Earlier this year, Keith McNally--owner of Balthazar, Pastis and the newly opened Morandi--wrote an open letter to New York Times food critic Frank Bruni accusing him of sexism. McNally wrote: "Bruni has never given a female chef in Manhattan anything...
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For the first event celebrating my 67th birthday we went to Annisa with Gary and Varian on July 24, 2007. When we arrived, they had already ordered a bottle of Prosecco and put presents at my place.
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I’ve mentioned previously that one of the difficulties in assessing restaurants — and one of the factors that give rise to disagreements about them — is how different they can be from night to night and dish to dish. A case in point: Annisa.
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In early September, I took a friend to Annisa for her 40th birthday. It’s a sweet-looking room. We were seated side-by-side on a banquette, which was an intimate twist on the usual arrangement.
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If restaurants have personalities, they also have gender. The steakhouse represents the archetypal masculinist bastion - a clubhouse for grown-up boys. Yet, until recently there was not an equivalent chick pick. In an industry in which until fairly recently most chefs were men and most owners were as well, this was to be expected - and most of those who made reservations were men as well. Servers considered women to be trouble, and fought to avoid all female parties at their station. The system was well-established. Most restaurants, even those at the high-end, bustled, bruted, and boomed.
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Every review of Annisa I've read starts with the explanation that "annisa" means "women" in Arabic, so I might as well oblige. Now that we got that out of the way, the reason we went to this place was that my date wanted to go to a restaurant run by all women. We had watched the owner/chef Anita Lo's victory over Mario Batali just a couple of weeks prior on Iron Chef America and on that program they mentioned that her restaurant is all women. Or maybe we remembered wrong as the staff there wasn't all women. [Update: I just saw that episode again. They did say she has an "all female staff".] There was a male waiter (he was our waiter, in fact... nice guy) and a bunch of dudes in the kitchen.
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LINK: http://www.blogsoop.com/nyc_rid_3767.html
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