First Looks

Even with all the fanfare and excitement about Jose Andres coming to town, Jonathan Gold isn't quite sold on The Bazaar at the SLS Hotel yet: "Would the riff on a caprese salad — cherry tomatoes impaled with pipettes full of liquid mozzarella that you are supposed to squirt into your mouth the moment you bite into the fruit — be more effective if it weren’t reliant on microbasil and tasteless winter tomatoes?...Is there any reason for the existence of Philly cheese steak reconceptualized as an airy, inverted Hot Pocket?" (We have to interject: Yes, yes there is.) "Is foie gras really improved by a blanket of cotton candy?...Don’t get me wrong — dinner at Bazaar is fun and probably slightly less expensive than you’d fear....But at the end of the evening, the dish you’ll remember best will probably be the hand-shaved wisps of priceless bellota ham, a foodstuff whose basic technology hasn’t changed in 3,000 years." [LAW]