A Good Meal Is Hard to Find at Least on New Yorks Upper West Side

Some 'amusement.'

'I’ve been wondering when the Upper West Side was going to complain about me. Until my review of White Gold this week, I’d never, in my five years as The Times’s restaurant critic, written a full, starred review of any restaurant north of Lincoln Center but south of Columbia University. (I don’t count Tavern on the Green, even though the driveway is on the Upper West Side.)

Honest, I’ve tried. Anytime I hear about a new restaurant on Amsterdam or Columbus that sounds out of the ordinary, I check it out. And it’s not that the restaurants have been bad. In fact, truly disastrous scouting trips have sometimes led to reviews, since a restaurant that’s gone off the rails can make interesting reading. Nothing on the Upper West Side has been like that. In general, the meals I’ve had have fallen into the category that Gael Greene once described, if I remember correctly, as “neither good enough nor bad enough to write about.”

Sometimes you hear the neighborhood called a “restaurant wasteland.” Usually that comes from people who live there, but it’s not true. There are loads of restaurants on the Upper West Side. The trouble is that, in my experience, they are … just good enough. Most of them seem content to be the place you go when you’re too busy or tired to cook. Not very many aspire to be the place where you try to impress your friends, or yourself.

This is one way to think about the divide between neighborhood restaurants and destination restaurants. I don’t like those terms — destination in particular is too ambiguous to be useful. People tend to use it to mean a place that takes itself seriously, but a destination restaurant could also be a modest little spot that serves a cuisine you can’t find in every neighborhood.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/insider/a-good-meal-is-hard-to-find-at-least-on-new-yorks-upper-west-side.html?