When the baked, crab au gratin-stuffed potato with a caviar “blackout” was placed in front of me at Mr. Edison’s bar, the man sitting next to me looked upon it with wonder. His eyes were transfixed upon the spud, which spewed crab cream — lightly broiled, like the top of a classic French onion soup — and lots of fish eggs from its potato casing. After he watched me take one bite and then another, he leaned over and asked, “Is that as good as everyone says?”
Short answer: It is not. I wanted this absurdly expensive baked potato to be good. I love that baked potatoes, of all things, have been trending in the last year. And besides, my colleague, restaurant critic Craig LaBan, liked the non-caviar-topped version of it. It was one of the few bright points of his review of the splashy new restaurant in the Bellevue hotel: “The restaurant’s $48 baked potato, stuffed with nearly half a pound of sweet lump crab au gratin, was the most memorable thing I ate at Mr. Edison,” he wrote.
The same restaurant can offer experiences that diverge widely, just as not all potatoes are created equal.
Alas, the baked potato I was served at Mr. Edison was all mush. “Well, a baked potato is usually all mush,” you might say. But think about a classic baked potato. There’s the crisp and chew of bacon bits; the gooeyness of melted cheese; bright, tangy, cold sour cream; a sharp pop of chives, all before you even get to the potato part. Precisely the kind of baked potato that’s all-you-can-eat for $15 on Wednesdays at Wine Dive, not even two blocks from Mr. Edison.
And if you’re eating a jacket potato from Mod Spuds in Graduate Hospital (five blocks away from Mr. Edison, with much better baked potatoes), you can trust great attention was paid to making sure the potato skin is crispy.
The caviar-laden baked potato at Mr. Edison costs almost six times what a potato at Mod Spud’s costs. Is it six times better? It is not. There is always a chasm between cost and value. When it comes to the Mr. Edison’s baked potato, that chasm is very wide.
The ideas behind the dishes at Mr. Edison aren’t terrible. Cream belongs on a baked potato, and so there it is. People love crab. So there’s crab in that cream. And people love caviar, so put that on there, too. But somewhere along the way, it seems that the kitchen forgot to make the final result delicious in addition to expensive.
But we’re not really talking about an $88 potato here, are we?
We’re talking about that upcharge, the caviar that catapults a $48 baked potato (still wildly expensive) into the stuff of legend — or at least, the stuff that makes food writers like me write articles about it, including a $55 slice of pizza (it comes with caviar), a $59 pancake (it also comes with caviar, but thankfully, it’s delicious even without it), or a $140 cheesesteak (it comes with truffles, foie gras, and champagne).
My colleague Michael Klein, who wrote about that $55 slice of pizza from Marina’s Pizza, said that it felt like a stunt. Indeed, caviar is seemingly everywhere now. Give me all the high-quality caviar all the time. But caviar for caviar’s sake? It’s starting to feel like it’s going the way of truffle oil.
Beware: Caviar is great. Baked potatoes are great. But more caviar and/or money does not buy you a better baked potato. It does, however, buy you the privilege of eating a baked potato in the company of a live pianist, sitting under a Ferris wheel that houses equally astonishingly expensive bottles of liquor.
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