Danny Meyer, who is currently lending his expertise to Ralph Lauren’s new restaurant in Paris, talks to GQ.com about the truffle-sniffing dog he purchased from Knoxville, Tennessee’s Blackberry Farm. Meyer tells GQ that he hangs out on the Lower East Side(!) and also says, “There’s a yakitori place I go back to several times a year called Yakitori Torys. It’s great. You never need a reservation. I generally don’t know anyone there and no one knows who I am. And the food is amazing, and the bill is very small.” Wait a minute, this sounds very familiar …
Here’s Thomas Keller talking about Torys sister establishment Yakitori Totto just a couple of weeks ago:
There’s always been Yakitori Totto in New York. I go in there and nobody knows who I am and I sit at the little yakitori counter. You have some chicken, special tofu and some rice and egg. And it’s like, ‘god, I’m in heaven.” It’s just such simple food.
Okay, so which is better, Torys or Totto? Bourdain issued the tiebreaker back when he endorsed Totto, but if you’re a big-deal restaurateur looking for a “nobody knows who I am” scenario, Torys might be better, since you won’t be running into Keller, Bourdain, or Ripert there.