From eater.com (and the last line's the best):
Big trouble is afoot at Related’s $20 billion development for the rich. Last month, the chic shopping mall at Hudson Yards, which remains closed due to COVID-19 regulations, lost its anchor tenant, the luxe department store Neiman Marcus. Now, it’s losing one of its marquee restaurants to the ongoing pandemic: TAK Room by Thomas Keller, a phoned-in midcentury steakhouse where a prime rib for one topped $100.
The economic consequences are tragic: Scores of hardworking people are losing their livelihoods during a time when there are far more restaurant workers than restaurant jobs. But culturally speaking, there’s not much to mourn. New York won’t suffer from the loss of a bland, plutocratic restaurant that failed to have any real impact on the city’s culinary scene.
The TAK Room lesson isn’t that if a famous and well-capitalized chef can’t make it, no one can. The lesson is that even if we lived in a parallel universe where there were no pandemic to grapple with — where people weren’t afraid of hugging their own parents, where the middle class didn’t have to worry about where their next paycheck would come from — TAK Room shouldn’t have opened in the first place.
TAK Room — the name stands for Thomas Aloysius Keller — was a virtual replica of the chef’s Surf Club restaurant in Miami, which opened a year earlier at a property it shares with the Four Seasons. Like the Florida original, TAK Room served French onion dip, tableside Caesar salads, tableside Dover sole, clam chowder, and steaks.
“You think about these dishes which are very recognizable in America and there’s a sense of sense of comfort with them because we have reference points for them. We’ve had them before,” Keller said during a Newsweek interview last year. Indeed, his comments betray a narrow view on what types of cuisines count as familiar to New York’s diverse populace. TAK Room claims to riff on Continental fare, a style of gastronomy that, in its 1950s and 1960s heyday, interpreted French and Italian sensibilities through an American lens. And while that approach to eating might have signaled cosmopolitan flair in postwar New York, Keller’s framing signals a more provincial mindset in 2020, namely that one would be hard pressed to find anything of non-European descent creeping onto the plate.
Or, as Pete Wells wrote in his two-star review, both Surf Club and TAK Room “glorify the strait-laced, spice-free food that rich white Americans used to feed on when nobody was shaming them into being adventurous.”