Kinda grim to live in an e-world where the kerfuffle is bigger over one bad review of a London clone than over the fact that thousands of sick pigs were dumped into a river in China and only the thinnest allah-save-us-from-the-sequester thread keeps Bushwhacked farmers from doing the same here. Can I just point out that Balthazar was not a great food venue when it opened in SoHo way back in the last century? The best it managed was two stars. I still remember jumping through 65 hoops to get a lunch reservation when it was new and being rewarded with profoundly mediocre cooking in an admittedly glorious setting. In my eating around NYC for a post-9/11 story, I took a friend there for another dinner so just-average she couldn’t be persuaded Leroy Neiman at the next table qualified as a celebrity big enough to validate eating West 50s classics. Today, to me, it’s La Grenouille for kiddles. I wouldn’t turn down dinner there. But did a city just a Chunnel away from Paris really need an Epcot bistro?