the sandwich bread was dried out (probably from being prepped a day in advance), but overall the scones and sweets were tasty, and our teas were also great. Service slowly got better as perhaps our waiter noticed how #angery we were, but we were once again taken aback as the staff started to vacuum the carpeted floor of the Palm Court itself (not the hotel and our surroundings) while a bunch of us were still seated for tea; understandably they were switching to dinner/drinks service, but this was baffling and loud.
I hate that I hated this experience. It was beautiful, and, if the staff weren’t sexist, classist, racist, and stuffy, it would have been such a lovely teatime. That being said, I don’t feel comfortable going silent about spaces that are exclusionary on a visual basis, and I don’t know the next time I’ll be a patron of the Palm Court, even though I adore afternoon tea. (I also left a two-star Open Table review but I know the Palm Court will not be affected by this, so I guess this is a targeted review for my loved ones.)
Isn’t it interesting that there’s such a high barrier to access to these institutions, yet as someone who has accessed them, I’m still oftentimes excluded? Experiences like these are part of the reason I am such a fan (and gatekeeper) of hole-in-the-wall joints; perhaps the utopian experience of fine dining is only euphoric for a certain type of person.
So sorry this one has been a giant rant; I figured I’d just go ahead and deinfluence to save all of you a collective at least $450. I promise I’ll share some food recs soon - stay tuned these next few days for some Thanksgiving content.
With Love,
Anna