Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Happy Buddakan

Morimoto may have left Frank Bruni a little cold, but Buddakan has the New York Times critic positively panting: "A restaurant as flashy as any this city has seen," he says of the latest Stephen Starr import to the Big Apple.

If a restaurateur is going to enter the competitive downtown arena of pseudo-Asian pleasure domes, he might as well go for broke. He might as well blow out more than 15,000 square feet of space, fill it with bright colors and festoon it with jumbled visual allusions: an enormous fake European tapestry here, scores of artfully showcased Buddha pictures over there.

He might as well set the ceiling of the central dining room as high as the Himalayas, hang a row of gargantuan chandeliers from it, and, ignoring the constraints of stiletto heels and the possible tipsiness of their wearers, make diners descend into this gaudy banquet hall — and the maze of moody chambers around it — via a vertiginous staircase.

He might as well dim the lights, crank up the hypnotic music and flood the zone with dozens of servers. He might as well try to leave Megu and Matsuri in the dust and Spice Market gasping for air.

And he liked the food. In today's paper.

KCosmo, a reader of A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago, which seemed to scarf up the review before it hit the streets, wrote:

The thing about Buddakan (Philly version) is that it is literally the only upscaleish restaurant in all of civilization that both Mr. Cosmo and I, on the one hand, and my not-remotely-foodie-in-a-million-years parents, on the other hand, all love. I'm glad it's come to NY -- not because we lack foofy pseudo-Asian pleasure domes that serve good food (Tao, I'm looking at you), but because it's a restaurant to which I could actually take my mother when she's in town.

ping: cruise-special -->
Posted 05/23/2006 01:41:05 PM