Claud, NYC

An intriguing space, charming service, and clever cooking in a bunker in the East Village, New York City.

“Dad, you definitely should check out Claude, it’s amazing.”

Me: ”I hear it’s a very good restaurant.”

Daughter: ”No dad, Claude the AI app, it’s so powerful, it can access information instantly and will save you so much time.”

Me: “Really, why? Save me so much time to do what? Watch Netflix? I already have plenty of it.”

Then I thought about it for a while. Maybe she’s right. It’s the thing everyone is talking about, writing about, paying for, and buying shares in, AI. If you need a heart felt eulogy written for your mother’s funeral, a presentation for a new client, or a sexy, naughty message to your Russian Professor girlfriend.
Just ask AI.
Why use your own voice when a computer can silence it for you?

I should look at it. Just think about all the money I could save not having to physically go to all these restaurants. Not having to deal with all those needy, attention deprived waiters trying to explain that “the chef’s childhood memories inspired this dish or what the word “sharing” means.” Not to mention the thousands of calories I could lose! Fuck it. I will have one dance with the devil, I signed for a month to Claude for $33.99.

Claude read all seventy of my reviews in Substack, in a few seconds, and I then asked them to review Claud restaurant in the East Village in New York in the style of Roaming Restaurateur. This is a condensed version of what they wrote.

Claud, East Village, NYC
Some restaurants don’t need to shout. They just need to be right.

It is 9.01am on a Tuesday morning and somewhere in this city a person is staring at their phone with the desperate, wild-eyed urgency of a man trying to defuse a bomb. They are not defusing a bomb. They are trying to get a table at Claud. Reservations open on Resy at 9am, fourteen days in advance, which means that at this very moment, hundreds of New Yorkers who have eaten at Claud before are locked in a silent, furious digital sprint to eat there again. I find this both alarming and entirely reasonable.

The restaurant is a few steps below street level on East 10th Street in the East Village; a detail that feels intentional, as though Claud has deliberately placed itself just out of casual reach. You have to mean it. Inside, whitewashed brick meets dark charcoal tiled floors; the seating is snug in that way that says, “we want you to lean in,” the open kitchen at the back glows with a kind of purposeful quiet. There are no exposed Edison bulbs. There is no millennial handwriting on a chalkboard. There is no concept, unless you count “being very good” as a concept, in which case the concept is watertight.

The menu is shared plates, though not in that frantic, can’t-decide, everything-arrives-at-once way that makes you feel like you’re trying to eat at a trade show. The kitchen has the good sense to know that restraint is not the same as withholding. Red shrimp arrive sizzling in garlic and olive oil, and I would like to say I savoured them thoughtfully, but they were gone before I had fully registered my own happiness. A pork chop with smoked onion jus is the kind of dish that makes you genuinely annoyed that you ordered other things, because now you have to share the attention. The roasted chicken is a roasted chicken, which is either the most boring thing you could say about a dish, or the highest possible praise, depending entirely on the chicken. This is the latter. Béarnaise beets that by all rights should not work as well as they do. Cod croquettes that could make a lesser restaurant feel ashamed of everything it had previously put on a plate.

If you cannot get a table — and statistically, you cannot — the bar operates on a walk-in basis, which is perhaps the most democratic thing about a restaurant that is, in most other respects, completely inaccessible.

Claud is Michelin recognised, nearly impossible to book, and worth every indignity of the attempt. In a neighbourhood that has always known what it was before everywhere else caught up, this restaurant fits with a quiet inevitability. It is not trying to be the most talked about restaurant in New York. It is simply, methodically, trying to be the best version of itself, every single night.

That, as it turns out, is enough.

My first thought after reading this was the same one that every cow must have had in the 1990’s in the UK during the mad cow disease; “I’m sure I have seen this shit before.” My second thought was my writing is worse than I realised, that, or the much-acclaimed Claude is malfunctioning. The review is perfunctory, benign, limp, and uninspiring. And that’s its strengths. Compelling machined mediocrity.

Will the AI revolution be the technology industry’s own mad cow disease? One where we ravenously devour so much of our own regurgitated information from the cloud trough that we are satiated into a comatose state. Lobotomised and content in the knowledge that we have none.

Will AI be one of our greatest innovative crusades or the largest Plagiarism Ponzi scheme of all time?
I have no answers to that question, but I do remember in the 2000’s when Zuckerberg and his bro nerds told us that social media would make us more social. Did it? Will AI make us more intelligent? We don’t need to ask Claude; we all know the answer. A few of my corporate mates keep banging on, “But Peter, you just don’t get it, it will make all of us so much more productive.” Why do we need to be more productive? Productive for whom? Your multinational bosses, and the share prices of tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Claude’s parent company Misanthropic?

AI is ozempic for the brain. It shrinks it. It’s far too late for my brain; it floats helplessly in a cerebrospinal fluid of negronis and burgundy. But what about our children and their children? It is time for a response that I’m calling Operation Epic Flurry.

What will a typical day look like in 2055? Do you start with a drone- delivered high protein breakfast, after which you will be driven in a driver less car, to a staff- less office, press a few buttons, generate a bit of code, and return at night to have a quick chat to Alexa, before having a spot of virtual sex with a hologram of a trad wife called Gwyneth? Please pass me that shotgun.

What is the end game here? Machine harvested obsolescence?

This is arguably a more intelligent review.

Claud opened in 2022 to rave reviews and has been consistently busy, but strangely we didn’t have too much trouble getting a 7pm booking on a Wednesday night. The yellow neon sign illuminates the four steps down into the whitewashed cellar room, a cute bar full of ten patrons, and custom-made small banquettes that use every square inch retrofitted into each nook and cranny of this sophisticated bunker. The open kitchen hums away as plates steadily hit the wooden pass to be expedited quickly to the forty odd diners. The moody atmosphere is enhanced by the black taco light fittings that emanate a diffused brothel red glow.

The wine list is a big selling point, the Burgundy selection features many small producers that you rarely seen on any list in town, let alone all together. Wines by the glass are thoughtful and well considered. The night I dined we tried a glass of Feudo Montoni ‘Grillo della Timpa’ from Sicily and an excellent Pinot Noir from the Mosel in Germany; poured at the table into super fine glassware by passionate and well-informed staff.

We choose five dishes from the well priced, concise menu that is short on descriptors but long on seasonality.

A salad of chicories is excellent, highlighting witlof, red and green chicory and dates covered in a snow of finely grated Stella Vallis cheese, a semi hard cheese from the Hudson valley, dressed with a sharp lemon vinaigrette.
An outstanding grilled skewer of scallops arrives cloaked in a veil of melting lardo flecked with chives and dried chilli; it’s moreish and clever. New season snap peas are thinly sliced and layered with strips of boquerones, (pickled white anchovies), chopped mint and shelled peas: a dish I am stealing for my next dinner party.

A black cast iron dish sizzles with three barely cooked red shrimp in hot olive oil with a clove of garlic, a dried red chilli, and a lemon wedge. The opaque crustacean has a delicate briny flavour; the residual olive oil they sit in is perfect for swiping the stellar sourdough through. A chicken liver agnolotti is reminder that the pasta game here is as strong as the rest of the high class, restrained cooking. The bite sized pasta pillows filled with sautéed chicken livers and sage are slathered in a sauce of reduced balsamic vinaigrette and brown butter. It is decadent, immorally rich, and incredibly good. Three firm, meaty slices of roasted monkfish sit in a broth of razor clams, grilled ramps, peas and rice peas, an heirloom legume variety that looks and tastes like a small chickpea.

Chef Joshua Pinsky’s possibly most famous, by famous I mean most instagrammable dish is ironically, a cake. The devil’s food cake is six layers of dark chocolate sponge soaked in a ginger-vermouth syrup layered with chocolate frosting and a sprinkle of sea salt. As far as chocolate cakes go, it is exceptionally good; moist, rich and satisfying in a fun, “guilty pleasure, naughty childlike way.” Try ordering the mint stracciatella gelato on the side, you will not regret it. The other dessert is a humble, homespun rice pudding; I crack open its golden hard toffeed crust to reveal an unctuous emulsification of smooth custard and rice.

While I am typing this, I realise how much I would miss all of this. The food, the chaos, the energy, the waiters, (even the needy ones), and the anticipatory excitement of eating in all restaurants. The good, the bad and the ugly.

I choose Claud over Claude.

P.S.
Before I cancelled my subscription, I asked Claude, “will AI ultimately be responsible for obliterating all critical thinking, creativity and any independent thought process that will in turn lead to the destruction of the human species?”

Answer: The evidence suggests right now that the more grounded worry isn’t extinction - it’s a two-tier cognitive society: people who use AI as a tool to think better, and people who use it as a substitute for thinking at all. That gap could have serious social consequences without being apocalyptic.

Whew, that’s a relief.

Claud, NYC
https://www.claudnyc.com/