Peter Luger Steak House Responds To Brutal Zero Star NY Times Review

There are restaurant review raves, there are pans, and then there are scorched earth takes the likes of which have driven Guy Fieri out of NYC. NY Times restaurant critic/assassin Pete Wells dropped one of the latter yesterday in his zero star review of beloved Brooklyn institution Peter Luger Steak House. He criticized the prices, the waitstaff, the general atmosphere; he mocked the shrimp cocktail and the steak sauce and the underwhelming T-bone. And he ends things with an absolutely brutal kicker.

The restaurant will always have its loyalists. They will laugh away the prices, the $16.95 sliced tomatoes that taste like 1979, the $229.80 porterhouse for four. They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.

Wells knows what he's doing, and what kind of power he wields in unleashing a bomb like this—it's a similar thing to what he did with Per Se, Guy's American Kitchen & Bar, Momofuku Nishi and Javelina previously. The only thing people love more than a rave review is a dropkick. As the New Yorker wrote about Wells' infamous Guy review, "A review of a bad restaurant seems to expand its writer’s reach more than an unhappy review of a book or a film."

Unsurprisingly, the Luger review has caused just as much commotion, with over 1,800 comments on the original review, as well as a follow up in which Times readers commended Wells for saying that which everyone apparently knew but was too afraid to say out loud: that Luger's "steaks have been on a long decline and that the service, once brusque but charming, is just off-putting now. Plus, it’s 2019 — who likes a place that’s both expensive and doesn’t take credit cards?"

The most important reaction came from Luger's general manager David Berson, grandson of founders Sol and Marsha Forman, who sent this statement to Eater:

The NY Times has reviewed Peter Luger numerous times over the years. At times we’ve gotten four stars, other times less. While the reviewers and their whims have changed, Lugers has always focused on doing one thing exceptionally well — serving the highest quality of steak — with a member of our family buying every piece of USDA Prime beef individually, just as we have done for decades.

We know who we are and have always been. The best steak you can eat. Not the latest kale salad.

We’re grateful to our customers who continue to pack our house every single day, and especially to our regulars whose emails of encouragement continue to flood our inbox.

While some critics, readers and outlets are debating today what the best steakhouse in the city is now that Luger has been de-crowned, not everyone is aboard the narrative. Eddie Huang wrote an impassioned defense of Luger on his blog, which he called "the greatest steakhouse in the world bar none."

"If anything we need MORE Peter Luger’s, more 2005 Supreme, more Great NY Noodletown," he wrote. "That’s what’s dying in New York! Every thing that has a singular confident identity anchored in local community and beliefs is being displaced by overly calculated/curated experiences that feel like algorithms trying to draw the greatest number of followers."