Before I knew that Pete Wells had stepped down from his post at The New York Times, I wrote this piece. It had a focus on what I have perceived as a sharp turn towards cynicism in Wells’ writing.
Wells, in the end, seemed to have such a defined point of view of what a restaurant should be, after over a decade writing about food, that Wells no longer was able to let restaurants surprise him.
When Wells dropped his review of Ilis, I cut it up into positive and negative remarks. The positive side of my document was overwhelmingly larger than the negative, with the negative often being about preference or plating or influencers or expectations (Noma). At the same time, there was a cynicism about diners, like Wells thinks you are razzled and dazzled by theater (he calls it jazz hands) and not Ilis’ concept, the food, the service, the space. Removing the commentary about diners or Noma or influencers or ingredient preference, the negative in Wells’ is very small. You can read it yourself.
I wrote the below section before I knew Wells was leaving was his post. Everything beyond the line break I edited after that knowledge. But this? I think it still stands:
Wells opens his article the same way I will open my essay–with the clam flask. I can’t have it, because I’m allergic to shellfish, but I don’t need to have drunk the contents to say what I want to say. He writes of it, “The reason everybody remembers the flask is that it is tightly bound and knotted with twine, like a corset designed for bivalves with a taste for mild kink. Mr. Refslund’s cooks must spend a good part of the workweek at the arts-and-crafts station.”
I’m sure he was very proud writing that line. But I actually love the idea of the Ilis team going to JoAnn Fabrics or some kind of shibari class to learn how to tie the clam up (I affectionately call it bondage clam), but in reality, they didn’t. Chefs know how to tie things up–just trust me on that.
What they are trying to do, which Wells fails to mention but definitely knows, is use every part of the ingredient when they can. That’s why cauliflower is cooked in pig’s bladder at Ilis. That’s why the clam is used at the table. This isn’t new, but they’re doing it in a way that diners are unable to ignore–you see the whole animal in front of you and engage in it in a way you won’t with a broth. It’s a moment of education for the average diner who might not know that kitchens like that exist.
Wells doesn’t tell you if he liked how the clam tasted. He just tells you it is “tepid.” Which like, fine, that’s fair feedback, but did he like it? We don’t actually know.
If I could ask Wells one question, it would be, “Do you just hate that they served it in the clam? Do you wish they would have served it in a glass for a dishwasher to wash for you on ice?”
My second would be, “Did it ever cross your mind that the clam flask was just really cool plating and people always love really cool plating and by using something that they love, the team at Ilis is educating them about food and that’s not theater?”
My third would be, “Do you want to go to JoAnn Fabrics with me and do a craft? You seem like you need a little bit of a break.”
When I’m eating my way through a menu, sometimes I lose my sense of direction.
I’m currently eating my way through every dish at Bar La Grassa that doesn’t have shellfish and I found myself sitting at the same pasta bar I’ve been dining at since I was 19 years old totally bewildered. You know how if you say the same word over and over and over, it loses its meaning? Eating pasta over and over and over makes pasta lose its meaning, too.
I found myself at the bar at BLG asking strange questions like why does it matter if the pasta is good? What is overcooked pasta anyway? Is very overcooked pasta actually the best kind of pasta and we’re all just missing it because we like our pasta al dente due to tradition? If I did a trial and gave children overcooked pasta for 15 years would they all hate al dente pasta? Why does it matter? What is the point of thinking about salt? Do I even have the skill to figure out the best things on the menu anymore? Etc. Etc.
I was eating a kalamata and orange pasta, pulling up my list of dishes I think people should order or skip at BLG and totally unable to place it.
I had to stop thinking. I was totally lost that night, the way you might be after looking at a math problem for hours, but when you come back in the morning, it makes sense (skip it, there’s better pasta at BLG).
My ex-boyfriend’s words rang in my head that night. He said that he’s almost never had a bad meal out. “What,” I said, totally baffled. But he thinks about food differently than I do. He said, “Most of the food you think is bad is way better than what someone can make at home, Kirstie. You can just make it better at home. Food you think is okay is often very good.”
He’s right, but still, I find myself trying to send you to places that are the best, most magical meals of my life. That’s a selfish project, no? But it’s the project of a food writer. Or at least, I think it should be–in the age of Eater and influencers, it no longer seems true—it seems we send people everywhere and tell them to order anything.
So sitting at the pasta bar at BLG, I was trying to understand if you would like the dish I was eating, which, more on that another time–I’m working on an entire piece on BLG. I just think maybe people don’t realize that when you eat dish after dish after dish, they start to run together and you can get lost in the sauce (in my case, literally).
Pete Wells is never going to read this, but when I read his review of Ilis, it was on the heels of this meal in which I felt lost in the sauce. I know how to see when a food writer is lost in the sauce, too, or moved by someone they have a relationship with, or writing a piece that would be different if access didn’t matter. I know how to name it.
On Ilis, I think Pete Wells got a bit lost. I think that he got cynical. I think that he missed the point.
I should tell you my point of view. Every food writer should.
My point of view is that I am looking for food you can’t find anywhere else.
That might make you think I won’t send you somewhere classic, but I will–if that classic food is done better than anywhere else. I also have a hot dog place I’ll send you to because it has the best fries in the city. For the most part, though, I’m looking for the wild, weird, and wacky. Or I’m looking for diaspora foods only found in a couple of places. Or I’m looking for food that pushes the limits on what food can do. Or I’m looking for a restaurant that lets radishes just be radishes and somehow they’re the best radishes you’ve ever had.
If you are looking for someone to recommend a classic French restaurant, go find someone else. If you’re looking for someone to tell you where the best butter chicken is, that ain’t me. If you want someone to rank burgers, go to Eater. But I think there is a large swath of people who want to be sent to restaurants doing weird and innovative shit, who are pushing the envelope.
I think that group of people wants to be sent to those places by someone who eats at a lot of them and knows what is good despite the theater and what is just theater. That’s me. That’s my very weird niche.
I scour menus in city after city looking for weird shit, menus that change daily, hyper local menus where the meat is sourced from three farms. But… I am not impressed by that in and of itself.
The food has to taste good, too. It has to feel a little bit like magic. That’s what I search for. Not perfection. Magic.
The number one group of people asking me where to eat is chefs. The number one group of people who follow my stories on a daily basis is chefs. The number one group of people who read this silly little blog is chefs. It’s because they often are looking for the same things I am looking for in food, but I also think that a lot of people outside the industry want that food, too.
Food writers just don't trust average people enough to send them to the places that will challenge them, in the same way that many chefs don’t trust their diners enough to take them there.
Ilis? Ilis trusts you enough to take you there. But Pete Wells? In his review of Ilis, Wells doesn’t trust you as a diner enough to say that the thing that was magic to him will be magic to you, too.
I hate restaurants with hidden doors. I hate the speakeasy trend in general. Except under one circumstance. For first dates, I chose places that were hard to find to see if men knew how to follow instructions. The number of men unable to find the very reasonably located Volstead’s Emporium is honestly a tragedy. But I wasn’t on a first date going to Ilis. I was alone on the heels of going to a country bar in Brooklyn, missing the south, wishing I was there. And I was going on the heels of a dreadful meal at Per Se so I was a little pissed off at fancy food in that moment.
On my way into Ilis, I wanted to eat gas station biscuits from a grandma who owns a gas station in Virginia—not something fancy.
It was winter. It was dark. I couldn’t figure out how to get into Ilis. Neither could the two other couples who arrived before and after me. We kept pulling on things that were not door handles. “I feel so dumb,” one of the women said.
“Hey, you’re in a crowd of idiots,” I said.
Then, with the time I had, all of us literally fumbling in the dark, I asked, “Why are you coming in tonight?”
Anniversary. Birthday. Places like Ilis mark the passage of time. As a food writer, I always ask, “Does this place deserve that moment?”
“Why are you coming,” one of the women asked.
“For sport,” I said.
I called a chef friend of mine who had gone to Ilis (he picked up at the pass) and that’s how me and two other couples got it, immediately pushed into a wall of sound, the sexiest playlist I’d heard in a long time. A man and a woman were at the door with big, Midwestern style smiles. It was slightly jarring but not in a bad way, jarring like feeling awake. The hard to get into door, the sexy music, and the people who reminded me of the hospitality of home made me feel warm. “Welcome,” they said. “I love your hair,” they said in unison to me.
I knew in that instant, standing in the doorway, that they had something special here.
Upon sitting down, I was asked how adventurous I was feeling. Ilis does their menu differently, not having you choose dishes but ingredients. Lots has been written about that, as well as the “One House” model—and I won’t rehash it, you can find it easily.
All I want to say here is that while I wasn’t vegetarian when I went to Ilis, I still wasn’t eating much meat. My ticket was marked vegetarian. When Chef Baena Fernando came over to talk to me about my options, he asked me how adventurous I was feeling that night. I said, “I’m usually pretty adventurous,” and he held up a fish like a dare, head cocked, one eyebrow up, gesturing with the fish like come on.
Most chefs will tell you that it’s terrifying when I eat in their restaurants because I look mad most of the time. I’m thinking, furiously writing. One of my best meals of the year was at a chef’s counter where I wrote on the check, “Gorgeous,” and they told me later they thought I hated it before that moment. I didn’t.
Another chef in an open kitchen preps new line cooks and says, “She loves it, don’t worry. She’s just serious.”
A bartender I know pretty well, after over a year of sitting at his bar, saw me run into an ex-boyfriend and explode into the bubbly person I am and he said, “You’re an extrovert?”
In restaurants, I’m stoic. I’m rigid. I’m in my own head. But in that moment, I let out a laugh into the restaurant like a crack of lightening. It was funny. It was deeply human. I’m sure that some vegetarians would hate that (Chef Fernando had no way to know I wasn’t a vegatarian), but I think that moment exemplifies what Ilis is.
Ilis is a dare to try things you have never tried before.
My experience at Ilis in many ways, mirrors Wells’ experience, though we took different things away from it.
When you read Wells’ review, he says over and over and over that he has had things at Ilis he has never had before. The New York Times critic for over a decade has been introduced to new food and is somehow not blown away by that possibility in and of itself.
I experience things I’ve never had before, either. A woman with a higher pitched voice echoing through the restaurant on expo, something I had never realized I hadn’t heard before until that moment (I have heard women on expo, but most of them have adjusted their voices). Fermented green strawberry, something that led me to beg a strawberry farmer to let me into her fields early to make this year. Wheatgrass granita. The viral sweet potato caviar dish (more on that later).
And then I’ve had things I have had before done really fucking well. Cold carrot soup in an ice bowl with carrot top pesto in carrot oil, the type of dish I really love, where you are being asked to engage with all aspects of something really simple. I wrote in my notes when the drinking broth came later, “I am so tired of drinking broth, but I like this one.” There were damn good pickles. Beautiful porridge.
Wells says that other writers had a spell fall over them because of the more unique dishes like the clam flask or the caviar dish. But my favorite? It was cauliflower with butter and truffle and flowers. It made me emotional. It was perfect.
My second favorite? It was Brussels Sprouts that I think I ate incorrectly—or if I ate it correctly, I was served it incorrectly, because someone dropped a napkin off to me halfway through eating it. It was on the stalk and I ate it like ribs. If it’s supposed to be served another way, cut and eaten one at a time, I think that’s a shame.
My meal at Ilis was my second best meal of this year and I’ve eaten at over 150 restaurants this far. When I rank restaurants in my own head, I pull up the photographs of my favorite dishes to compare with what I’m actually eating right now. Those are the photos I hold up. No theater. Just damn good cooking.
I don’t think people who love Ilis had a spell cast over them. I think Wells did.
I think he got cynical. He kept saying he wasn’t comparing it to Noma but the word Noma appears 6 times in his article (the only words used more than Noma in the article are Ilis, Refslund, kitchen, clam, like, potato). Maybe it is not us that is wrong, but maybe he had a spell cast over him by holding it up to Noma (but also claiming not to hold it up to Noma) or focusing on presentation and other people. Maybe he just got lost.
In those comparisons, he’s not just insulting the staff at Ilis by considering them referential because the head chef is born out of Noma, but he’s insulting you for liking the meal.
At the same time, he’s showing what his legacy is as a critic: Pete Wells doesn’t trust you to make your own decision. Pete Wells thinks that you are going to think anything served to you in a BDSM clam is good.
But the BDSM clam and the sweet potato aren’t the best parts of Ilis, though they showcase so much of what is great about Ilis. And almost anyone who has been there knows that.
I am sure that Wells didn’t pay attention to the people around him. He didn’t look around for magic or delight. I don’t talk in restaurants. I sit silently and listen. I heard it all over, actual gasps and laughter of surprise. I experienced it, too.
Watching the kitchen intently, at one point Chef Refslund looked directly at me. I had the viral sweet potato that is set in wax in front of me. They set a timer. The timer was almost up. We made eye contact. He went to talk to Julia at expo (I was only given her first name, Julia, which now I’m kicking myself about not asking her last name and a little mad at the kid who didn’t call her “Chef LAST NAME” to me as a sign of respect).
Chef Refslund came over to put caviar on my sweet potato and he said, “I hope you like caviar.” I do. I love it. It made me laugh. It was a beautiful moment of service.
In 2024, at most restaurants, I’m getting upcharged $80 at most places for $20 worth of truffle, $100 for $30 worth of caviar, $900 for your newest and best dishes. The feeling of luxury has often left fine dining, where you’re buying your pairing menu and also being given the piecemeal option of an opening glass of champagne and closing cocktails on the menu. Once, a restaurant that has an all inclusive menu sent me a $6 bill for coffee after spending $400. That’s fine dining in 2024. I get it. Shit’s hard. Margins have never been smaller. Labor has never been higher.
But in 2024, Ilis has found a way to give you an entire tin of caviar on a fucking sweet potato.
Wells calls it theater, but honestly who gives a shit? It’s what fine dining was always meant to be.
Wells is acting like we’re all bamboozled for seeing and loving the things he could not. He’s not saying that he doesn’t like Ilis. He’s saying that everyone else is wrong for liking it because of the theater.
And look, I get it. I do! I have three pieces on this blog where I’m telling people that very popular (Oriole, Alinea, Per Se) restaurants are expensive and boring. But I wrote those articles looking at the people around me who were bored and I can back up my opinion about the food in what I wrote.
Wells, on the balance, had a good experience at Ilis based on what he wrote. Side by side, the negative is so short in that article compared to the positive, when you remove all of his narration. And even some of his negative comments, I still think don’t stand on their legs.
At Ilis, they’re educating you about the food around you and in doing so, you are sometimes eating things you might otherwise not. Like invasive Japanese knotweed which Wells says, “if I don’t gnaw on another raw knotweed shoot until next spring, that will be fine with me.” And like, look, I get it. But also, a food critic with more than a decade of experience should be able to see what is happening there, that Ilis is a restaurant with beautiful food, yes, but it goes beyond that.
They’re trying to show you something about where you live. Wells skims over that, but I think it’s the point.
I think Wells knows that. Wells calls a dish at Ilis riveting. He says you will likely run into something new. He names so many proteins that you probably can’t eat anywhere else. One of his semi digs in the article is to say, “Salt and caviar will make almost any potato taste good,” but I think we’ve all had bad fries, right?
Another semi dig is that he says that cauliflower cooked in a pig’s bladder tastes like steamed cauliflower, which, that’s what it is—and if that moment of the pig’s bladder is theater, I think it’s good theater. It teaches people about parts of an animal they might never have eaten. But I don’t think it’s theater—I think it’s whole animal butchery and I think if you tasted two cauliflowers side by side (one cooked in the bladder and one not) there would probably be a subtle difference.
When I read Wells article, it seems like his main gripes are 1) it’s not Noma (but he will tell you that wasn’t the point) 2) he doesn’t like the presentation of dishes and thinks it is theater, which is actually, often, using the entire plant/animal 3) he ran into some ingredients he didn’t like.
Maybe not liking new ingredients is hard if you’re used to knowing everything and knowing if you like it or not. But personally? I love it. I think you learn about your point of view by learning what you like and what you don’t.
I think what makes a good chef—and a good writer—is knowing what is preference and taste vs poor execution.
Earlier this year, I had a smoked trout gel that made me say out loud, “Oh I hate that,” but I know it’s because I hate smoked trout and I am able to tell that the dish is good. One of my ex-boyfriends hates nuts, but he knows how to use them. I ate an ode to the olive this year and I really don’t need to have an olive glaze on olive cake ever again, but that dish was executed as intended and I know that. I don’t know—maybe he’d think those dishes are theater, too.
The real theater worth coming to see? It was missed in Wells’ article but not missed by most diners who look up and out at the kitchen.
Not the sweet potato in front of you but the woman working expo. Not the drink cart but someone so focused on the food they are making that it seems that they have lost track of time. Not the BDSM clam but the people to your left that are quietly saying it is the best meal they’ve ever had.
I wish more critics asked people at the door why they went or how it was. I think it would have humanized Ilis to Wells. So focused on his own experience and preferences, he could not digest the magic happening for others. I try to think of where you want to go, so I ask random people if they like it. In the bathroom, I asked a woman how her meal was and her jaw dropped. That was her response. I went to the bathroom another time and the woman said, “Gobsmacked.” On my way out the door, I asked a father and son how they liked what they ate and they said they hadn’t had most of those dishes before. “Did you like them,” I asked. They did.
Trendy and hard to get into and viral, sure, but not viral like a rainbow bagel. Viral like I know this food has changed people’s perceptions on what food can do and should be, changed the way they select restaurants, and helped them make memories.
It’s not that Wells doesn’t see any of this. He does. He sees a lot of it.
A critic who eats for a living telling you he has been introduced to new dish after new dish? Telling you those dishes are memorable? Riveting, blown away, local, some of the best farm-raised duck he’s had? Those are his words.
It sounds like he’s telling you to go, right? He’s not. He gives it one measly star out of four.
In the face of all that inspiration and beauty and magic around him, Wells can’t lift his head from his plate long enough to say, “Yeah, there’s some kinks to work out (there are—the N/A menu is incredibly boring, the apple dish I had was hard to eat and I kept worrying I would light the leaves it was served in on fire, service was choppy sometimes, there’s a lot of truffle) but if I’m comparing a dish that made me feel blown away as a reason to go with a tepid clam juice as a reason to stay home, I think you should drink the tepid BDSM clam and go.”