If there’s a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout, it’s this: People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit. The new financial imperatives—accompanied, perhaps, by some small sense that ostentatiously throwing a lot of money around unnecessarily might not be cool right now—dovetailed perfectly with the rising hipness of the more casual Momofuku and L’Atelier fine-dining models (which had been around for some time), as well as other, more mysterious forces, long simmering under the surface and just now bubbling to the top to be
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