Rice on Mott

Risk is a game of world domination, where the object is to conquer the globe. The eats-and-drinks-industry in New York is something of the same. This is particularly evident with chain restaurants. Witness Chipotle's recent blitzkrieg through lower Manhattan. With fourteen locations, they've become a burrito-brick empire.

In fact, the only chain-free battlefield left below Manhattan's beltline (aka 59th street) is Nolita, where all the restaurants are unique installments. Or were. Rice-the same Rice that serves only quasi-exotic rice dishes equally fit for catering the U.N. Summit or feeding a fraternity-has recently expanded to four locations: Gramercy Park, Dumbo, and Fort Greene, in addition to their original, the Delta Team, Rice on Mott. No longer the quiet imperialist, Rice is on the march.

Their aggression is hardly surprising, however, given the history. Rice has been a neighborhood institution since real estate interests first invented "Nolita" in the mid-1990s. It arrived in a wave of similar modernist, pod-like restaurants. Radically simple, might have been their collective motto. Then, the future looked bright.

But it wasn't, of course. Notable casualties included the all-white Bot, the mostly chrome Glass, and Dippin' Dots, formerly America's fastest growing franchise ("Ice Cream from the future!"). Notable survivors included Rice, of course, but also its docile southern neighbor, Café Habana.

At this point, metaphors involving North Korea and South rather sharply present themselves. Both restaurants consider visiting the other restaurant an act of espionage; both serve conservative staple-foods and suffer from overcrowding; and sometimes people mix them up.

I'd prefer fourteen locations of Café Habana to Chipotle. Ditto for Rice. But I'll settle for at least one good one of each. Unfortunately, as Rice expands, the quality appears to be slipping. Just this week, as they promoted Fort Greene, Rice on Mott was flagging. The normally moist and fluffy grains were dry and heaped high enough to snowball my meatballs and stop up my stew. Plus, my guacamole was suspiciously cold, and my girlfriends tofu steak had it's own climate zones. Temperatures varied from room to basement to outside on the porch at dawn. Topping it all off, I had to cross the border to Habana to get myself a mojito.

Certainly it's unreasonable to blame Rice for not having a drink they've never pretended to have. But somehow I found it emblematic of their downfall. Just be yourself, Rice.