Restaurant review, Quinto Quarto Brings a Bit of Rome to the Village.

I haven't had such killer bucatini amatriciana ($11) since the last time I was in Rome. The pasta—like thick spaghetti, but bored up the middle to facilitate boiling—came gobbed with a tomato sauce whose richness derived from guanciale, the cured jowl of pigs. Like snow on an Apennine peak, grated pecorino blanketed the top. Though the recipe originated in the small Lazio town of Amatrice, the Roman populace has clasped it to its bosom, and now there are dozens of variations—and the plate that sat before me was a particularly delicious and aggressive one.

I was dining with a friend in Quinto Quarto, a relatively new restaurant at the tail end of Bedford Street that styles itself an "osteria Romana," which roughly means "Roman inn." The place was launched by a pair of sibling restos in Milano, but our branch has received little attention, even though it's been open for six months. "I feel like I'm in Rome," my date observed, noting the flickering tapers, dark paneling, and utter unpretentiousness of the atmosphere, where guests feel free to linger over their glasses of wine. Besides, everyone around us was chattering happily in Italian.

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Restaurant review, Brighton Beach's KeBeer Bar & Grill.

It's been nine years since Zum Schneider debuted on Avenue C, kindling a minor craze for German beer gardens. This being New York City, many are entirely indoors. Now you can snack on sausages with a foamy stein at a dozen rollicking places in the Lower East Side, Astoria, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and the West Village. But in Brighton Beach? I was incredulous when I spotted KeBeer one evening as I descended from the Q train. The place sat at the foot of Coney Island Avenue, in a storefront formerly occupied by Eastern Feast, one of the city's earliest slingers of Uzbek charcoal-grilled kebabs.

In fact, the 2000 Village Voice Best Of issue touting Eastern Feast still hangs on the wall, though the rest of the interior has been transformed completely. Big picture windows now look out on downtown Brighton Beach, where, unaccountably, two branches of Chase Bank face off against each other across the same intersection. KeBeer's décor is positively medieval, with white tiles clinging to the wall behind a bar sprouting beer taps, and dark wood shrouding the balance of the sizeable room. Black iron fixtures with guttering candles dangle from the ceiling, and, as you go downstairs in search of the bathrooms, you can't avoid the impression that you might find yourself in a dungeon.

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Restaurant review, Doggy Style in Park Slope: Bark Hot Dogs.

Wear your sunglasses as you exit the 2 or 3 train at Bergen Street, because the giant neon sign that spells out B-A-R-K glows with thousands of nuclear watts late into the evening. The interior is far more dark and chill, with raised counters running the width of the storefront, flanked by stools that allow you to perch but not slouch. Make your way past the seating area to find an ordering station deep in the interior, from which the dogs are dispensed. The staff is friendly as hell, clearly trying to win you over to their effete frank lifestyle.

Years ago, I noted you can tell that times are bad when hot dogs become dinner, rather than just a snack. And today, just as hot dog carts have progressively disappeared from city streets, dogs have found a new kennel in semi-upscale restaurants. Bark is the most advanced evocation of this idea, styling itself as an eco-friendly hipster hang, and mounting a menu that gives tube steaks the respect they may—or may not—deserve.

First off, the weenies themselves. Snob-wise, a Nathan's or a Sabrett wouldn't do. Bark offers a single frank, a proprietary link manufactured by Hartmann's Old World Sausage of Canandaigua, New York. That's nearly locavoric, right? These franks display a wonderful snap when you bite into them, but the pork-beef combo inside is as pale as Casper the Friendly Ghost. To compensate for this comparative blandness, the boiled dogs are basted in a smoked lard-butter combo, which lends an amazing savor.

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Restaurant review, Rum Along to Ambiance.

The ambiance at Ambiance can be summed up in one word: green. The walls glow lime green, the wainscoting dark marbleized green, while the bulbs that race around the coffered ceiling shine neon green, making the faces of the diners look like scary Halloween masks. The agreeable waitress will seat you somewhere mid-room, and as you wait for the menus, you'll note odd accoutrements that date from previous establishments: big antique mirrors, fake potted plants, huge chinoiserie vases resting on truncated Ionic columns, and lavish sprays of artificial flowers, now pleasantly faded, making you think of proms long past. The front of the room is given over to a bar, at which a few phantom hangers-on perch, as the bartender mixes greenish cocktails of limeade and Babancourt Rum ($6).

When the menus arrive, you'll discover that there are no apps, no sides, and no desserts. Ambiance—a Haitian restaurant a few blocks from the terminus of the L train—intends to feed you, and feed you well, but is not concerned with the subsidiary frivolities that dominate modern menus. Theirs is a very ancient idea of what a restaurant should be: a place to provide rudimentary yet substantial refreshment to wayfarers, a function that has become all the more important as Brooklyn's Haitian population has dispersed from Flatbush to the farthest reaches of Canarsie.

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Restaurant review, Abe & Arthur's Says Goodbye to Disco, Hello to Comfort Food.

Once it was Lotus, a trendy trilevel disco, about which a female detractor once wrote, "As soon as you walk in, you're instantly swamped by pretentious, idiotic guys who think it's OK to grab your backside!!" It seems like a sign of the times that where once stumbled dissolute clubgoers swilling $300 bottles of champagne now sit the solid burghers of Chelsea and the West Village, tucking into roast chicken, chops, and whole fish.

There's little backside-grabbing going on at Abe & Arthur's. The main floor is devoted to an expansive barroom, leading to a dramatic, two-story dining room. Around the top runs a balcony, where my date and I sat on our first visit, surveying a half-filled restaurant. Giant cylindrical light baffles hung like space stations at eye level, and the room was surrounded by a scrim, limned with faded images that recalled prehistoric pictographs, or maybe Wassily Kandinsky. Adjacent to the balcony sprawled another large barroom—proving, at least, that the alcoholic function of Lotus remains entirely intact.

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Restaurant review, Some Incredible Qingdao Cuisine Hits Flushing.

Not long ago, I found myself delighted by a restaurant in Flushing with the noncommittal name of Golden Palace, serving the cuisine of northeastern China. The owners hailed from Liaoning province, and the food was amazing. Instead of white rice, there were puffy, pale-yellow baos made from corn flour, and dishes dotted with wobbly agaric mushrooms. Such northern Chinese standards as lamb with cumin contended with recipes that scrambled eggs with unfamiliar leafy vegetables. Pig skin in aspic and noodles that were dead ringers for spaetzle seemed to represent German influences from Shandong, another northern province that had once harbored a German "concession."

So, when a restaurant from Shandong opened just around the corner, whose owners emigrated from the port city of Qingdao (where German-style Tsingtao beer is still brewed), I was there in a flash with a carload of friends. M & T Restaurant is just as anonymous-looking as Golden Palace, and the friendly staff can't wait to try out their English on you. In the three months that I've been eagerly eating there, the menu has evolved, and now the specials once inscribed in Chinese that fluttered on paper strips have been translated.

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Restaurant review, Ovelia Psistaria's Fear of Frying.

Ovelia Psistaria doesn't look like other Greek restaurants in Astoria: Missing are the iced displays of fish, barnyard animals rotating on spits, 3-D pictures of the Parthenon, and rustic taverna décor that have long characterized the neighborhood's Hellenic eateries. Instead, there's a long bar that twinkles like a starry sky with light-emitting diodes, slinging a menu of sweet, colorful cocktails that owe nothing to metaxa or ouzo. Lit by fixtures resembling ghosts dangling from the ceiling, the dining room ascends to an elevated rear platform flanked by smeary paintings of half-ruined boats. While the diverse décor doesn't quite hang together, neighborhood patrons seem to relish eating in a relentlessly modern-looking place.

The bill of fare remains resolutely Greek, though, with a handful of interpolations from other Astorian ethnicities, and a few modern fripperies. The "psistaria" in the name refers not to a walk-in clinic where cysts are speedily lanced, but to a restaurant that specializes in grilling. This activity dovetails nicely with the modern distaste for fried foods, and thus do the galeos ($15) arrive prison-striped from the grill, rather than thickly breaded and fried as they are elsewhere. Also known as sand sharks, these ambassadors from the Gulf of Maine are the only sharks that breathe air, and also use their gills. Even more strangely, each female has twin uteri, in which a pair of youngsters gestates for as long as a year.

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