The NYT gave 4 stars to a restaurant 99.7% of readers can't afford

Pete Wells reviewed Le Coucou for the New York Times in September 2016 and awarded it four stars, the paper's highest rating. The restaurant is a Stephen Starr production — the same hospitality magnate behind Buddakan, El Vez, and approximately 40% of all restaurants where people propose in Philadelphia. Wells's review acknowledges Starr's reputation as a 'restaurant impresario' and then proceeds to evaluate the food as though it materialized from thin air, untouched by commercial considerations. This is the Pete Wells method: note the empire, then pretend it doesn't influence the plate.

The review is, on its own merits, beautifully written. Wells has a gift for food prose that makes you simultaneously hungry and inadequate. He describes dishes with a specificity that borders on the forensic — the exact shade of a sauce, the precise yield of a quenelle under a spoon. But here's my problem with four-star reviews of restaurants where the average check exceeds the average American's daily wage: they function as advertising for a lifestyle, not as criticism of a meal. Wells is reviewing an experience that 99.7% of his readership will never have. At what point does restaurant criticism become real estate porn with better adjectives?

Wells retired from the NYT restaurant beat in 2024 after twelve years, and his Le Coucou review encapsulates both his strengths and his structural limitations. He was the best prose stylist in food criticism — nobody else could make you feel the weight of a spoon in a sentence. But the four-star system at the Times functions as a Michelin Guide for Manhattan's wealthy, and Wells operated within that system without questioning it. A four-star review in the Times is worth millions in revenue to a restaurant. Wells knew this. He awarded those stars to Le Coucou with the confidence of a man who has never had to check the prix fixe before sitting down.

I'm giving this review a 4 out of 10, which feels generous, because the writing is genuinely excellent. But excellence in prose doesn't excuse the fundamental absurdity of the NYT four-star system. You're reading a review written by an anonymous critic (Wells dined anonymously) for an anonymous audience (wealthy Manhattanites) about an experience designed to exclude almost everyone who reads newspapers. Le Coucou may indeed make French cooking feel 'alive and necessary again.' So does a good baguette from the bodega, Pete. Not everything needs four stars and a 2,000-word coronation.