Meet Me at Michael's

Long the favourite lunch spot for media types, Michael's has the reputation for media executive sightseeing par-excellence. If anyone wants to announce some new alliance or potential hire whether officially or not all they need to do is have lunch together at Michael's and the pr work is done. It is expensive as you might expect and contrary to expectation it is apparently not the place for consistently good food. From Frank Bruni in the NYTimes:

Then I had this restaurant’s jumbo shrimp appetizer. The shrimp were entombed in a dense, soggy beer batter and interred in an almost monochromatic landscape of goat cheese, puddles of dark miso aioli and shavings of summer truffle that might have been shavings of summer rubber for all the flavor they had. California cuisine? More like gloppy, affected pub grub, for which Michael’s charges $25. That’s what happens when a restaurant starts throwing truffles around, and that’s probably one reason this restaurant does it. Until that dinner I thought Michael’s prided itself on produce. Then I had its appetizer of peekytoe crab with spears of white asparagus, which might as well have been spears of white wax for all the flavor they had.

He notes the excellent Cobb salad which I agree is worth ordering although over breakfast I have had (inadvertently) some $12 orange juice.