The lifespan of a restaurant — any restaurant other than fast-food joints and coffeeshops, any establishment that shoots out of the gate beholden to a finely hewn culinary genre, a name-brand chef, a marketing concept — follows a trajectory like that of a pro athlete's career, or a bottle of dependable-but-not-immortal wine. It tends to mature and then devolve along a bell curve, often improving in its nascent years as it smoothes out the kinks, finds its legs and cashes in on the skills it possesses and the innovations it manifests. After that it may coast on its reputation and before you know it, it's but a shell of what it once was, be it Michael Jordan sinking ho-hum jumpers for the Wizards or a once-glorious Châteauneuf-du-Pape that's sat for too long in the cellar and emerges from the bottle no more remarkable... More >>>