The year’s end brings to mind a fresh batch of restaurant nuisances that were rare in 2015, but all over the map in 2016. Here, in no particular order, are things we’d love to see disappear by Jan. 1.
1. Shrinking seafood
We know rising costs are murdering restaurants, but really, guys — certain cuts of bass, halibut and cod at places from La Sirena to Benoit were so puny, they left us scouring the plate for them with iPhone lights.
2. Tock
The pain-to-use online reservations platform forces us to pay in advance for a meal. New York culprits include Chefs Club, Rebelle and even the Plaza Hotel’s Rose Club, which is basically a bar. “Ticketing” is meant to reduce no-shows — a legitimate problem, but not enough to justify making customers suffer long before they even set foot in a place.
3. “How are those first bites treating you?”
Waiters’ inane way with words made previous atrocities (e.g., “Is everything to your liking?”) seem like the king’s English.
4. Tasting menus
Once confined to ultra-expensive restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park and Japanese kaiseki spots, the chefs’ ego trips — which save the house a fortune on food by limiting choices — now blight cheaper places as well. Even cramped pain pits on Avenue B.
5. Banana-bread beer
Say no more. The menace tripped me up at House of Brews, but you might slip on it all over town.
6. The poke’s on you
The “year of poke” that some called the 2016 craze for Hawaiian-inspired, chunked and marinated seafood — supposedly new in town — was beaten to the punch in 2010 by “spicy ahi poke tartar” at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where it ought to have stayed. The supposed treat popping up everywhere from Noreetuh in the East Village to Crave Fishbar on the Upper West Side is basically the same “sushi” salad that’s been on a million menus forever.
7. Heartbreaking closings
Let’s have no more out-of-the-blue shutdowns of places like those that seemed always busy — Swifty’s, Carnegie Deli, Spice Market, Telepan and Da Silvano. With owners at the mercy of skyrocketing rents and minimum wage hikes that will hurt restaurants more than it will help employees, all we can do is pray.
8. “Impossible burgers”
A slice of good old American cheese can’t save these meatless, bloodless, flavorless patties concocted out of $80 million in laboratory research and sold at Momofuku Nishi.
9. Age discrimination
More and more restaurants — including vegan pizza joint 00+Co. — scare off oldsters (i.e., 40-plus-year-olds) with deliberately painful noise levels and tree-stump-like “seats.” David Chang at least put in better seats at Momofuku Nishi, but sound-level “improvement” is a joke.
10. Mutant milkshakes
No sequels, please, to Black Tap’s $15, 1,600-calorie, candy-filled confections and people dumb enough to wait on line for them. M&Ms and Oreos that collapse into bland Blue Bunny ice cream don’t make them taste any better.
11. “Microseasonality”
Mere seasonality wasn’t enough at Günter Seeger. The overpriced eatery’s website and promo material tout this previously unheralded phenomenon. What’s next? “January 8 root-vegetable veloute”?
12. Toilet odysseys
There’s nothing like an endless stroll to the loo to keep dining romance going! The trek from the Beekman Hotel’s Augustine — through a crowded lobby lounge, then to a slow elevator and ultimately through a basement maze — rivals Riverpark’s march through the sterile lobby of a laboratory building.