The first strike was the bland décor, the second strike was the awkward placement of the bar, and the third and final strike was the terrible food. Three strikes and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto’s restaurant, Tribeca Canvas, is out.
Masaharu Morimoto is a big name in Japanese cuisine. His titles of being an iron chef on the Japanese cooking show, Iron Chef, and its spinoff Iron Chef America, has made him a reputable celebrity. He owns multiple restaurants in multiple parts of the world, ranging from Philadelphia to New York to New Delhi, and of course, Japan. Interested in Western cooking styles, he traveled to the United States, which furthered his fusion style of cooking.
Tribeca Canvas was critically panned, especially on its Asian-influenced comfort food. Instead of food that would be expected from an Iron Chef, such as lavish sushi delicacies, Tribeca Canvas offered hamachi tacos, tuna tostadas, and fish and chips. Comfort-food restaurants tend to work best when the chef has a clear connection with the food that they’re working with, but this is something that Morimoto may be lacking. Instead of cooking from the heart, many recipes seemed as if they were randomly put together with a blindfold. The mash-up of traditional desserts, like a French tart with persimmons rather than apples or Thai rice pudding with a bruleed top just did not help Morimoto’s reputation. The mash-up recipes seem as if they would be more fitting in a manic TV cooking competition rather than a high-end restaurant.
Chef Morimoto closed the brutally reviewed restaurant not even a year after opening it, but he was not depressed by that failure. He immediately opened a new restaurant, Bisutoro, to replace the old restaurant with a completely renovated interior, a new menu, and even new partners. Morimoto is clearly doing everything he can in order to make the former restaurant be a thing of the past. The enchanted forest décor is gone, replaced by retro chairs and murals. While the interior has clearly changed from restaurant to restaurant, the question is if the revamped interior of Bisutoro is much better than that of Tribeca Canvas. There are street-art murals and tattoo photographs decorating the inside, but if a close-up of someone’s navel piercing stimulates your appetite is something to consider.
This time around he’s kept the cuisine of Bisutoro simple, leaning towards Asian-influenced bistro food rather than the previous Asian-influenced comfort food. Perhaps Morimoto is making a comeback to be more focused on this restaurant by changing the menu to something that he’s more familiar with. He swapped out the mac and cheese and corn dogs seen in Tribeca Canvas with uni carbonara and pork tonkatsu. That Chef Morimoto has continued to make the cuisine Asian-influenced suggests that he is undaunted by how poorly the food was critiqued from the last restaurant. Throughout this change Chef Morimoto has never left his Asian roots. He always incorporated some Asian flair and traditional Japanese culinary techniques into his food. With all his changes to the Tribeca space, it’s as if Tribeca Canvas never existed, which was probably his point.
It may be obvious why Morimoto closed Tribeca Canvas and opened Bisutoro in its place. The former restaurant was doing poorly and had unanimously critical reviews, so he wanted a fresh start and an improved restaurant. Looking at another restaurant which was also replaced by another one of the same company, however, makes one wonder if there was more to Morimoto’s decision of ending Tribeca Canvas’s time in the city.
A Texas-based company, Landry’s Inc., announced that its McCormick & Schmick’s seafood and steak restaurants had closed and will be replaced by another Landry’s-owned restaurant. The seafood and steak restaurant served dishes of all different prices, varying from $16 for a hamburger to $50 for crab legs. Meanwhile, the new restaurant offers comfort food, most of which cost less than $20. The reason for the closure of the seafood and steak restaurant was not disclosed, but it could make one curious as to if price was an issue. Comparing the prices of Tribeca Canvas and Bisutoro reveals that Bisutoro is slightly more expensive (Steak Frites was $26 in Tribeca Canvas while it was $36 in Bisutoro), which is the opposite of what happened with the Texas-owned restaurants.
Although the prices are a bit steeper in the new restaurant, the food and the quality have probably improved the most since the last restaurant, since the food is what got the brunt of the critical reviews. Perhaps Chef Morimoto closed Tribeca Canvas partially because he wanted to provide a cuisine more closely tied to his roots. The reason for the higher prices could have been that he, along with higher quality ingredients, put more care into the food that he created, which was an issue that he faced with his former restaurant. Maybe Chef Morimoto had reasons unbeknownst to the public about replacing one of his restaurants, such as wanting a fresh start, providing a different style of cuisine to the public, transporting the customers to a different place when they’re inside, or maybe he simply wanted to redeem himself. Bisutoro clearly wins out over Tribeca Canvas in the food category, but it may not be the famous restaurant anytime soon.
