Restaurant review, High Junoon.

If you don’t believe that the parched postrecession restaurant landscape is slowly returning to the kind of lush boom-era opulence that New Yorkers are used to, then I suggest you book a table at the new Indian dining palace in the Flatiron district called Junoon. The restaurant’s façade is covered in hand-­chiseled limestone, like the exterior of a Mughal fort. Inside, the barn-size dining room is appointed with giant rose-colored statues cut from Indian sandstone, and limpid spa-style pools with candles and lotus blossoms floating in them. In the downstairs Spice Room, you can view the exotic spices and herbs (dried ginger, fenugreek leaves, strings of red saffron, and so on) that go into the house-ground curries, and the semi-­private dining room upstairs is decorated, according to my loquacious waiter, with antique wooden arches carved centuries ago for a raja’s palace in Jaipur.

“French service, in the family, ­Indian style,” is how our waiter (who was French) described the menu at Junoon (the name means “passion” in Hindi), which is divided not just between appetizers and entrées but also by method of Indian cookery. The most familiar of these, of course, are tandoor (clay oven) and handi (curry), although our early appetizers included two dainty scallops sizzled in the tawa (cast-iron) style, and tubes of tasty though curiously tepid minced-lamb kebabs, which tasted like they’d been grilled in a fire pit (sigri) an hour or so earlier. ­Neither of these dishes was as satisfying as the Goan shrimp, however (small shrimp in a rich, properly fiery piri-piri sauce), or the Tree of Life cauliflower (crisp-fried with a garam masala crust), or the tiny, delicate tandoori-style adraki bater, a whole quartered quail softened in ginger and lime juice and piled over slices of freshly peeled orange.

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Restaurant review, Blink and the Menu Changes.

I can’t believe they’re serving food in this chicken coop!” cried one of my grumpy, slightly disoriented guests, as we sat crouched in our little white café chairs at our rickety, farm-style tables, waiting for events to unfold at John Fraser’s radical new exercise in experimental dining, What Happens When. Fraser’s latest restaurant, as you may have heard, is not really a restaurant at all. At least it’s not a restaurant in, say, the static, prosaic, everyday way that Fraser’s critically acclaimed Upper West Side establishment Dovetail is. According to the notes on the back of the menu, this is a “temporary restaurant installation,” which means that the menu will change completely every month, along with the décor and music, the drinks program, and even the waiters’ outfits. A similar experiment in perpetual reinvention has been under way at Park Avenue Winter (a.k.a. Park Avenue Spring, Summer, Autumn) for years, but there’s another twist here: Fraser’s whimsical “culinary, visual, and sound experiences” will last only nine months (which is how long Fraser holds the lease on his chicken-coop-size space), after which the restaurant will go dark forever and everyone will go home.

On my first visit to Fraser’s culinary performance space, the little room (which in more conventional times housed the popular Nolita bistro Le Jardin) was painted all in black, with white lines drawn on the walls and floor, like on an architectural rendering or a chalkboard. Various builder motifs dangled here and there (empty windows, a mirror, a ladder), along with the kind of temporary, bare-bulb lamps you normally see illuminating suburban garages or construction sites. A month later, this tabula rasa theme had been replaced with an assemblage of red birdhouses, several of which were suspended above our heads in a thatchlike installation made of little green sticks. To encourage what the menu described as “a whimsical romp through our fantastical forest,” deer and bird tracks were painted on the floor, and the air was filled with the ambient sounds of what might have been rustling leaves, or popping popcorn, or bongo drums.

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Restaurant review, Brooklyn Eats Manhattan.

As any knowledgeable restaurant anthropologist will tell you, the seeds of the new Brooklyn style of dining were planted in Manhattan. That’s where locavore, seasonally driven menus originated. So did bewhiskered mixologists, trendy no-reservation policies (thank you, Mr. Chang), and ye olde dive-bar restaurants with carefully distressed décor (thank you, Freemans). But as the Brooklyn restaurant scene continues to mutate and evolve, the kind of raffish, casually inventive, modestly priced neighborhood cooking associated with such now iconic institutions as Marlow & Sons and the Frankies Spuntino empire in Carroll Gardens is starting to loop back across the river. And more and more restaurateurs in Manhattan are attempting to bottle the elusive, homespun alchemy that the best Brooklyn restaurants are known for, and make it their own.

At least those were my thoughts as I hunkered down at the bar amid the bearded, flannel-shirted, bourbon-­swilling hordes who are already flooding into ­Gabriel Stulman’s latest restaurant, ­Fedora, which opened recently on 4th Street in the West Village. Over the past few years, the energetic (and, as it happens, bearded) Mr. Stulman has made a specialty of taking pokey spaces near Sheridan Square, where he lives, and turning them into the kind of hopping, corner-bar destinations that you’re more likely to find in Williamsburg or the newly gentrified borderlands of Fort Greene. Stulman’s restaurants are tiny, as a rule ­(Joseph Leonard, on ­Waverly, has seven tables, Fedora has eight), the menus are filled with hearty hipster staples like braised lamb shanks, brisket sandwiches, and oysters on the half-shell (Stulman’s a former partner in the Little Owl), and in the evenings, the crowded little rooms take on an intimate, almost private-party-like feel.

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Restaurant review, Slimmed-Down French.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when ambitious French haute cuisine restaurants opened with a splash in prominent skyscrapers and hotels all over midtown Manhattan. But as the shadowy, slightly opaque name suggests, La Silhouette is an haute cuisine restaurant for our new, post–haute cuisine era. It’s technically in midtown, but to find it, you’ll have to trudge several blocks from the subway to the borderlands of Hell’s Kitchen. The bar serves $15 cocktails and $97 bottles of Gevrey-Chambertin, but it’s barely big enough to seat six people. There are no linens on the tables, and the menus have a laminated sheen. The tiny, sunken dining room in the back is manned by professional waiters wearing neatly pressed vests, but it feels pokey and austere, like something you’d find in suburban Miami or off the lobby of a provincial European hotel.

But once dinner begins, the mood in the matchbox-size dining room begins to change. “This looks lovely,” muttered one of the grizzled Francophiles at my table as he examined an old-fashioned torchon of Hudson Valley foie gras, which was smooth as proverbial silk and served with two disks of Melba toast and a spoonful of delicately chopped pear chutney. The risotto appetizer I enjoyed one evening was wreathed in a vividly green parsley foam and scattered on top with boutique mushrooms (hen-of-the-woods) and a handful of crisped, garlicky snails from Burgundy. My neighbor’s beet salad was constructed in delicate layers, in the familiar Alfred Portale style, and if you order the pappardelle at this outwardly unassuming establishment, you’ll find that the flat, chewy noodles are rolled fresh every day, and smothered in a rich, faintly gamy wild-boar ragù.

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Restaurant review, Barnyard Baroque.

If Jean-Georges Vongerichten was the multitalented Picasso of nineties auteur “superstar” chefs, then David Burke was the blustering cook’s version of Julian Schnabel. At hit restaurants like the Park Avenue Café, Burke embellished his recipes with fanciful props, created inventive sculptures on the plate from lobster shells and other oddments, and slapped countless fusion ingredients together in the hope that a few of them would stick. Like the market for Schnabel’s more garish canvases, however, the one for Burke’s expressive brand of showmanship has dwindled over the years. Recently he’s lent his name (like lots of the star chefs from the vanished nineties) to more formulaic enterprises, including seafood restaurants (Fishtail by David Burke), steakhouses (in Vegas, Chicago, and the Foxwoods casino), and even a string of signature comfort-food spots at unusual locales like Bloomingdale’s and the newish Bowlmor Lanes, in Times Square.

So it was only a matter of time before Burke (like Jean-Georges before him) tackled the most fashionable and formulaic trend of our time, farm-to-table dining. ­David Burke Kitchen, which opened not long ago in the basement of the starkly modernist, almost comically un-­bucolic James New York hotel, in lower Soho, is decorated with all the familiar totems of our barnyard-mad era. The walls of the softly lit, dun-colored room are adorned with the usual giant color photographs of apple-cheeked “suppliers” cuddling the usual lobsters, piglets, and baby sheep. The ceiling is clad with planks of tastefully distressed wood that look like they’ve been ripped from the side of an Amish barn, and the café-style chairs are made with woven leather. The tabletops are cut from polished wood and set with blue-check napkins, like at a church picnic, and when you ask for a glass of water, it’s poured from specially made bottles stenciled with the image of a capering rabbit.

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Restaurant review, Italian 101.

So when, precisely, did osteria and trattoria replace brasserie as the catchword for casually chic, ­Continental-style dining in this city? For argument’s sake, let’s date the first stirrings of the trend back to Mario Batali’s great faux-Roman osteria Lupa, which opened in the Village more than a decade ago. Since then, studiously chic, nouveau-rustico Italian establishments have been popping up around town like mushrooms. These restaurants tend to have snappy names (Crispo, Morini, Maialino). Many occupy cramped, neighborly spaces with fake rafters on the ceilings and have dining counters designed largely for the consumption of Italian wines. The menus are filled with crudo appetizers and carefully curated salumi boards (frequently featuring that great Batali favorite, lardo). The pastas are earthy and handmade, and the ragùs are often freighted with faithfully authentic peasant delicacies like coxcombs, stewed tripe, and cured pork jowls.

You will find many of the totems of the nouveau-rustico movement on display at Spasso, which opened early this year, on the corner of Hudson and Perry Streets in the West Village. There’s the bouncy, Bastianich-style name (“amusement” in Italian), and the slightly awkward storefront space, which in this case has been fitted with not one but two cramped dining counters. There are the carefully chosen, modestly priced Italian wines (just 120 bottles of them) in the cellar and the de rigueur selections of house-cured salumi (coppa with roasted peppers, lardo with rosemary) and crudo (amberjack with sea urchin). Spasso’s chef and partner, Craig Wallen, has studied under many of the high priests of the rustico movement (with Michael White at Convivio, and at Lupa itself), and his designer pastas are “hand-rolled,” according to the restaurant’s website, and dressed with properly earthy ingredients like chopped pork shoulder and braised duck leg.

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Restaurant review, Imperial Schizophrenia.

Every grizzled fine-dining veteran knows that your enjoyment of dinner can be directly affected by where you’re seated in a restaurant. But I’ve never encountered two rooms as jarringly different as the ones on display at Sam Talbot’s new seafood restaurant, Imperial No. Nine, which opened several weeks ago off the lobby of the Mondrian Soho hotel. The main dining room, where I was seated one grim evening, is a windowless lounge-lizard Siberia. There, the house music is annoyingly loud, and the glowing imitation Louis Quatorze furniture looks like it’s been lifted from the VIP lounge of an after-hours club in suburban L.A. The garden room, by contrast, is an airy space enclosed in glass, like a giant greenhouse, and decorated with flowerpots and handblown chandeliers. On a clear evening, you can look up and see the stars twinkling dimly over downtown Manhattan. So it was a lucky thing, for Talbot and his crew, that the maître d’ decided to seat our party in the garden room when I took Mrs. Platt to dine at the Mondrian. “I love this place,” she announced not once but twice, as we gazed up at the sky from our table next to a row of mossy planters.

Like the faux-bucolic surroundings in the front of the house, much of the food at Imperial No. Nine seems to have been designed with a delicately discerning—you could say feminine—sensibility in mind. There is no burger on the dinner menu. All of the ingredients, as our waiter (who looked uncannily like Jonathan Rhys Meyers from The Tudors) took pains to explain, are righteously sourced. The fish is “line-caught” and not “dredged” by commercial boats from the ocean floor. The heirloom vegetables are handpicked from a boutique Ohio farm (there are seven non-meat dishes on the menu), and many are designed to make a meal in themselves.

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Restaurant review, The Stork Club This Isn’t.

Desmond’s, which opened for business a month or so ago on a gloomy stretch of 60th Street, across from the loading dock at Bloomingdale’s, aspires to be the kind of restaurant that your sophisticated grandmother used to enjoy on her stately forays into the big city. The tables in the high-ceilinged former carriage-house space are covered with white linen and decorated with little silver lamps shaped like pineapples. The waiters are dressed in suitably subdued tones of white and charcoal gray, and several of them speak with comforting (if slightly indistinct) Continental accents. There’s a version of Waldorf salad on the menu (tossed with sliced Concord grapes, the way your grandmother used to like it) and a passable Dover sole. If you’re in the mood for a stout pretheater Edwardian feast, you can even dine on a beef Wellington big enough to feed a party of six.

Desmond’s proprietors (Indochine veteran John Loeffler, former Soho House London cook David Hart, and Richard O’Hagan from London’s Annabel’s) appear to be aiming for something like a latter-day Stork Club atmosphere. But the restaurant’s timeless, slightly archaic charms are diminished somewhat by the acoustics in the echoey room (after it was a carriage house, it was a bank), not to mention the lighting, which is catacomb-gray in the afternoons and tomblike in the evenings. Then there’s the location, next to the back end of Bloomingdale’s. The spot might be convenient for a quick ­after-work drink or a nice shopping lunch in midtown, but it’s beset by a steady stream of traffic during the day and strewn with garbage bags from local fast-food joints (a pizza parlor next door, a Subway sandwich franchise down the street) at night.

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Restaurant review, Bouley Does Japanese.

Among all the great cooks who made New York their playground during the go-go nineties, David Bouley has a special place. Like Batali, Jean-Georges, and Daniel Boulud, he’s run seminal restaurants (notably the original Bouley, which opened in the late eighties). He’s pioneered culinary trends (nouvelle American cuisine, the sous vide bag) and helped train many great chefs (Dan Barber, Anita Lo, Eric Ripert).

Unlike his other superstar brethren, however, Bouley has rarely strayed far from his New York roots. His restaurants have generally opened in that little three-block corner of southwestern Tribeca known to my gourmet friends as Bouley Land. And like many residents of this lunatic city, he’s had his dramas—shuttering several of his operations, battling creditors, and shaking his fist wildly at the fates. Through it all, he’s persevered and survived. Among his generation of hypertalented New York superstar chefs, you could say Bouley’s the quintessential New Yorker.

His latest quixotic venture is the long-awaited high-end Japanese establishment Brushstroke, which opened about a month ago in an angular ground-floor space on Hudson Street, a location the chef’s fans will recognize as the former home of his doomed French brasserie, Secession. Before that, the narrow, high-ceilinged room housed the excellent multi-star Austrian restaurant Danube, a place famous for its delicately puffy Wiener schnitzel and its glittering Klimt-style murals. Now the room has been redone again, by Bouley and his Japanese partner (Yoshiki Tsuji, head of the Tsuji Culinary Institute, in Osaka) in the spare, woodsy style of a Shinto shrine.

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Restaurant review, Don’t Call It a Taco Shop.

Ever since David Chang made the momentous decision, nearly a decade ago, to abandon the kitchen at Café Boulud and open a small noodle shop downtown, ambitious young cooks have been leaving gourmet kitchens in droves. They’ve opened Italian delicatessens (Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone at Torrisi Italian Specialties), neighborly southern-cooking joints (Robert Newton’s Seersucker in Brooklyn), and countless burger bars. But even by today’s standards, Alex Stupak’s decision came as a shock. Over the years, he’s won many accolades and awards for his avant-garde dessert creations, first in Chicago, with the molecular gastronomist Grant Achatz, and then here in New York, with Wylie Dufresne, at wd~50. But late last year, Stupak announced that he would be laying down his syringes and immersion blenders to pursue what, presumably, was a lifetime dream. The most creative dessert chef of his generation had decided to open what one of my scandalized gourmet colleagues described as “a high-end taco shop.”

Empellón is the name of Stupak’s new project, and in fairness, it’s not really a high-end taco shop at all, although there are plenty of high-end tacos on the menu. It’s a casually elegant Mexican restaurant that has been designed (like Torrisi and the Momofukus before it) to appeal to the new breed of scruffy, tattoo-bearing, avowedly non-gourmet culinary sophisticates who have radically reshaped the city’s dining scene over the past decade. This means the brick walls of the old space on West 4th Street are painted in a clean, no-nonsense shade of white. There is a bronzed Virgin Mary from Mexico by the restrooms and a Frida Kahlo–like portrait on one of the walls, but otherwise the main dining room is mostly devoid of frippery. The wooden tables are linen-free, and the long bar is designed as much for eating as it is for tippling the restaurant’s exhaustive, impressively esoteric selection of artisanal tequilas and mezcals.

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Restaurant review, Daniel Does Mediterranean.

Throughout the course of his illustrious career, Daniel Boulud has taken an impish pleasure in breaking down tired old culinary formulas and reimagining them in all sorts of distinctive and entertaining ways. He’s reinvented many tired old haute cuisine recipes at his uptown establishments, of course, and updated the aged French-bistro formula at his midtown restaurant db Bistro Moderne. He’s tinkered famously with the American hamburger (this summer marks the tenth anniversary of the iconic db Burger) and less famously with the hot dog at his populist downtown beer hall DBGB Kitchen & Bar. Now, at Boulud Sud, which opened recently next to the other Daniel outlet across from Lincoln Center, Bar Boulud, the great chef has turned his attention to that tired old world of olive tarts and rust-colored faux-Provençal fish soups that generations of weary restaurateurs on this side of the Atlantic refer to broadly as “Mediterranean” cuisine.

The question my guests and I kept asking, as we waited for our drinks to arrive in the long, airy room, is, What in the world has taken him so long? Monsieur Boulud’s latest restaurant (he has six of them in Manhattan now) is fronted on Broadway by a glimmering new “épicerie” parlor, which sells coffees, classic (and, of course, pricey) French pastries, and freshly made sandwiches decoratively wrapped in plumes of cellophane. The dining room has a high, multi-arched ceiling, like in a small modernist museum, and the blond-paneled walls are decorated with bright sun-splashed photographs inspired by famous Provençal paintings by Van Gogh, Matisse, and Cézanne. The tables in the well-lit space are set a little too close together (the room can seat 100 clamorous guests on a crowded evening), but they’re covered with fresh white linens and set with green, Mediterranean-style water glasses and napkins the color of lemon chiffon.

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Restaurant review, More Burgers and Bourbon.

If, by some miracle, you’ve missed the endless comfort-food fads and outer-borough dining boomlets that have turned New York’s culinary world on its head in the past decade, I suggest you get yourself to Andrew Carmellini’s boisterous new Soho restaurant, the Dutch, for a refresher course. You’ll find whiskery barkeeps who mix drinks with artisanal bitters made from celery and peaches, and keep enough bourbons behind the bar (27) to satisfy the most righteous Brooklyn bourbon snob. You will find a much-hyped $17 house burger (lunch, brunch, and late nights only) and iterations of formerly trendy southern classics like fried chicken and fried green tomatoes. Ingredients are hailed as “local,” and the house “white boy” pork ribs come with a very un-Dutch mix of hoisin sauce and scallions (thank you, Mr. Chang). In case you can’t get into Minetta Tavern up the street, Carmellini even offers his own version of côte de boeuf ($98 for two), purveyed by that frenetic butcher to the stars, Pat LaFrieda.

“I feel like I’m in a hipster theme park,” Mrs. Platt declared as we surveyed the network of cramped, clamorous, speakeasy-style bars and dining rooms (formerly the Cub Room, on the corner of Sullivan and Prince Streets), which Carmellini and his partners, Josh Pickard (Lure Fishbar, Chinatown Brasserie) and Luke Ostrom (Locanda Verde), have remodeled in clubby tones of brown. There’s a low-ceilinged dining room in the back, and two bars in front, one designed for the consumption of Manhattan’s original locavore delicacy, oysters. They’re served on the half-shell and fried in doll-size sliders, and you can complement them, depending on the day and time, with platters of soft scrambled eggs and smoked sable, silky sweet corn soup, and pleasingly messy “sloppy duck” sandwiches garnished with peanuts and mint.

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Restaurant review, Don’t Call It Bar Food.

Ever since the term gastropub migrated here from London a decade ago, it’s been used to describe a whole range of boozy New York establishments, from neo-speakeasies to beer dens to Brooklyn whiskey bars. But if you find yourself pining, on a steamy summer evening, for something approaching the real thing, I suggest you book a table at a curious, out-of-the way little restaurant called Hospoda, which opened this spring on the ground floor of the Bohemian National Hall (also the Czech consulate) on East 73rd Street. You will find a cool, well-appointed room and tables filled with pink-cheeked gentlemen nursing mugs of pilsner served at exactly 44.5 degrees. You will find newfangled Bohemian specialties like duck breast with red-cabbage essence; waiters conversant in all sorts of intricate, beer-geek brewing techniques; and a burly, old-world barkeep who looks like an extra from the set of Game of Thrones.

The restaurant’s head barman, as it happens, is Lukas Svoboda, and if you consult the restaurant’s website, you will find that he was named International Master Bartender of the Year in 2010, beating out “4,000 bartenders from 17 countries.” He’s from Prague, where the locals treat their homegrown pilsner with the kind of obsessive reverence that Kentuckians reserve for their bourbon. The only beer on tap at ­Hospoda (the name means “pub” in Czech) is Pilsner Urquell, which is a little like saying the only soft drink available at the new U.S. embassy restaurant in Prague is Coke. But Svoboda and his assistants serve their smooth, piercingly refreshing brew in a variety of esoteric, nontraditional ways, ranging from ­Cochtan (served neat, with no head) to the mellifluously named Milko, which consists of an entire mug filled with clouds of cooling foam.

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Restaurant review, Twee It Is Not.

Tremont, which opened early this summer among the posh townhouses and boutiques down on Bank Street, is one of those small, slightly self-conscious West Village restaurants that, on first inspection, look almost too polished and twee for their own good. The storefront façade is painted in a neat white trim, and the windows are covered in discreet wooden shades. The fifteen or so small café tables inside the snug, suspiciously spotless dining room are divided by partitions made of carefully painted, Hamptons-style white wainscoting. The cozy, ten-seat dining bar in the middle of the room is fitted with little hooks on which to hang your shopping bags, and the walls are hung (one of my jaded, fashion-minded guests observed) with the kind of summery, pleasantly inoffensive paintings and prints that you’d see in the tastefully redesigned vacation home of a midlevel banker.

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Restaurant review, Fried Chicken for Ladies Who Lunch.

The curse of the boom-time hotel restaurant has been well documented in this column. Boom-time hotels tend to spring up around town like exotic mushrooms during (or just after) periods of economic excess. They’re shaped like giant concrete Kleenex boxes (the James, on the southern edge of Soho) or great billowing sails (the Cooper Square Hotel, on the Bowery), and many of them feature elaborate new restaurants run, at least temporarily, by big-name chefs (David Burke at the James, for example). The cooks are drawn into the arrangement by the publicity, ready-made clientele, and sometimes cheaper-than-usual rents. In return, however, they often find themselves marooned in strange, unfamiliar neighborhoods (David Chang’s Má Pêche in midtown, Susur Lee at the tragically located Thompson Hotel on the Lower East Side) or saddled with a poky, ungainly space, like the one Scott Conant’s doomed Faustina briefly occupied off the lobby of the Cooper Square Hotel.

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Restaurant review, Barnyard Chinese.

I can’t remember the last time I was served crispy beef by someone with a tattoo,” whispered Mrs. Platt as we wedged ourselves into one of the long communal tables at the boisterous newfangled Chinese restaurant RedFarm, which opened a couple of months ago on Hudson Street in the West Village. The brightly lit little townhouse space is built with wooden rafters and banquettes, and decorated here and there with familiar casual barnyard touches like wooden packing crates, dangling candles, and the kinds of flowerpots you see hanging in the courtyard homes of old Chinese houses. There were plenty of tattooed diners, too, sitting at the long tables, which were set with mismatched chairs as in a country kitchen. They sipped fashionable, non-Chinese cocktails like the RedFarm Manhattan, and picked at thick, American-style egg rolls stuffed with Katz’s pastrami, and dishes with antic names like Shu Mai Shooters.

RedFarm is bankrolled by that ubiquitous restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow (China Grill, Asia de Cuba), but the concept belongs to the great czar of New York’s increasingly moribund Chinese-food scene, Ed Schoenfeld. Schoenfeld has had a hand in numerous Chinese dining trends over the decades (the seventies establishment he managed, Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan, launched the General Tso’s chicken craze on an unsuspecting city), and he’s been involved with many high-profile Chinese restaurants, including Shun Lee Palace and Chinatown Brasserie. As the catchy name indicates, RedFarm is an attempt to update the ancient, tired formulas and market them to the new, more casual generation of big-city diners. This means, among other things, that there are no reservations at this “farm style” Chinese restaurant, and that the bistro-style one-page menu is imbued with what the proprietors eagerly describe as a “Greenmarket style” sensibility.

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Restaurant review, Follow the Smoke West.

Manhattan restaurateurs have been attempting, with varying degrees of success, to bottle that homespun, organic quality that the new generation of Brooklyn dive bars and neighborhood joints are famous for and make it their own. But what happens to that elusive outer-borough mystique when ambitious, bewhiskered Brooklyn restaurateurs decide to cross the river and set up shop in Manhattan? Earlier this year, the venerable Brooklyn pizza parlor Grimaldi’s opened a new branch on Sixth Avenue in Chelsea; the popular Mexican establishment Hecho en Dumbo moved a while back to a new location on the Bowery; and those industrious (and bewhiskered) culinary entrepreneurs Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli recently opened a boisterous West Village branch of their red-sauce bistro chain, Frankies Spuntino, which is as different in tone and scale from the Carroll Gardens original as the first Palm steakhouse is from the one in Vegas.

Now comes Fatty ’Cue Manhattan, Zak Pelaccio’s glitzy Manhattan reimagining of his great Asian-accented Brooklyn barbecue joint, Fatty ’Cue. Unlike the poky, ­closet-size flagship on the fringes of Williamsburg, the new Fatty ’Cue occupies a prime piece of storefront real estate on Carmine Street in the West Village. The façade of the new restaurant is sheathed in painted brown wood, the windows are covered with stylish blinds, and like that of a downtown nightclub, the heavy door is affixed with a silver handle molded from a real pig’s foot. The dark interior is lit like a nightclub, too, and features a black-tiled bar and rows of padded green leather banquettes. There is no pleasingly authentic, spark-belching smoker in the backyard (the meat is smoked at the Williamsburg restaurant and trucked across the river), and the walls are set with glowing displays of “table service” liquor bottles, which patrons can buy for the evening, like high rollers in a casino.

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Restaurant review, Is There a Chef in the House?

Once upon a time, before soufflés mysteriously vanished from the menus in midtown and the pork chop replaced filet mignon as the protein of choice among the city’s high-­minded gourmets, Michelin-approved chefs from Europe were received in New York like visiting popes. But those days are long gone. The perennial Michelin favorite Alain Ducasse has closed two of his four New York restaurants in the past decade, and the survivors (Adour and Benoit) have gone through five chefs in three years. Joël Robuchon’s gourmet outlet at the Four Seasons Hotel has managed to fly under the radar, but Michelin’s other darling, Gordon Ramsay, received a series of tepid reviews when he set up shop in the London hotel five years ago. The Four Seasons briefly hired the celebrated Italian cook Fabio Trabocchi to update its ancient menu, but the plutocrat regulars complained so bitterly that Trabocchi abandoned his efforts and eventually left town.

So you have to give the Barcelona chef Miguel Sánchez Romera credit for even getting on the plane when the jet-set hoteliers Sant and Vikram Chatwal asked if he’d bring his eccentric brand of “neurogastronomy” to the basement of their new Dream hotel, Dream Downtown, in the meatpacking district. Romera, as you may have heard, is a trained neurologist and a self-taught chef whose food is described by his admirers (his Barcelona restaurant, L’Esguard, has one Michelin star) as being a kind of holistic, artisanal version of the high-wire molecular gastronomy practiced by his famous countryman Ferran Adrià. Romera has a fondness for edible flowers and strange, vegetal potions designed to increase sensory awareness of one’s meal. His dishes are accompanied by elaborate tasting notes that he composes himself. And to experience the eleven-course menu at his new, eponymous establishment on 16th Street, you have to fork over $245, which puts Romera in the rarefied economic company of Masa and Per Se.

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Restaurant review, Fino Latino.

Like the other ambitious cooks from around the globe who’ve been rashly setting up kitchens in New York this fall (Miguel Sanchez Romera from Barcelona at Romera, Jung Sik Yim from Seoul in the old Chanterelle space downtown), the Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio comes to town with a sparkling résumé. Easily the highest-profile chef in South America, Acurio has been described as “Lima’s Molto Mario” and “the Jean-Georges of Peru.” Like Batali, he’s a round, charismatic figure, with multiple hit TV cooking shows to his credit. Like Jean-Georges, he’s authored numerous glossy cookbooks and operates a vast international empire of restaurants. At last count, there were 29 Acurio establishments in twelve countries (Jean-Georges has a mere 25), and the frenetic chef reportedly has plans in the works for at least 20 more, including a Japanese-Peruvian concept, a Peruvian steak-and-sandwich joint, and a chocolaterie.

Acurio’s first New York venture is called La Mar Cebicheria Peruana, and it’s part of a string of signature ceviche bars with outlets in far-flung destinations like São Paulo and San Francisco (two more are planned for L.A. and Miami). The 196-seat restaurant occupies the same two-floor space off Madison Square Park that Danny Meyer’s Indian-fusion restaurant Tabla occupied until last spring. There’s still a large round hole between the two floors, as in Meyer’s day, and a curving wooden staircase, which the new owners have painted in a severe shade of black. There’s a sculptural arrangement made from dried Peruvian corn kernels on one of the walls, and shimmering lattice curtains are hung here and there in a vain attempt to give the ungainly space a soothing, aquatic feel. But these effects tend to work better in the downstairs ceviche bar than in the upstairs dining room, which was submerged, on the evenings I visited, in a weirdly flat, shadowy gloom.

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Restaurant review, Building a Better Bibimbap.

Jungsik, which opened not long ago in the fabled old Chanterelle space in Tribeca, aspires to be the first modern haute-Korean restaurant in all of New York City. This means that at the bar you can enjoy soothing $17 cocktails rimmed with crushed seaweed or mixed with exotic ingredients like green plums, and an unfiltered Korean rice wine called makgeolli. The tables at this ambitious little establishment are covered with crisp white linens, and the painstakingly prepared dinners are served in handcrafted white bowls and giant plates as big as gull wings. There’s classic Korean fried chicken on the menu, but it’s stuck with a bamboo toothpick and served as a thimble-size amuse. The only dinner options are a three-course $80 or five-course $115 prix fixe, which, as any David Chang freak can tell you, is almost enough to buy the entire menu at the original Momofuku outlet.

The man behind this rash experiment in international dining is a talented young cook named Jung Sik Yim. He’s a veteran of Aquavit and Bouley, as well as several grand, Michelin-approved kitchens in Europe, and he runs a popular restaurant in Seoul called Jungsik Dang, which has been praised for its “nouvelle” approach to Korean cuisine. Here at Yim’s New York branch, the formerly ornate space has been remodeled in a generic modern style (clean, unadorned walls, white curtains over the windows) and divided into three dimly lit, slightly feng shui–challenged rooms, the last two separated by a sliding door. On my visits, dinner was served in the narrow middle room, which has white banquettes along both walls and is set with two small rows of tables that face each other, like in the dining car of a train. There’s also a white acrylic bar in the front of the house and a curiously dead gallery space called Cube, where you can examine (and purchase) the work of Korean artists.

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Restaurant review, Uptown Waverly.

In this constrained, no-nonsense, post-boom era, most ambitious New York chefs attempt to make their names by leasing dark little spaces in out-of-the-way neighborhoods and crafting spare, locally sourced comfort-food dishes. But during the course of his short, meteoric career, John DeLucie has prospered by doing things the old-fashioned way. As executive chef at the Waverly Inn, he was known for dressing the famous house version of macaroni and cheese with truffles. When he finally opened his own restaurant, the Lion, he exhibited an old-world fondness for expensive caviars (golden osetra, $125), pricey French wines ($1,850 for a bottle of Bollinger Blanc de Noirs ’00), and elaborate, Hollywood-style props (oil paintings, sparkling chandeliers, etc.). Like an old-school restaurateur, he choreographs his productions with a specific audience in mind, and, more than most chefs today, he’s an entertainer at heart.

DeLucie’s latest big-money culinary show is called Crown, and it’s been playing for nearly three months now to packed houses, and characteristically mixed reviews, on the bottom floor of a posh Upper East Side townhouse off Madison Avenue, across from the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. As at the Waverly, the entrance to the restaurant is discreetly marked, and guarded in the evenings by a doorman who could easily be mistaken for a nightclub bouncer. Echoing both the Waverly and the Lion, there’s a cramped, darkly lit Black Hole of Calcutta bar area in the front of the house, which is designed as a kind of holding pen for people straining to gain entrance to the grand dining room, and reservations are doled out to a select, clubby clientele, which means normal civilians will find themselves sitting down to dinner, like I did, at 5:45 or ten o’clock.

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Restaurant review, Nouvelle Ripert.

Is that French hip-hop I’m hearing?” asked one of my slightly disoriented guests as we cooled our heels in the posh little “lounge” area, one of many new features of the slightly disorienting 2.0 version of the great midtown restaurant Le Bernardin. There used to be no racy backbeat nor even a proper lounge area at Le Bernardin, of course. The old front of the house included a bar so small that you were discouraged from sitting at it and a couch or two where you could perch while waiting to collect your coat. There used to be no lounge menu, either (the new one includes a $35 caviar-and-salmon croque monsieur, and Eric Ripert’s homage to the American lobster roll, truffled and served “en brioche” for $19), nor a selection of signature cocktails with names like MLC Mezcal and French Connection, which have been designed for this regal midtown seafood palace by the mixologist Greg Seider, the owner of Summit Bar down on Avenue C.

These radical changes, plus many more, are the result of an elaborate and well-publicized makeover designed to make Le Bernardin more accessible to what longtime co-owner Maguy Le Coze describes as the restaurant’s “younger clientele.” The distinctive old oil paintings of French fishermen and Brittany seascapes have been packed away and replaced with tobacco-brown latticework and a large triptych of a stormy wash of waves by the Brooklyn artist Ran Ortner. The lovely coffered wood ceiling is still intact, but the rug is now gray and the windows are covered in shimmery metal-and-bamboo treatments. The new, slightly clunky hotel-lobby-style chairs are made from shiny steel and covered in dark, cigar-colored leather, and the ocean-blue vests and ties the waitstaff used to wear have been replaced with modish Nehru jackets that look like they’ve been lifted from the wardrobe of the Green Hornet’s sidekick, Kato.

“I’m still getting used to this,” said Mrs. Platt as we were led to our table under one of the towering, twig-filled botanical arrangements that dominate the center of the restaurant’s more modern, but slightly more generic-looking, dining room. That’s the danger of a full-body makeover, of course. As any legendary brand from Coke to Mercedes-Benz knows, you may attract a new kind of clientele when you tinker with the venerable old formulas, but you also risk baffling your devoted followers. The new room, designed by the architectural firm Bentel & Bentel, which also did the Danny Meyer restaurants Gramercy Tavern and the Modern, is more commodious than before (there are fewer tables). But the postmodern touches (the tinny, upbeat soundtrack, the hard-edged art, the gleaming new plates by Bernardaud) make the space feel busier and more hectic, and the essential stately character (the “Frenchness,” as Mrs. Platt put it) of the old restaurant is gone.

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Restaurant review, Martha of the Mediterranean.

Maria Loi’s eponymous Greek restaurant looks at first like another in the long string of doomed culinary concepts that have been tried over the years in what’s known in restaurant circles as the Compass space, on 70th Street off Amsterdam Avenue. There’s a new sign over the door, of course, adorned with what appears to be a hastily rendered logo featuring loopy script and white leaves against a bright-purple background. The flatly lit, sparsely populated bar area in the front of the house appears the way it did during previous incarnations (“Like the stateroom of a Slovenian cruise ship” was how one dining companion described it to me long ago), and if you feel like lingering there these days, the slightly haunted-looking bartenders will serve you cocktails with hokey cruise-ship names like Taste of Greece and Fire of Patras, which is made with Knob Creek, sweet Greek wine, and a touch of honey.

Once you move into the main dining room, however, the sense of foreboding lifts a little and the mood begins to change. The walls of the endlessly redesigned room are now trimmed in white and decorated with soothing photos depicting the green Nafpaktos coast. There’s a tray of fresh pomegranates by the doorway, along with bottles of Greek wine and loaves of bread. The backs of the chairs are covered in elegant striped satin, and the tables are arranged in neat rows and set with crisp white linens. Unlike in the past, they’re actually filled with diners, merrily tucking into hot baked spinach pies threaded with feta, platters of keftedakia meatballs, and dainty cheese croquettes garnished with a fig compote. Some nights, you might even see Loi herself—the self-proclaimed Martha Stewart of Greece—bustling around the room, greeting customers with her practiced ­laser-beam smile.

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Restaurant review, Adaptation.

For classically trained chefs of the old school, finding an appropriate culinary voice for this casual, post-gourmet era is a little like trying on hats in a buffeting windstorm. You keep frantically grabbing at different sizes and styles, until you find something that sticks. Over the past decade, the accomplished, slightly star-crossed French cook Alain Allegretti has tried on more hats than most. During the course of his peripatetic career, he has worked with luxury-minded luminaries like Alain Ducasse (at Louis XV in Monaco) and Sirio Maccioni (at the old Le Cirque 2000 on Madison Avenue). He’s run the kitchen at a gourmet restaurant at the Ritz (the doomed Atelier), opened his own fussy eponymous French establishment in the Flatiron district (the ill-fated Allegretti), and even done time working at a trendy, crowd-pleasing tourist trap (La Petite Maison, in midtown).

At his polished new Chelsea bistro, La Promenade des Anglais, however, Allegretti finally seems to have hit on a style (or a hat, if you will) for this new dining age. The modest-sized room, on the ground floor of the London Terrace apartments on 23rd Street in Chelsea, features bistro-style mirrors and a long, polished white marble bar. The waiters are dressed in vests and jaunty navy sneakers, and the ceiling has been painted with palm trees and cobblestones to evoke the famous promenade in the chef’s hometown of Nice from which the restaurant takes its name. There’s a decent haute burger at this cheerfully unfussy restaurant (lunchtimes only, with brandied onions and melted Gruyère), along with a variety of communal “for the table” items (delicious crostini piled with fresh mussels and fennel, pots of whipped ricotta with wedges of toast), and even an elegant ­North African–style slider (on the bar menu), which the chef makes with crumbling bits of merguez sausage.

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Restaurant review, Building a Better Gefilte Fish.

What in the world has gotten into Jeffrey Chodorow?” muttered one of the food snobs at my table as he took a perfectly brined pickle from the exceptional “delicatessen” board at the rashly conceived, surprisingly accomplished “modern Jewish-American” restaurant Kutsher’s Tribeca and crunched it happily between his teeth. Chodorow, of course, is the restaurateur New York food snobs love to hate. Over the years, the successful entrepreneur (he’s made millions in real estate, among other investments) has been derided by members of the self-appointed culinary smart set as a hopeless populist (his five China Grill franchises are wildly profitable), a purveyor of overpriced, passé luxury foods and schlock décor (the samurai-sword-covered Kobe Club), and a serial sponsor of endless star-crossed, crackpot dining schemes (Rocco DiSpirito’s reality-TV restaurant Rocco’s, as well as Wild Salmon and Brasserio Caviar & Banana, to name just a few).

But lately, Chodorow’s dark reputation has begun to brighten. In the past few years, while many restaurateurs have been cowering on the sidelines, he’s put his money behind a string of popular, even critical hits, including Bar Basque, Zak Pelaccio’s Fatty ’Cue and Fatty Crab, and the fashionable new Chinese farm-to-table establishment RedFarm. Now comes Kutsher’s, which has been designed by Chodorow’s young partner Zach Kutsher as a kind of upscale homage to his family’s famous Kutsher’s Country Club resort in the Catskills. The room, on Franklin Street, is appointed in a stylish, nouveau-Fontainebleau way with gold-colored light fixtures, whitewashed backlit walls, and a bar top made of copper. There’s a dish called pickled herring “two ways” on the menu, the kasha varnishkes are made with wild mushrooms and quinoa, not kasha, and the house gefilte fish is molded into decorative gourmet pedestals and feathered with micro-greens and a parsley vinaigrette.

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Restaurant review, Euell Gibbons Goes Downtown.

When exactly did lowly tubers become so hip?” one of my slightly startled uptown guests wanted to know as we examined the “Soil” section of the menu at the buzzing, indisputably hip new downtown brasserie Acme, which opened a month or so ago in the old Acme Bar & Grill space on Great Jones Street. On this evening, there were vividly colored salt-baked beets in the “Soil” section, and knobby black-skin heirloom carrots cooked with pine and garnished with lardo and sprigs of rosemary. Most eye-catching of all, however, were the great, plum-size sunchokes, which looked like they’d been unearthed from some rocky organic garden just hours before. The sunchokes were wreathed in a creamy foam laced with winter truffles and Gruyère cheese, and brought to the table by waiters dressed in hip-hugging jeans and skinny black ties. The vegetables had a delicate char on their exterior, like roasted marshmallows, and when I asked one of the skinny-tied waiters why, he said it was because they’d been delicately smoked over little pyres of hay.

Two of the four owners of Acme have been running downtown-scene restaurants for two decades (most notably ­Indochine and BondSt) and are adept at imbuing even the most earthy dining trend with a sense of glitter and hype. There’s a giant thatch of cherry blossoms propped at the entrance of this chic ­hunter-gatherer lounge, and the bar is set off by a long mirror-backed wall of glimmering liquor bottles that would make Keith McNally proud. The weathered roadhouse tabletops of the old Acme Bar & Grill have been replaced with elegantly worn Parisian-style café tables, and the old divvied-up bar and dining-room space has been hollowed out into a single large hall. Like the waiters, the ­mixologists at the bar are dressed like members of an eighties-era rock band, and the room is outfitted with tastefully ­curated downtown art (prints of Playboy bunny–inspired skulls by Richard Prince and a neon sculpture by Hanna Liden) and rimmed with moon-shaped banquettes studded with black leather.

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Restaurant review, Taavo Does Brooklyn.

In this era of low-risk burger bars and glorified pub food, there’s something to be said for quirky unpredictability and the thrill of the new. At least that’s what the merry band of Manhattan food pilgrims I was dining with were telling themselves as we huddled around the table at Taavo Somer’s quirky, unpredictable, singularly interesting new Williamsburg restaurant, Isa. On my first visit to the snug corner space on Wythe Avenue, I’d enjoyed a plate of fried pigs’ tails, and the melting, delicately crisped skeleton of an entire sardine. But those dishes were gone now, replaced by creations with runic names like “sunchoke cream” and “smoked yolk, spelt, sorrel.” There was the image of a gorilla head on the front of the day’s menu, and as a waiter arrived, we peered at this document in the flickering candlelight, looking, I later imagined, like tourists in Tokyo puzzling over a subway map.

Unlike Somer’s Manhattan restaurants (he and his partner run the popular Freemans and Peels), Isa (“Father” in Somer’s native Estonian) has not been heavily publicized. Somer did much of the carpentry in the beamy, comfortable space himself. His chef, Ignacio Mattos, also comes to Brooklyn from Manhattan, where he was the chef at the venerable Italian restaurant Il Buco. Mattos is a proponent of the local, highly stylized haute forager cuisine popularized by the Danish chef René Redzepi, and in coming to Brooklyn, he and Somer have done what artists do when they move from the towers of Manhattan to the hinterlands. They’ve exchanged high rents and glitter for the freedom to pursue their own quirky ideas and experiments at a languid, agreeably neighborly pace.

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Restaurant review, Alison’s Restaurant.

Those of you interested in studying the rise and fall of the many chaotic dining epochs that have rippled through the New York restaurant world over the past 30 years should pay close attention to the career of Alison Price Becker. She began in the eighties, answering phones at Jams, the seminal Jonathan Waxman establishment that introduced the city to the seasonal wonders of California cuisine. She worked at Gotham Bar and Grill while Alfred Portale was inventing his much imitated vertical cuisine, and was the manager at a short-lived restaurant called Rakel, which is notorious as the place where a talented young cook named Thomas Keller first set up shop in New York. In the late eighties, she opened Alison on Dominick, which was one of the original outlier dining destinations to open way downtown during the late eighties, and is still famous, among aged carnivores, as the place where the great Tom Valenti popularized that iconic delicacy of the early nose-to-tail era, the braised lamb shank.

Price Becker closed Alison on Dominick not long after 9/11 and then, for a time, skipped town. But now she’s back, after a spell in the Hamptons, with a new big-city venture called Alison Eighteen. The original Alison restaurant was known for its darkly baroque interior, but the new one has been modeled (by the designers of the original restaurant) in a classically clean, if slightly generic, neo-casual style. The space, on 18th Street in the Flatiron district, features a commodious tavern area up front, which was filled, when I dropped by, with dignified professional couples sipping fruity Champagne cocktails at the bar. The dining room is decorated with arrangements of forsythia blossoms and white wallpaper depicting Bemelmans-style New York street scenes. Long ­purple banquettes line the walls, and the waiters are dressed, like ghosts from a bygone fine-dining era, in classic white topcoats and straight purple ties.

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Restaurant review, From Masa to Neta.

Sushi connoisseurs judge their restaurants in all sorts of finicky, hypersensitive ways. They focus obsessively on the quality of the rice (soft is good, too soft is bad), or the texture of the tamago egg sushi (too sweet is very bad), or even the color of the gari ginger (pink gari is the kiss of death). For the non-connoisseur, however, the simplest way to judge the popularity, and even the quality, of a topflight sushi restaurant in the city is by the number of serious-faced gentlemen in neatly pressed shirts twiddling their smartphones at the bar. Forget about Kobe beef and the $120 prime rib for two. For the new, postmillennial generation of financial titans and Internet billionaires, raw fish is the ultimate trophy food. It won’t give you a heart attack. It’s loaded with subtle snob appeal. If cash is no object, as the high-roller habitués of restaurants like Masa in the Time Warner Center and Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo will tell you, there’s no more theatrical, cosmopolitan meal in the world.

Like their beef-loving forebears, members of the sushi power elite tend to travel in packs and dine in the same rotation of trusted, ridiculously expensive establishments again and again. But lately I’ve noticed more and more of them congregating at an unassuming sushi restaurant called Neta, which opened last month among the scruffy bars and cut-rate West Village shoe stores along 8th Street near Sixth Avenue. In the tradition of discreetly ambitious sushiyas everywhere, the façade of the storefront space is painted in black trim and covered in pale curtains. There are a few tables set along the walls inside, but most of the narrow, railroad-car-size space is taken up by the bar, which is made of polished ebony. Aside from a random vase of cherry blossoms in the corner, the gray-shaded room is so devoid of artifice and decoration that one of my guests compared it to a “corporate test kitchen” in the suburbs of New Jersey.

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Restaurant review, Roast Lamb’s Head.

During the course of his industrious career, the frenetic West Village restaurateur Gabriel Stulman has mastered almost every casual dining trend in this fickle, fashionably casual restaurant era. He helped pioneer the upscale New American neighborhood-bistro craze (not to mention the upscale-burger craze and upscale-meatball-slider craze) with Joey Campanaro at the Little Owl, and then again at his own popular, tiny West Village restaurant, Joseph Leonard. He’s opened a counter-style restaurant devoted to stylishly casual food (Jeffrey’s Grocery) and a raffish neo-speakeasy joint (Fedora) featuring the nose-to-tail cooking of a young chef from the offal capital of North America, Montreal. You can enjoy very good nouveau-southern cooking in Stulman’s mini dining empire (the crispy ham-hock sandwich at Joseph Leonard) and an endless variety of trendy retro cocktails, many of which are poured by whiskery barkeeps wearing lumberjack shirts.

So it was only a matter of time before Stulman got around to tackling the most durable of all casual New York dining trends: rustic Italian food. His new restaurant is called Perla, and like his other establishments, it occupies a snug little space within walking distance of Sheridan Square. The bar serves drinks with catchy names like Tombstone Sunday Nights and Meet Me in Laredo. The clubby, beamy room is decorated with tastefully curated retro tchotchkes (faded black-and-white photos, framed antique menus) and lined with banquettes covered in shiny crimson leather. Party girls graze at the bar on esoteric varieties of handmade pasta. Obscure peasant delicacies like roasted lamb’s head are served as occasional specials. And the late-night bar menu includes boutique mushroom pizzas fired in that great totem of the Italian nouveau-rustico movement, the wood-burning oven.

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Restaurant review, A Feast in Disguise.

During the olden days of what used to be called “haute cuisine,” the path to fame and fortune for ambitious young cooks led through the grand kitchens of Paris, and from there to large, spangled dining rooms in San Francisco or New York. In the age of what this magazine recently (and hilariously) described as the great “artisanal delirium,” however, all of that has changed. Instead of grandiose dining rooms, high-minded chefs now open small, out-of-the-way “tasting rooms.” Tablecloths, menus, and even cutlery are out; discreet, mini-size dining counters are in. Precociously talented chefs still take inspiration from the superstars of Europe (in the age of artisanal delirium, that superstar is the master forager René Redzepi, of Restaurant Noma in Copenhagen), but these days, the comforting rhythm of the à la carte menu has been replaced by a blizzard of seasonally attuned tasting “bites,” which take an entire evening to consume.

Or so it occurred to me as I sipped my carefully crafted (and undeniably delicious) rhubarb-tinged Shandy Shrubb cocktail at Atera, the polished, ambitious new tasting atelier that opened with little fanfare (but much hysterical Internet buzz) several weeks ago in Tribeca. Like the city’s other tiny, hyperfashionable tasting rooms (Momofuku Ko, Brooklyn Fare), this one is anonymously located on the ground floor of a nondescript commercial building. The frosted windows shield the dimly lit room from the outside world, and in the evenings, the entrance of the eye-and-ear clinic next door is hidden behind thick green curtains. One entire wall is covered with an arrangement of potted plants designed to look like foliage in a wild forest, and diners nibble at their omakase dinners at a slate-colored bar, which is made from polished concrete and built around the gleaming open kitchen, like the bridge of a ship.

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Restaurant review, Eleven Madison Light.

In the old, genteel world of restaurants, maybe you hired a few more cooks when you hit the big time, or, if you were feeling rash, expanded into the space next door after a year or two. But in the upper echelons of today’s ­multimillion-dollar restaurant industry, success is almost more complicated than failure. After a chef has his first big triumph, he will be all but obligated by his business partners and investors to expand. But which among the thousands of suitors begging you for franchise deals do you choose? How many cookbooks should you write (or have written for you)? Should you open a lavish branch of your smash New York restaurant in ­Vegas or Macao, or capitalize on your newfound fame by lending your name to a string of profitable, though potentially humiliating, burger bars in New Jersey? How, in short, do you “monetize” your good fortune (i.e., make piles of cash) in the most effective and tasteful way, without ruining your brand?

Many of these delicate calculations are on display at Daniel Humm’s posh, coolly impersonal new restaurant, NoMad, which opened recently off the lobby of the NoMad Hotel on Broadway. NoMad has clearly been designed as a “casual” bookend to Eleven Madison Park, which Humm and his partners purchased from Danny Meyer last year after Humm helped turn it (in the estimation of this bilious critic) into the finest restaurant in the city. Instead of trying to appeal to a single new audience, however, Humm (who was named James Beard Outstanding Chef last week) and his partner, the restaurateur Will Guidara, have decided to jam a hodgepodge of styles under one roof. There’s a glass-ceiling Atrium for the ladies who lunch and a clamorous, stand-up bar area for the cocktail crowd. If you wish to sit with your bespoke cocktails and French wines and pick at casual snacks, you can do that in the Library, and if you’re looking for something more intimate, there’s the Parlour, which is appointed, like a Victorian sitting room, with burgundy-colored rugs and velvet chairs trimmed with gold.

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Restaurant review, Spanish Brooklyn.

For jaded, Brooklyn-weary Manhattanites, there are many things about the popular new Cobble Hill restaurant La Vara that appear, on first inspection, to be distressingly familiar. There’s the quaintly classic storefront location on a picturesque, tree-lined stretch of Clinton Street. There are the noise-­enhancing exposed-brick walls (and in this case, duct work); the narrow, railroad-style dining space (decorated with the work of local artists); and the ancient, hastily repainted stamped-tin ceiling. There’s the still-evolving liquor situation (“Right now we only have wine, beer, rum, and gin,” our waiter cried merrily over the din), and the rows of intimately spaced tables (no doubt cluttered with baby strollers on weekends), which can make snooty visitors from across the river feel, on crowded evenings, like they’re dining in a neighborly commune instead of a first-class New York City restaurant.

But La Vara is not quite what it seems. The proprietors, Alex Raij and her husband, Eder Montero, come to Cobble Hill from Manhattan, where they run the excellent tapas establishments El Quinto Pino and Txikito. Like more and more top New York chefs these days (Taavo Somer opened Isa in Williamsburg last year, Hearth’s Marco Canora will be opening a Park Slope restaurant this summer), they see Brooklyn less as a refuge or escape than as a promising market for their particular brand of casually elegant (i.e., Brooklyn-style) gourmet cuisine. Which in this case means you can get piles of crunchy, paprika-infused garbanzos fritos (fried chickpeas) for $3 a plate, along with other classic Iberian delicacies like empanadillas de millo (moon-shaped empanadas) stuffed, the way they do in Galicia, with minced razor clams, and skewers of pincho de ceutas, which is what they call grilled chicken hearts in Gibraltar.

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Restaurant Review, Chicago Cut Steakhouse.

With a menu of USDA Prime steaks sourced from New York and dry-aged on-site --- not to mention an iPad wine list touting super-size bottles from all over the globe --- owners David Flom and Matt Moore (both formerly of Rosebud steakhouses) give corporate cards a workout. The vibe in the window-filled dining room, which is street-level of an office building, evolves as the day wears on. During daylight hours, Loop workers --- including Merchandise Mart employees, who slip in through a private kitchen entrance --- powwow at scarlet-hued booths, downing hearty a.m. egg dishes. At lunchtime, diners can choose from selections such as a Kobe beef hot dog, lobster roll, fish tacos or crispy Amish brick chicken. Come nightfall, well-heeled noshers join the nine-to-fivers, elevating the glitz factor to typical Chicago steakhouse caliber: jumbo lump crab cakes with lemon-cilantro aïoli, seared foie gras with apple bread pudding and rhubarb preserves, and Châteaubriand. If you like the custom-made knives, sets are available for purchase.

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Restaurant Review, L2O.

Chef Matthew Kirkley has energized this stunning, spendy and sedate dining room, tucked off of the lobby of The Belden-Stratford hotel. It’s a room filled with Macassar ebony columns, plush couches and white leather chairs, ones comfortable enough to pass a long, luxurious dining affair in comfortable repose. The touted bread service --- behold bacon-infused rolls --- endures, as does the finer-than-fine approach to dining. Choose between the seven-course prix-fixe menu ($140) and a 13-course luxury tasting for a hefty $210. Expect the wow-factor to be high. We’ll never look at “watermelon” the same way again; here, a dish of tomato aspic and avocado-topped tuna tartare, stippled with caviar, mimics its visual appeal with precision. Yet, the pristine flavor of the ingredients remains at the forefront. Much of the menu comes from the kitchen tanks, which hold blue lobsters from Brittany, abalone, langoustine, geoduck clam and giant European brown crabs. As meals progress, fabled shabu-shabu remains a possibility; if you’re lucky, the extra broth will be poured atop a tangle of house-made noodles. Dining here is truly an experience, one furthered by a remarkable selection of cheeses and desserts like chilled yuzu soup with raspberries and mascarpone sherbet. The extensive wine list, under the guidance of Richard Hanauer and Allison Frey, caters to both high rollers and (surprisingly) those with limited budgets, with plenty of avant-garde options in between. However you cut it, though, this is a special occasion experience --- and you’ll be amply rewarded for taking the plunge.

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Restaurant Review, Coco Pazzo.

Coco Pazzo is one of Chicago's finest Italian restaurants; its seasonal cuisine a sight (and taste) to behold. There is a great awareness of the scope and import of Italian cooking --- classic, traditional and modern --- and that makes this place both special and endearing. And then, there is the attention to detail and quality ingredients. Consider a simple pasta dish: gnocchi alla Parmigiano, in which homemade potato dumplings are dressed lightly and properly with a fresh-tasting tomato sauce accented with Parmesan. Well done in every way is the risotto with shavings of fresh white truffles and the handmade chestnut tagliatelle with roasted pumpkin, mushrooms and leeks. Meanwhile, luxury comes in the form of rabbit-filled paccheri gratin, topped with Swiss chard and forest mushrooms. Even the pizza tastes great. One dessert not to miss is the warm chocolate cake with a molten center and scoop of cappuccino ice cream. The service is right on the mark, and there's a first-rate selection of regional and classic Italian wines.

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Restaurant Review, Alinea.

The name says it all. In the course of history, an “alinea” would mark the arrival of a new idea or philosophy. If the concept flies, it could mark the beginning of a different way of thinking or a new practice. The restaurant Alinea situates itself in that sphere and in a forthcoming age that succeeds all the inns, taverns and bistros as we’ve known them. So be prepared: Alinea is a restaurant like no other in America, period. The experience begins at the doorstep when one enters into a post-post-modern, bare set-up, evocative of a museum of modern art. Tables are over-size, widely spaced and free of distracting tablecloths. All of this is to focus our attention on the food and nothing else. Waiters dressed like bank executives in black suits move smoothly on the carpeted floor, delivering solemnly to the tables miniscule cups, small glasses, mini plates and mysterious decorative objects symbolic of an esoteric food that needs to be deciphered before eaten. The dinner, composed of approximately 16 to 20 courses, is concocted with dozens of components and in an order and a fashion revealing the art of Grant Achatz. This all may have a disconcerting effect if one is not prepared. So staff pop up to explain and guide one’s approach to the odd presentations, such as at the tip of a metallic skewer or on a steel string swing. Achatz constantly invents new preparations, changing combinations that he dubs with a concise description, such as “king crab,” passion fruit, heart of palm and allspice, or “otoro,” Thai banana, sea salt and kaffir lime. In this whirlwind of creativity, you’d think the dessert simply named “chocolate” would be a mainstay given its uniqueness. Achatz unrolls a plastic-coated cloth on your table and pours the ingredients of his chocolate dessert over the cloth, then gathers and kneads coconut, menthol and hyssop with the hot cocoa. It is the most sophisticated and paradoxically simple “pastry” you can think of; the most spectacular as well.

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Restaurant Review, Benny’s Chop House.

Benny Siddu (Volare) is behind this spendy River North steakhouse, a den of prime Allen Brothers meat and seafood with Jonathan Lane (Four Seasons) in the kitchen. The setting is as old-school as it gets --- comfortable booths, dim, clubby environs and a piano player on weekends --- though the repertoire is somewhat redefined, as evidenced in the serious cocktail program, showily plated crab-lobster Louie and grilled romaine. The dry-aged steaks really are all that --- tender, marbled and full of flavor. An Alaskan halibut T-bone and jumbo sea scallops with spinach pappardelle and creamy garlic sauce also are available. A well-traveled wine list and pasta sides, including spring pea tortelloni, complete the very posh, special occasion experience.

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Restaurant Review, Prosecco.

We have Kathryn Sullivan-Alvera (Narcisse, Domaine) and sibs Mark and Stefania Sparacino (Sparacino Ristorante, Traveling Fare Catering) to thank for this sophisticated, elegant-as-can-be Italian ristorante. Luxe, an undercurrent that continues until meal's end, is immediately apparent in the form of a braised beef short rib-stuffed diver scallop with creamy saffron risotto. From the carpaccio bar comes a fine bresaola and barely seared duck breast with clover honey, Morello cherries, capers and shallot aïoli. Orecchiette coddles earthy wild mushrooms, artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes in rich, Grana Padano-kissed truffle cream sauce. Among other entrées, the double pork chop with roasted red pepper is satisfying --- especially when served alongside faintly sweet, caramelized onion mashed potatoes. The ubiquitous warm chocolate cake is elevated by the addition of rosemary-accented blood orange sauce. Of course, the namesake delivers with a vast selection of bubbles.

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Restaurant Review, Everest.

Everest has maintained its perch above Chicago's skyline for over 25 years; the spectacular view from the 40th floor never gets old. Evolved décor brought sleek silver fixtures and contemporary artwork on the walls. The changes made sense, the easier feel analogous to chef-owner Jean Joho's personal vision. Chef Joho's Alsatian roots dot the menu. One night, Michigan chestnut and celery root velouté with duck confit and brioche croutons appears first. On another visit, it may be home-smoked salmon. Then it's on to Alaskan black cod pavé accented with hazelnut brown butter emulsion, or dry-aged New York steak, sauce foyot and Alsace potato gnocchi. Other dishes to ponder may include roasted rack of lamb, and tender venison surrounded by a wild huckleberry jus. Risottos distinguish themselves by their rich and creamy mouth-feel, as in a carnaroli version with fricassée of petite gris snail, Riesling and fines herbs. The fact is that the food, even through seasonal changes, is never without creativity and unquestionable goodness. Desserts are no less artful or enticing, perhaps a chocolate tasting or a Grand Marnier soufflé with orange coulis and Tahitian vanilla glacé. The wine list has one of the broadest selections of Alsatian wines outside of Alsace. Impeccable service adds to the feeling of luxury.

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Restaurant Review, Spiaggia.

Chef Tony Mantuano is the architect of this super-luxe Italian restaurant. The food, which has a contemporary spin, is splendid; it's also expensive. However, when making most everything from scratch (pasta included), the difference is noted and notable from competitors. Seafood dishes are especially remarkable, as is his delicate, hand-rolled gnocchi, which may arrive with ricotta sauce and black truffles. Another winner, when offered, is the veal-filled agnolotti with fennel pollen and crispy veal breast. This is quite the affair for small-portioned fare, so expect to digest a tab of $100-plus per person. If you're really indulging, go for the seven-course tasting menu (starting at $145 per person, $235 for wine pairings), and be wowed by dishes like pumpernickel crusted salmon with fennel kraut purée. The wine list offers interesting, rarely seen Italian selections. Accordingly, the cheese selection is staggering and the desserts --- perhaps huckleberry brioche custard with poppy seeds, mint, passion fruit sorbetto and Italian meringue --- a dream. It’s a small price to pay, many say, since the view from the tiered dining room provides amazing panoramas of Oak Street Beach and the lake.

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Restaurant review Bavette's Bar and Boeuf

Exuding sultry, jazz-era charm, Brendan Sodikoff’s sexy steakhouse is more than the sum of its parts. It’s also a departure for the restaurateur (also of Gilt Bar, Maude’s Liquor Bar, Au Cheval, et al). From its leather booths to its zinc-topped bar, it’s an equation that works. And while the 24-ounce dry-aged rib-eye is a thing of great worth, it’s the other options that linger in your mind for days. The bone-in filet is an investment at $75, but it cuts like butter. The foie gras with blackberry-raspberry jam will bring you to your knees. And the Chicago-born shrimp de jonghe? Wow. Still, it’s the beef stroganoff with house-made noodles and sherry jus that we’ll allow to warm us up any day. Beautiful shellfish platters and fresh-shucked oysters are options, too. Finish with a rich gold-brick sundae, made with local Black Dog Gelato. Bourbon is big business here, though craft beers, creative cocktails and a thoughtful wine list add to the appeal.

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Restaurant review Naamyaa Café, 407 St John Street, London.

You know how, in a dream, you find yourself surrounded with familiar objects, landscapes and people but also with completely unfamiliar, surreal and alarming things? That sense of walking down a street near your old school which is also, somehow, a path on the side of the Grand Canyon, populated with giant talking lemurs? The Naamyaa Café made me feel like that. It's both Western and Eastern, basic and exotic, frank and inscrutable.

It's the newest thing from Alan Yau, one of the great innovators of the catering world. He's the chap who invented Wagamama in 1992 and introduced British lunchers to the restaurant as high-tech, spick-and-span Japanese works canteen. He sold the chain after five years, and launched the Busaba Eathai, a Westernising of the Thai eating experience. The Busaba interiors were dark and woody as saunas and the food was prepared by David Thompson, the Australian expert on Thai cuisine. It became the after-the-movie supper venue for Soho nighthawks, once they'd got over their British reluctance to share a table with strangers.

Now, after ventures with Chinese cuisine, he's offering Thai street food. Walk into the Naamyaa Café in Islington (soon to become a chain), and your eyes have to take in a lot of design. Four or five competing designers seem to have been turned loose on the interior. The far wall seems to be made of brown turf briquettes, inset with little gold Buddhas. The side wall is tiled with coral-on-white scenes of temples, hillsides and rustic wooing – the Siamese equivalent of Willow pattern. The bar stools are bamboo painted a tart's-lipstick-red. Above the pale pistachio banquettes, a cat's cradle of black wires holds a collection of yellow fairy lights. The overall effect of these warring designs is chaotic but rather jolly.

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Restaurant review The Three Horseshoes, High Street, Madingley, Cambridge.

Across all nations and centuries, the essential ingredients of a wonderful restaurant form an enduring trinity: delicious food, affordable prices and a lovely setting. I'm not sure I've been to any place in England that more effectively combines these criteria than the Three Horseshoes in Madingley. Let's take them in reverse order.

A 20-minute cycle ride west of Cambridge, Madingley is a small, tranquil village distinguished by the presence of Madingley Hall, where the future King Edward VII rented a room while an undergraduate at the university. Today, the hall is a conference centre and home to the university's Institute of Continuing Education.

If you are driving up to the village from either Cambridge or London, you'll pass a very beautiful American cemetery, where nearly 4,000 US servicemen are remembered. Picturesque is putting it mildly.

The Three Horseshoes is a thatched building which was once the village pub. For two decades, the chef-proprietor has been Richard Stokes, an alumni of the River Café in London. He kept the bar in the front, raised the quality of the upholstery, and converted the conservatory into a spacious and well-lit dining-room. What he also appears to have done is taken a solemn vow to keep his prices down and his standards up.

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Restaurant review Rocksalt, 4-5 Fishmarket, Folkestone, Kent.

There's an almost fairy-tale quality to this week's story. Think of it as Local Hero with a side order of duck-fat chips. The cast: a philanthropic millionaire with a dream, and a brilliant young chef, escaping from the palace kitchens to start a new, simple life at the seaside.

The millionaire is Roger de Haan, who made his fortune by building up and then selling the Saga financial and travel group, founded by his father in Folkestone, where the company is still based. In the true spirit of Saga, de Haan didn't slump into passive retirement. Deploring the doldrums into which his home town had sunk, he invested millions in regenerating Folkestone's run-down Old Town, rebranding it as a cultural quarter with its own triennial arts festival and filling derelict shops with galleries and interesting small businesses.

In what he has described as a "moment of madness", de Haan also bought Folkestone harbour, a neglected afterthought to the town since the cross-channel ferry stopped running. The first part of his planned redevelopment, a destination restaurant, has just opened. Which is where our chef enters the story – Mark Sargeant, the Michelin-starred boy wonder of Claridges, and Gordon Ramsay's bright-eyed TV lieutenant, often seen chopping and cooking in the background while his boss shouted at people.

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