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Waiting for Bruni: Anthos

Posted by Ed Levine, May 15, 2007 at 9:20 PM

Anthos is more than just a restaurant to its chef-owner Mike Psilakis. It's a cause. It's his chance to show the food world that Greek food and a Greek restaurant can be good enough and important enough to get three stars from Frank Bruni of the New York Times. I spoke to Psilakis ten minutes before the review appeared: "We gave it our best shot. I was here every time he came in, and the service and the food was as good as we can make it. He didn't get cheated. He seemed to like the food. I just hope Bruni understands how much this restaurant is part of my soul, I hope he understands how much of me is on every plate." I said that Bruni seems to try to get under the hood, that he tries to see beyond the individual plates of food. "I hope so, I hope so., Ed."

Psilakis is hoping for three stars but is steeled, almost resigned, to getting two. He got two stars at Dona, and two stars at Onera, which has since morphed into a more casual Greek restaurant, Kefi. "Bruni's always been fair with me. He gave me two stars at Onera and two stars at Dona, that's pretty good. This time we really went for it, and I think we nailed it. I think he looks for the soul of a restaurant when he reviews places. So many people in the restaurant business talk about the politics of restaurant reviews. I don't think Bruni thinks that way. I could be wrong, but I really don't think he thinks that way."

"This restaurant means so much to Greek people everywhere, even in Greece. They want to be able to say that a Greek restaurant in the US got 3 stars from the New York Times. My dad comes in here and eats the pork dish, and he thinks it's rocket science, we've taken an essential Greek dish and transformed it in a soulful, meaningful way. But if we get two, what am I going to do. I'm going to get up tomorrow and do the same thing I always do on Wednesdays, go to the market and cook for people and make them happy. That doesn't change. It's what I do, it's what we do every day here. And I hope we're going to be doing it for a long time. I hope he doesn't focus on the decor. I think it's a nice-looking place."

I got off the phone with Psilakis at 9:45. At 9:55 the review came out.

It's a two star review that reads like a three star review in many places. The headline and sub-head read as follows: "Restaurants: Greek Again, With Even More Passion. At the restaurant Anthos, a restaurant on 52nd Street off Fifth Avenue, Frank Bruni finds imaginative, carefully executed haute Greek dishes."

He loves much of the food. "Much of the cooking is inspired, and much of it is excellent. Mr. Psilakis takes familiar ingredients and flavors and puts them through unfamiliar paces, the results wedding the rustic and the elegant in keenly enjoyable ways."

But Bruni is no fan of the decor. He describes it as a "drab, rectangular room, which has none of Dona's exuberance...Anthos has a seriously depressed air about it."

But you can tell that Bruni understood what Psilakis was trying to do on just about every level, including attaining three star status, and that he was rooting for him to do it. The final paragraph: "Even so, the ratio of hits to misses is better at Anthos than at Dona, where the menu's sprawl worked against it. If the setting were cheerier and the kitchen's efforts just a little more selective and straightforward, Mr. Psilakis and Ms. Arpaia would have a restaurant that represented not just the blossom but the full flower of his dream. The quest continues, or at least I hope it does."

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Tags: Anthos, Frank Bruni, NYC, Waiting for Bruni