Trend-spotters might find more illumination on the flip side.
The sudden shuttering of three exceptional restaurants in Jersey last year -- Ursino in Union, Thirty Acres in Jersey City and David Burke Fromagerie in Rumson -- seemed to shake some nerves. What's going on?
Many would argue the obvious. That these were all fine dining spots, and everyone knows fine dining is dead. Except that it's more complicated than that. (And fine dining is not dead, no matter how many burger-and-wing joints challenge otherwise.)
Each restaurant was in a unique situation. At Thirty Acres, the chef's priorities shifted. Kevin Pemoulie, despite all his indignant posturing about the New Jersey customer vs. the New York customer and the woes of opening a restaurant in Jersey City, has a baby daughter. Family comes first. He's moving to Seattle.
Crispy stuffed airline chicken breast -- with chicken sausage and mushroom faro pilaf -- is on the dinner menu at Laurel & Sage in Montclair, where chef Shawn Paul Dalziel is reviving modern American cuisine. Ursino, which was groundbreaking in its mission and created as a jewel on the Kean University campus, had been losing favor for several years at the university, which seemed no longer interested in properly managing the farm and sustaining the restaurant's original farm-to-table mission. Plus, there were legal issues, with local officials arguing that it was unfair that the restaurant was tax-exempt simply because it was located on campus.
And Fromagerie? It was a sentimental, vanity purchase. Burke wanted to honor the kitchen in which he learned to love the business. But the walk-in crowd in Rumson is far removed from the walk-in crowd at Burke's other restaurants, in New York and Chicago, etc. Sentimentality is not a sound business model.
Trend-spotters might find more illumination on the flip side. The opening of Laurel & Sage in Montclair, where masterful chef Shawn Paul Dalziel is reviving modern American cuisine; the reopening of elements in Princeton, by Jersey's ground-breaking culinary guru Scott Anderson; the naming of Jockey Hollow Bar & Kitchen in Morristown as one of the best new restaurants in America by Esquire magazine; the opening of The Farm Cooking School in Stockton, with Ian Knauer and Shelley Wiseman, two consummate culinary professionals; the opening of Andre's, a new lakeside spot in Sparta, by chef Andre deWaal.
The death of fine dining? Nothing to see here.
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