The Venn diagram overlap of ardent fans of professional wrestling and close followers of New York Times restaurant reviews is probably just me. But I have to say, Pete Wells, restaurant critic of the paper of record, might do well to tune into WWE RAW on Monday nights.

Show me a person who goes to Luger for the steak and the smiles and I’ll show you a sucker.

Why? Well, first of all, let’s start with just the basic facts. Periodically, Wells, by and large a mild-mannered critic, goes ham on some easy target restaurant. He is, eight years later, still perhaps best known for his takedown of Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar.

Recently Wells penned a troll-y and enjoyable slam of Peter Luger, a superannuated steakhouse institution in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge that opened in 1887. Wells is a meat-and-potatoes guy but at Luger he didn’t like the meat (“just another steak, and far from the best New York has to offer”) or the potatoes (“I look forward to them the way I look forward to finding a new, irregularly shaped mole.)

A hamburger and fries at Luger. New York Daily News Archive Getty Images

The piece was full of zingers, as these takedowns often are:

“The Department of Motor Vehicles is a block party compared with the line at Peter Luger.”

“The shrimp cocktail has always tasted like cold latex dipped in ketchup and horseradish. The steak sauce has always tasted like the same ketchup and horseradish fortified by corn syrup.”

And the kicker: “[Y]ou start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.”

I’m not one to argue with the man. He is not incorrect that the service is Hobbesian (nasty, brutish, and short) or that better steak can be found elsewhere. Or that, at times, the potatoes can look like dysplastic nevi. Or that price-wise, the place is institutional pickpocketry.

But I’m also not sure Wells was right either.

For my money, the best part of professional wrestling is the jargon. All sports have some specialized words but wrestling’s argot is particularly rich. You have good guys, called faces, and bad guys, called heels. You have planned fakery, called work; and unplanned realness, known as shoot.

But the best and most powerful of all wrestling words is kayfabe, the communal make believe that holds all of professional wrestling in its embrace. Or, as Michael Brick from Harpers describes it, "When you know you're faking and the audience knows you're faking and you know the audience knows you know you're faking," but at least we’re in this together.

It pains me to do this, since the first rule of kayfabe is don’t talk about kayfabe but, in defense of Peter Luger and its much-maligned ilk, I’ll do it. When it comes to the grandes dames and eminences gris of New York restaurant scene, there’s enough kayfabe going on to thrill any wrestling fan.

The original Delmonico’s was housed in this building on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. George Rinhart Getty Images

Show me a person who goes to Luger for the steak and the smiles—or Delmonico’s, the country’s oldest restaurant, for the oysters and the seamless service, or Bamonte’s and Lombardi’s for the pasta and professionalism—and I’ll show you a sucker.

This applies not just to customers but to every single player in this great charade of restauranting: chefs, restaurateurs, critics, purveyors, flacks, real estate brokers, and members of the third estate.

We know the show isn’t found on the plate or the punctilious service but in the creekity crotchety accumulation of years. The price we pay for mediocrity is mainlining history in a town where restaurants turn over faster than a flapjack on a hot griddle, in which restaurants that stick around for five years are lucky, 10 years are legend, 20 are few, and over 30 unicorns.

Those precious few institutions that have not been washed away by the flow of time could serve cardboard topped with paste for a buck thirty and still we’d go. Hell, they don’t even need to smile while they shiv us. At least they’re honest. And anyway, those old tuxedoed waiters at Bamonte’s are not the glad-handing type, the sort to saddle up tableside and ask, “Have we decided what we’d like to eat?” (Answer: We? Are you joining us?)

Patrons at Peter Luger in 1999. New York Daily News Archive Getty Images

Even at more relatively new additions—I’m thinking here of the vaguely internationalist luxury of Cipriani or the midtown mainstay Michaels or the Loews Regency—no one kvetches that the gnocchi is noxious or that the or that the half grapefruit is exactly one half of a grapefruit and still costs $12.

And why not? Kayfabe: When you know you're faking and the audience knows you're faking and you know the audience knows you know you're faking but at least we’re in this together.

Those precious few institutions that have not been washed away by the flow of time could serve cardboard topped with paste for a buck thirty and still we’d go.

Wells’ suplex of Peter Luger, meanwhile, is the equivalent of a killjoy standing up in the midst of a wrestling match and saying, “It’s fake! It’s all fake!” Cue the Solo cups of Bud Light raining down and plaintive groans of men who must now admit they were playing make believe. I understand: Wells may see himself as the white knight, saving pie-eyed tourists the pain of separation from their hard-earned cash.

But this is like dismantling the Santa Claus myth to my kids prematurely. There’s so little in the way of magic and myth these days. What’s an overdone steak on balance?

There is another option. Part of me, the hopeful Mankind-loving part, thinks maybe Wells is in on the whole shebang. Maybe this is the work, not the shoot. And if that’s the case, he’s the heel and Peter Luger is the face and we, the fans, can gleefully return to our seats in the arena, to our pallid steaks and irregularly shaped mole-like potatoes, and cheer on the match once more.

Joshua David Stein Joshua David Stein has written for publications including _The New York Times, Fatherly, Esquire, and The Guardian.

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