382: Felix Salmon

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. It's not about, like, how good is the food, and it's not one of those very American, adjective-heavy. It's all about the writing. As long as it's entertaining and people want to read it and people, you know, you have a following because you're a good writer, that's what matters.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

0:59Felix Salmon has lived in and around New York City for over 20 years and is one of the sharpest observers of food culture and trend around without actually officially writing about food. He's the current chief financial correspondent at Axios and host of the terrific podcast Slate Money. He's also the author of The Phoenix Economy, Work, Life, and Money in the New Not Normal. On this great episode, we talk all about New York City dining and also his family's fascinating history in the London food world. We also talk about the early snarky days of Eater and what he thinks about the future of food media.

1:34It's so great having Felix in the studio, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:48Felix Salmon, welcome to This Is Taste. How are you? I am good. Thank you. I just had a lovely lunch at Il Bucco Alimentari. A big branzino for two with lots of olive oil and fennel and deliciousness and salumi on the side and the lovely starter of, what was it, fluke crudo. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I feel like this has set me up. I'm in a good mood. Justin Smiley, I believe, is cooking there now or has been for a couple of years. He's back. He's great. It's back. It's happening. I can highly recommend. Yes. Are you lunching with a source and taking them out? Is someone taking you out? What's the dynamic of this lunch?

2:27This was, yeah, this was like a, you know, one of those media lunches where media folks get together and talk about how our industry is doomed. Really? Yeah. So there were some drinks. There was a nice Northern Italian white, I believe. Okay. Yeah. Well, how big is the party? Just the two of us. Oh, just you and another. Yeah. Just dumping some shit. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I love Sleep Money Podcast. You've been doing it for a decade. But what I know about you, and we've never met, I just know you're writing. You're like a big, I mean, you're like one of the biggest supporters of downtown restaurant scene.

2:58Like, I know. No, for real, you write about it. You were like an early eater, whatever, like always on the pages writing stuff or being in the pages. Yeah, I used to, I briefly had a column at New York Magazine with Ellen Sitzman at Grub Street when Grub Street was a thing. Oh my gosh, it still is a thing. We just had Matthew the Critic then. Yeah, Alan's running the shit still. I always get confused. How do they have Eater and Grub Street at the same time? But apparently they can. As a media observer yourself, you tell me. I think that I don't know. Actually, I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things like the Wall Street Journal would have the business page and the markets page and the finance page or something.

3:40And you'd be like, I have no idea what the difference is. And I'm sure that internally they all understand what the difference is. But from a consumer point of view, if you stopped someone on the street outside a fancy restaurant, you'd be like, what's the difference? They'd be like, I can't take it. I think, yeah. I think the Eater national remit is clearly their thing when they do national coverage. There you go. Eater New York and Grub Street cover similar territory, but they have different staffers and they have different points of view, I guess. I mean, I would say that. More is more. But then again, you know, sometimes it will collapse.

4:20You know, sometimes there will be BuzzFeed and HuffPo, and then there will be just HuffPo. Yeah, it sounds like the tea leaves have been put in front of you at this lunch. And it was Jim Bancroft, right? It was. It was me and Jim Bancroft talking about how it was all going to shit. Yeah, yeah, no, you kid, but I'm thinking it's 50-50 chance it was Bancroft. This is not a media criticism. Our listeners care maybe a little bit. But I wanted to talk to you about many topics in kind of the New York dining milieu and what's happening. But first off, Wikipedia tells me, Felix, that Salmon is a member of the Salmon and Gluckstein family who ran the Lions Tea House and Bakery Chain in Britain.

4:58Is this true? What is Lions? This is true. What is this? So, yeah, my ancestors started a company called J. Lions, which was a caterer. And we made, we had lion's tea and we had corner shops, corner houses, which served tea and cakes. We had hotels. We had like the Regent Palace Hotel, the Strand Palace Hotel, the Trocadero. We had lots of restaurants. So I grew up, yeah, in a catering family. we had massive wine cellars under the River Thames that were like joint wine cellars for all of the hotels and all of the restaurants. And my grandfather was in charge of those. So that was kind of awesome.

5:46Your grandfather was like this family sommelier or was he just - Something like that. He actually, of course, being like a member of a certain sort of London class and caste, he joined a club, the Saville Club, and he ran the wine program at the Savile Club. Wow. He was one of the first English people to really embrace New World wine. He got into... Oh, like South America? Penfolds Grange from Australia. Australia. Well, I mean, it's not New World, but he got into Chateau Moussard, which is ultra, ultra old world, long before it became like this big, you know international thing but um yeah so i i kind of grew up in the industry in a weird way did you ever work service at any of these restaurants no and in fact they'd all been sold by the time i yeah you know was of an age to work anywhere uh you moved to new york when what's the what's the 1997 97 i moved here in 2002 so it's it's it's a time the 90s in downtown new york tell me your early journalism career was there was there a place that that like the journalists were hanging out at in new york in the early in like 96 97 oh pre-blog yeah because because like come come like 2003 and blog then everyone would just hang out at the magician magician obviously um pre-blog i pre-blog i was not really in that crowd yet i was still a kind of trade journalist and and i hadn't sort of found where the cool media kids were sitting So I'm sure the cool media kids was sitting somewhere.

7:31I just didn't know where it was. So I used to just go to Nautrang on Baxter Street for lunch. That's a great spot. They were at Michael's, likely, Conde Nast back in 96. They were probably at Michael's. Which I then, you know, I definitely had a brief period of being lunched at Michael's. And it was always a whole thing. Because there was a bunch of hedge funds around there as well. It wasn't just media. No, no. But it was mostly media. So let me ask you these early days when you were reporting, are you taking sources out to places? What's it like for you as an early journalist in New York? In the 90s, later on, it was definitely a thing.

8:10And I became very much a lunch regular at Lure on Mercer Street. Yeah, right. That was my standard go-to place. I would always take everyone to lunch and they knew me and they'd always give me a nice booth and everything was copacetic. And I'm a massive fan of just becoming a regular somewhere. It doesn't even matter what it is. As long as they know you, it's the best thing to do. But yeah, back in the early days, in the 90s, that was, I had friends, a good friend of mine was the media reporter of the Wall Street Journal at the time. And he would regale me with these stories of taking sources out to the Four Seasons.

8:45And I was like, you get to do that? That's awesome. I had no idea that people could do that. So when Food Media was born on the internet in the early 2000s, I'm thinking of Eater, obviously, as part of it, but also blogs. What was that like for you? The blog scene? Because I went back and read you were blogging about restaurants in 2003. You wrote, New York is changing. It's getting smaller, friendlier, less corporate, less ostentatious, maybe even a little bit more genuine. You wrote that in 2003. Your own personal blog. Those were the days, right? Right. I mean, yeah, 2003, I didn't have a lot of money, but I felt that there were a bunch of restaurateurs who were aiming at people like me, who wanted to eat good food without spending a lot.

9:33And post-pandemic, that's just impossible. Yeah. Well, we'll get into some economics because this is really the core of what you cover at Slate and just your own financial reporting. And it's a big part of your purview. But I want to just keep us in that era. Did you have a favorite chef or a restaurant in, we'll say, early 2000s that you were a regular? You mentioned Lure. That was a bit later. I would say back then, the place I used to go whenever I could was 71 Clinton. Yeah, right on. Wiley Dufresne's place. Not because of the food so much as just because it was a really friendly place. It was also local.

10:14I lived just down the street. and um dewey du friend while his dad was always there at the front just like making your life so just anticipating your needs and being very very high touch wonderful service with everyone and he wasn't you know he wasn't remotely sort of snobbish about it and that that just showed me what really good service yeah was and that was not an expensive restaurant at all definitely not and way ahead of its time, and it ended up transitioning to WD-50, which then transitioned out to probably the most important restaurant in the 2000s, right? Downtown, WD-50. WD-50, you see, I never got into it.

10:54Like, that was the weird, I went there once or twice, and it always just seemed very precious. That's a, I agree with you. I was not a regular either. I was living in East Village at the time. I just think in terms of, like, pedigree. I mean, certainly it was influential, and certainly, you know, it had a lot of press and a lot of buzz and certainly it had much more flashy sort of interior design and much higher price point and much higher ambitions. But yeah, that wasn't really what I was looking for at the time. Can we talk about Keith McNally now? Sure. We're about to enter the memoir Keith McNally media cycle.

11:35I feel there's going to be probably a few exclusives out. There'll be some excerpts. There'll be him doing some podcasts should we even care i i think he um is incredibly important incredibly smart and i'm you know for all that he has his idiosyncrasies um he's the most important restauranteur in new york recent new york history like i don't think there's a number two i don't think it's even close um i think that balthazar alone would put him on the map and make him important like the sheer tonnage of food that kitchen puts out at consistently high quality is a very very impressive feat and to manage to do it in a room that has been copied a million times because it is just an absolutely stunningly gorgeous room um but even before then like odian created an entire culture i'm glad you go back to that um i'm glad you go back to that and i mean i literally go back i go back to odian regularly to this day i mean it is still one of my favorite restaurants it is completely reliable completely fun like the thing about keys places is they're never trying to do anything they're not.

13:00And whatever they do, they do really well. When I lived on Rivington Street, I was very close to Schiller's, which was a great, perfect restaurant. Dining room had a lot of great light. It was a cool dining room. It had the playbook of downstairs bathrooms and it had a little bit of Polino's as well. It was kind of that vibe similarly. You know, the list goes on. Lucky Strike, I met some of my favorite friends at Lucky Strike just sitting next to them. We had no idea who we were, but they were sitting at the table next to us. And literally by the end of the evening, we were invited to their wedding.

13:36Pravda. Remember Pravda? Yeah, of course. That was awesome. Yeah, Pravda, you know, the vodka club bar. I mean, it was like lines of Pravda. I mean, it was a tough place to get into, right? At time. I mean, it was a tough, tough door. And, you know, and basically, like, his hit rate was amazing. Just absolutely astonishing. I feel Polino's is probably the only one that has bombed. That was the one on Houston? That was the pizza, yeah, on Houston. It's been empty since. It's obviously a very bad space. Something up with that place. It's been empty for 15 years. But yeah, his hit rate is up the charts.

14:10What about major food group? Let's go into another big boy kind of operator, operators of Carbone, The Pool, The Grill, other places. Yeah, I mean, you know, when they started with Palm, right? I think they started with Teresi Italian Specialties. That was like their first moment. It was like Rich's Restaurant. And then they kind of moved out to... And then Palm like opened up next door as a kind of like... Yeah, and it took its spot. And then Mario opened Carbone, which became Carbone en Dumas. Dumas? Let me do that again. It was like Carbone en Dumas. And now they're in like Las Vegas and Miami.

14:47And they're like a big... I mean, you tell me. Did they just announce something with Mireya? They bought Mireya. They bought Mireya, which is wild. They bought Marea. At least they're going to operate Marea with the same structure. I mean, what's the big story is their private club up in Hudson Yards that they opened. That's the big one because that's a different level of engagement. Everyone wants to be a club these days because it's that wonderful gym business model of get people to pay you even if they're not coming. Oh, yeah. And if you're in Hudson Yards, I can guarantee you they won't come.

15:22how many like canceled meals have you had with people in Hudson Yards yeah it's true and yeah no Hudson Yards is is a shit show it sucks um it's a terrible place G.C. Ammo though it just hits that place is so good have you been there G.C. Ammo I have heard of it it's good I I've heard it's good but I mean but like there have been good restaurants there I went there was a David Chang place there for a hot minute and yeah that was good and then it opened and And then it closed because like no one is going to go there to eat. No one's going to go there for any reason. It's just a soulless place. Every time I need to go there just to, you know, because I'm going to the shed.

15:58I'm just like, really? Do I have to? I mean, the mall element of Hudson Yards, I think of it as two spots. It's like the complex of all the restaurants. And then there's like the cursed mall, which is, you know, the food and bev strategy in there was weird. I mean, it didn't work. But to answer your question about major food groups, if... If McNally really got the setting right, the thing that he does very well is interior design. It makes people feel very comfortable. What Carbone did, or what Major Food Group does, is they just bring the service up to a whole ultra-extra level. and turns out there's real appetite for like being extra right now and you can see it everywhere and they've they've met the moment is that because of social media is that because you need to have um a strategy if an art direction that can be easily digested on instagram tiktok i i mean i I don't think so.

17:08I mean, I am not hugely on Instagram, but I don't feel like Carbone is an inherently Instagrammed place. I think what it is is that if what you're looking for is an experience, then it's just like turning all of those experience styles up to 11. Yeah, yeah, good point. And you can definitely try and get all of those experience dials turned up just on food alone. And I recently had a lunch at Red Paperclip in the West Village. Really fucking great food. I mean, amazing food. But every other dial is turned down to zero. The decor is down to zero. The service is down to zero. And they're just like, they're super monastic and monkish about it.

17:57And they're like, you are going to come here for the food and you're going to have the food. you know you do love the food but that's not an experience in order to really blow someone away with an experience you want to turn up in new york in houston it works you can have like places outlying and just do the food right i mean that's the thing like if it was in a strip mall it would be different exactly you can do anything you want and also yeah if you're in houston or in la you know you can you know your fixed costs are just so much lower you can get away with shout out to tatamo in houston by the way if you ever make it there that is in a strip mall amazing place doing a like they have their masa driven tasting menu amazing stuff just had to that's what popped in my head when i said strip mall you can do anything you want i mean i feel like the you know the best sushi joints anywhere in america always in strip malls do not ask me why i know um well the parking is amazing in la you know that's the thing right in la if you're talking about a place where i think the best sushi in the country is it's because it has the best parking and it's easy to get to and it becomes hot but that's just a theory i want to transition to the uk press and critics and british restaurant critics like hits different a little bit like there's something it's a it's a different genre let's get into it felix because i know you are a media person you you grew up there so how do you articulate the the the british restaurant critic and the style so the british restaurant critic is a newspaper columnist first and foremost first the american restaurant critic so the first thing you need to know about american newspapers is they all have cities in the name the new york times the washington post the miami herald right and so if you are the restaurant critic for one of those newspapers you will review restaurants in that town and it will be intrinsically servicey the idea is that you will go to the restaurant you will eat the food, you will make a judgment, and then other people in that city who read your newspaper will decide whether they want to go to that restaurant and eat that food.

20:01That is not the role that a UK newspaper critic is fulfilling. The UK is a very large country. All of our newspapers are national. So if you're going around saying, here's this cool new place in clap them, the vast majority of your readers, probably including most of the ones in London, are just never going to think about going there. So it's not a servicey thing. It's not about like how good is the food. And it's not one of those very American adjective heavy, like, let me describe the food so you can decide if you want to. It's all about the writing. It's about being entertaining. It's about talking about food more generally and talking about just more generally, more generally.

20:49You know, A. A. Gill was famous for writing restaurant reviews where he never once mentioned the food. And that's fine. As long as it's entertaining and people want to read it and people, you know, you have a following because you're a good writer. That's what matters. Yeah. I think that the real works of journalism and more of it's more craft in some ways. I think that the critics there um i think the american critics just think they they they're driven by the polarity of it being either really good or really bad i feel that seems to be the tendency to criticize it from here or more or more to the point one way or another that's what they want to do like they feel like their purpose we're in writing the review is to say like it's good it's bad you know or you know or maybe it's complex whereas that is not the purpose of writing the review if you're a uk critic right it's not important on some level whether the restaurant is good or bad because that's not why people are reading the review no they're reading it because it's a columnist they like and they like the person and they they want to know what you think broadly about the restaurant or what the restaurant tells us about the state of something something and we liked adrian gill because he like had a interesting life and we like know about him And he could just write like an angel.

22:07So that's the thing. So honestly, he could review carpet fabric and it would be great. You ever meet him? Yeah, I get to interview him one time on the phone. I never get to meet the guy. But his book about sobriety is really good, by the way, as an aside. But he's really, I miss that type of journalism coming out. Do you have any favorites that are writing currently in the UK? Do you even read him? I'm putting you a little bit on the spot. Yeah, I mean, as I say, I've been in New York since 97. So a lot of whoever is hot right now in the UK, I probably wouldn't even know. I do always read my friend Marina Hyde whenever I see her byline pop up.

22:45But I don't think she, again, like she could totally write about restaurants. And I'm sure she has every so often. I know she has every so often. It's definitely not her main thing. Let me ask you about your career writing about finance. You've interviewed and covered the biggest names in specifically high finance and New York finance. Where are you going to eat with these guys Do you have any stories of like taking out The diamonds of the world I mean I feel like you're part of the mix I mean you got friends Let's get some names in here A Lloyd Blinkenfield I will say The head of The chairman of Latin America Deutsche Bank Once took me out for dinner in New York And ordered $400 bottle of Araujo, which is a California Cabernet, which was completely untrinkable.

23:39It was so like heavy and tannic and sweet and like 60 % alcohol or something. And I was like, okay, this was just like, it kind of threw me off. And what I realized a little bit then, and then recently I've had a couple, I've had a couple of interesting experiences where I've been just setting up a standard lunch date not with anyone hugely important necessarily um but i'll be like you know what kind of neighborhood you want to go to what kind of food do you like um there was this one guy who was like i'm vegetarian i'm like okay let's go let's meet up at what used to be i can't even remember what it used to be nuts and roots anyway it's now um abcv at the tin building oh right now right now And we go there and he's like looking at the menu and he's a little bit confused.

24:30And I'm like, oh, we should have the doses. They're good. Oh, I love that. They brought those back. Love those. And well, they had them all along. Yeah. No, they had them at the old location in Union Square. Well, yeah, they haven't left yet. But they had them at whatever the hell the vegetarian restaurant was before they rebranded it as ABCV in the tin building. Oh, OK. I see. But yeah, anyway, so, and then it kind of arrives and he kind of looks at it with mild terror. And it's clear that he's never encountered a dosa before in his life. And I remembered another time when I, do you know Schilling down in the financial district, the Austrian place?

25:10Really great. No, I don't. Really great Austrian restaurant down on Lower Greenwich Street or Washington, one or the other. I remember going there and saying, oh, my God, you have you really have to order the schnitzel here. It's like literally the best schnitzel in New York. It's so good. And my lunch companion was like, great. We ordered this. We both ordered the schnitzel and it came and it was crunchy and it was delicious. And he kind of sheepishly admits to me halfway through that he was expecting a sausage to arrive. I love that schnitzel like give sausage and probably dosa gives something like light and spongy and not like elongated and crispy.

25:44People, it's like about vocabulary. And the thing I've learned is that if what you're wanting to do is have a meaningful conversation over lunch, and the thing that you're really doing is trying to bond with someone over lunch, you don't want people to be weirded out by food they haven't encountered before. You want something vaguely familiar. And so that's the lesson I've learned. And I did get taken out to, talking of the pool and the grill, the restaurant downstairs from them, what's it called? Lobster Club? Yeah, the Lobster Club, right. That was like Caviar Service Lobster Club, yeah. Yeah, I went there for lunch once, and I'm pretty sure it was the single most expensive lunch I've ever had in my life.

26:30Like, I think it's more expensive. If you just order what looks good on the menu and you're not paying much attention to what you're ordering, even without any drinks at all, you can easily spend like 200 bucks a day. Oh, easily a person, yeah. I mean, Therese is similar, I think. And so I was like, huh, this is like a subterranean place that used to be Brasserie and it would be cheaper to go upstairs to the grill, you know? Yeah, it's interesting how like rooms that get smaller and more exclusive, the prices go up sometimes. It's not that small and it's not that exclusive. I know it's definitely not exclusive.

27:03You can eat there all the time. But I think major food group is just like their cost structure on their menus, their pricing structure has always been what it is. And they don't give it away. And that's Rich was on the show talking about that. And that's their prerogative. People are willing to buy it, right? Right. We're not dismissing it. And in fact, if you think about all of those dials that you're turning to 11, you know, there's the flavors in the food. There's the theater of the service. There's the sumptuousness of the interiors. And then there's also the prices. That's part of the whole thing.

27:37And it is well established in the literature that if you drink a glass of wine that you know is expensive, you're going to like it more than if you think it's cheap. Same with bourbon, same with all the... Same with bourbon and same with lunch. You know, if you wind up dropping$200 a head on lunch, you're like, that was something. You remember that, you know? It's all about getting people in for that first hit. Once people get into like the habitual nature of dining at$28 for a club sandwich, right? Once you get over that hurdle as a restaurant guy, you've kind of struck gold, right? If people are willing to pay a lot.

28:21and and he's kind of doing a favor for everyone else as well right because he's he's widened the overton window so now you go out to lunch somewhere and it's 75 a head and you're like that's not so bad yeah it's all relative right i want to talk about trends in cpg and trend i mean the way like restaurants have leveraged technology better now than ever before i think about blackbird these are all like just things you understand blackbird can you explain this thing to me I swear to God, it is like some weird crypto thing where you need to tap your phone and you get crypto. Into a wood block at the restaurant.

28:55And then you get, and then you can somehow like redeem it. And it's like, what? No, like it's way too much friction. Way too much. Ben Leventhal has been on the show. He tried to explain it. I mean, it's a work in progress with the crypto stuff. I mean, generally speaking, Felix, I can't explain it. I know that literally I went to Upside Pizza and they're like, put your phone on this piece of wood. And then all of a sudden I got a notification that had fractional crypto. Zooming out, it's more about the hospitality industry embracing loyalty in a way that's more than like five punches gets you a free salad.

29:31You know, it's more. I understand that in principle. But in practice, you know, as someone who, you know, used to be understood as a loyal luncher at Lua Fish Bar, you know, I don't want to be punching and tapping and redeeming. You know, I just want to be sat at the nice restaurant and the bowl of edamame comes out and no one's charging me for it. It's not for you. That's like, that's what loyalty gets you is recognition. And the minute that you assume that someone is loyal and coming regularly, but no one in the restaurant is recognizing them or is seeing them in the reservation system and saying, oh, this person has been here three times in the past four weeks.