Park Slope's Talde Gets a Star

[kara zuaro] Dale Talde, David Massoni, and John Bush are neighborhood guys. At the root of their partnership and business model is a shared desire to provide good food and a casual dining experience. Dale Talde recently became a partner at Thistle Hill Tavern, Massoni and Bush's first restaurant in Park Slope, where he is now in charge of the menu there. Talde, the trio's most ambitious restaurant, was less than a year old when the team opened Pork Slope, an American Honky Tonk serving chef Talde's take on bar food. As for the restaurant, Talde's immediate success when it opened in January has given the Park Slope eatery serious culinary momentum, the likes of which has brought in Pete Wells, who filed a one-star review on the restaurant today.

"About a month into its run," Wells writes, "the dining room ticked along briskly, and the cooking, which could be called pan-Asian if that didn’t sound so alarming, was smart and skillful." That was before Talde was in charge of three menus, hard work to say the very least. The best way to deal with that is to be at three places at once, but science hasn't made that possible yet. In his review, Wells mentions how whenever Talde was in the kitchen, "The food was back to its old, confident self."

The review seems to suggest that had Talde been in the kitchen on each of the three visits Wells made before he could file his review, an unwritten (written?) Times requirement, he may have stamped it with a second star. Talde, no stranger to competition, is ready to do what it takes to right the wrongs. He had this to say about the review via Twitter: